The week after we lost Commando Senior was difficult to say the least. For a start there was the task of letting people know. This was hard enough with the family members we speak to regularly but Commando Senior had so many friends outside of the family circle and these were mostly people we didn’t know. We also didn’t have contact details for all of them. After some discussion on Friday night we decided we would have to go to the house and see if we could find an address book or contact list.
Going to Commando Senior’s house and searching through his things wasn’t going to be a pleasant task so I went for a little walk to psych myself up. For me walking is a kind of meditation and I could feel some of the tension and pain lifting with the rhythm of one foot in front of the other. If a death in the family does one positive thing it is to remind us all that life is short and we should be appreciating every moment.
The last of the wisteria along Monks Path made me smile. Further along I took a snap of the old petrol pumps outside the garage there. For a second I thought of showing them to Commando Senior, he was bound to have a story or two about petrol pumps… There’s been a lot of that happening. There are hours at a time when I forget and each time I remember it’s a blow.
My feet took me along the river while my mind wandered. The beautiful cirrus clouds above me made me think again of Commando Senior, was he flying free up there now? I hoped so, he loved to fly. When I got to the White Swan I sat on a bench for a while sipping my water and thinking. There were hanging baskets on either side of me and I felt as if I was in a cloud of flowers. These moments felt like bright islands in a dark sea and I grasped at them greedily.
Walking back towards home I saw the three cygnets near the bend in the river. They hardly seem to have moved from the spot since I last came this way and I wondered again where their parents were. On the last stretch of river the swans were gathered at the viewing platform where a family were throwing bread. I was pleased to see the black swan amongst them.
Then it was back to earth with a bump. Back to Commando Senior’s little crooked house where we searched in vain for an address book. His flat cap, on a side table where he’d left it, made me cry. It felt wrong to be there, as if we were trespassing. In the end we fired up his ancient computer in the hope there would be something on there. It was painfully slow. There were lists of all sorts and old business records, but no addresses. We cleaned the perishables out of the fridge, picked up a box of old photographs (the most valuable thing in the house in my mind) and left, knowing we would have to return and the sorting out was going to take a lot of time. The emotion of it all and the size of the task ahead left us both exhausted.
On Sunday, while Commando went for a run, I walked over to town. It’s his birthday soon and I thought I’d get a present or two while I had the chance. Besides, it was another walk. There were cygnets along Chessel Bay, the first I’ve seen down there. They were the only photographs I took. I lost myself again in the act of walking and let my mind drift.
A kind of torpor born of lack of sleep and emotional exhaustion has made the days merge into one. The bottle of Commando Senior’s wine we shared on Sunday night may not have helped. At some point we collected a death certificate, then found we needed to go to the registry office. There was a lot of messing about trying to find people, Google searches, messages on Facebook. Funeral arrangements were made, flowers ordered, people phoned… All these little tasks are distractions. Time and again it comes to me that none of it really matters. The funeral, the sorting of things are all for us not for him.
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