That Day

I opened my curtain this morning and peeped out, expecting to see a white river spreading across the streets and rooftops of Hove. But the road below me was grey, dry and hard, as though no snow had fallen at all over Sussex these last weeks.

     
Yet yesterday as we spilled out onto a London pavement, clutching flowers, coconuts; two packets of butter, handbags and a brightly painted Ganesh statue, the heels of my brown 1940s shoes sank straight into slush and ice. Snow smothered pavements and cars; I stumbled towards a taxi.

     
We were running slightly late. In fact all the guests were running slightly late, except for the Hindu priest, who was running rather late. My friend S, coming from Brighton, stood on a platform at East Croydon staring at Cancellation signs on the departure board, and the snow was still drifting down. South East London was muffled by white. I suspected that the five of us squeezed into the cab might be the only ones making it to the crematorium that morning. My sister, her calm expression suddenly cracking, said, "I'll do the bloody service myself."

     
There aren't many days in your life where you say have to goodbye to someone you love, and won’t ever see again. Tears mess up your eyeliner; hands shake, voices wobble. Ordinary life seems like a silly childish sketch: bus journeys to work, petty arguments; that TV programme you can’t bear to miss. However, such days seem to have increasingly crept up on my family and I over the last few years, to the point where they feel more normal and real than anything else a lot of the time. Jobs, money, relationships, aspirations: these are the things you do between heartbreaks, and not vice versa.

     
In Hinduism, yesterday was an auspicious day, one where sins are cleansed, and night and day are of equal duration. Anyone sent to the other world on this day is especially blessed. After we’d arrived at the Crematorium, I couldn't help feeling, as I watched snow hanging off oak branches in clumps, weighing heavy on rose petals in the garden, that we might be the only people left in the world, the rest of it muted to silence, whited-out by puffy snow-clouds.

     
Soon taxis pulled in; legs stretched out onto pavements. The driveway filled up. Everyone had made it.

     
I can write about before the funeral and I can write about after, but not about what happened in between. These things are too personal. All I can say is that I think it was what he'd have wanted, absolutely. And I was proud to be there.

     
I ate twelve ciabatta sandwiches yesterday, including three I grilled for my dinner at my flat later that night, after it was all over. I'd left my sisters, friends - people I've loved long before I really knew what love meant - hanging over the balcony of a London block of flats, waving the paw of a dog at me. Then I trudged again through thick snow into darkness, the wet gloom of a tunnel finally gobbling me up. I sat on the train eating Reese's Cups and crying quietly, the day, the last month, finally catching up with me. Beauty, suffering: two sides of the same inexplicable force we call life. Of course there's not one without the other. But knowing this doesn't make it any easier, does it?

     
The sadness didn't leave; it followed me into my dreams, and was there when I woke up this morning. But now I'm here. Tomorrow, things will be different again. Life moves. The snow melts. The rose opens its petals.

Up North

It is quite possible to find something awful and beautiful at the same time, to feel love and joy and some terrible, irredeemable loss all rolled up into one tiny ball. Thursday was like that, an exhausting, endurance test of a day that shone with life and connection and even some smiles.

The funeral was a good funeral, a fitting farewell to my friend, not glossing over the loss, not remaining stuck in its black tar. Flowers were wound into the pale wicker of his coffin and candles were lit, a round was sung, and the words here I walk in beauty/beauty is around me/above and below me would have been enough to break through even the most closed of hearts.

But the disbelief at the situation was palpable. Not only myself, but, it felt everyone in the room could not believe that the young man in the photo on our programmes, with his sweet smile and his floppy fringe, was the same man lying before us in a wicker box.

I don't think we ever come to terms with the mystery and pain of someone disappearing forever. But this, so sudden, so senseless somehow, is hard to take. There is something so appalling about seeing a father struggling to speak about his son, who now lies before him, cold as stone. No father should ever have to do this. It feels like an anomaly in the nature of things. But one thing I am learning as I grow older is that senseless things happen to people who don't deserve them all the time, and that it isn't personal, it might be unfair, but our universe wasn't, isn't and never will be a fair universe. It is as it is.

But I can still feel angry about this. I still open my eyes wide and perplexed as I try to make sense of how my friend's life ended so suddenly, when he was so happy, and had so much to live for, so much left to experience and to give. And how my own story of him, and with him, has suddenly ended. I won't be taking up the strands of our friendship and marvelling at the next port where it will be stopping. This is it. This is that final port. The final stop happened when I hugged him on a chilly beach, a blue sky above us some weeks ago. If I thought we might be coming together again to be there at yet another significant time in our lives, I never thought it was to be at his own death, and that I was to be there, waving him off to somewhere I shall not be able to follow. Not now. Not yet.

Funerals are profound things, everyone so raw, so honest, so real. Death makes the best (and the worst) come out in people. It makes people speak truths they would never otherwise say, it makes them open to things they might usually brush over and dismiss. In that way, they can feel like the most real, and therefore, nourishing places to be in, devoid of the usual bullshit. And they can be poetic and beautiful and awe-inspiring.

But one thing I often experience at funerals is the ridiculous way that profundity and mundanity sit side by side. People utter the most profound words, and the sight of a coffin bearing someone you love inside it is enough food for contemplation to last a lifetime.

Yet, for me, there is also this edge of knowing that life in all its mundanity is carrying on. And a certain black humour can arise in me. People fluff up lines, taxis don't arrive and there is always that moment when the pallbearers lift the coffin high into the air when I feel a certain hysterical laughter rising in my throat. It is the uneasiness on their faces that makes this feeling well up in me, and the terrible possibility of what could happen should their hands slip. Funerals contain drama; they act out some mighty cosmic drama that is going on, unacknowledged, around us every moment in our lives. And they also include all the fragility and ridiculousness of it as well.

We spent a couple of nights in Manchester, the five-hour drive seeming too much to contemplate straight after such a day. So, following chilli and cake at the Manchester Buddhist Centre, I wobbled out into the town centre with Bob, like a homing pigeon, heading straight for Afflecks' Palace. Realising the toll that the day had taken on my system, I stood at the top of the building, trying to catch my breath, realising I needed to sit down somewhere calm and not try and follow the footsteps of my past, my days of living in Manchester, right there and then.

We went and had brandy hot chocolate in the Night and Day cafe, a huge, eight foot painting of Ian Curtis on the back wall. Oh Manchester. I was there for seven years, and so many significant things happened to me during that time, one of them being that I met David, and we began both our friendship and our life as Buddhists there. After our drinks, and feeling much more grounded, Bob and I ventured out onto Oldham Street, and spent the next couple of hours trawling the streets we both knew so well (he also lived in Manchester for years), past Dry Bar and Eastern Bloc Records, to Piccadilly, where they'd installed an outdoor ice skating rink.

Manchester's so upmarket these days. It smacks of money in a way that it never used to. Who'd have thought that the IRA obliterating the entire city centre would precipitate such a major transformation of the city. I remember walking as near to the exclusion zones as was allowed, months after the bomb, and staring in awe at the bare skeleton of the city's shops, a ghostly feeling following me through the streets. Now it's all Harvey Nics and art galleries.

Though I'm glad it has been rejuvenated, I can't help feeling that it has lost some of its soul. We wandered all the way down Cross Street, past Albert Square and its huge inflatable Santa, its German Christmas Market, and down past the Peveril of The Peak pub. And what do you know; The Hacienda is now a swanky block of exclusive, trendy, metal fronted apartments, with its own underground car park full of flashy sports cars. Businessmen rest their rich and conservative heads in what was one of the most decadent, ground breaking and influential nightclubs that's ever opened its doors. Oh, the fucking irony.

After staying with some very welcoming and lovely Buddhists in Salford, with the frost wiped from the car windows and some porridge in my belly, we drove home. Back in my flat in Brighton, I am still left wondering what my relationship to the North is, and where my dear friend has gone.