Funeral oration
I first met Terry in 1971. He came to live on the top floor. I was in the basement with Simon and his mother, the landlady was in between. His wall was plastered with Cuban revolutionary posters. Though we disagreed about politics, we had other things in common. By the measure of the school year we were the same age. We had both just come back from lengthy trips to India. We were interested in hippy culture and modern literature, though he was more into music than I was. For years he used to make up tapes for me.
Over the next few years we lost touch a couple of times, but ran into each other again. He came to live within walking distance. I have drunk more beer with him than anyone else. We tried certain drugs together, there was one woman we both slept with , and we sometimes worked for the same employer.
Reaching your sixties, when a close friend dies you lose part of yourself. Terry knew more about some aspects of me than anyone else. It was the same the other way round. One evening after a heavy a boozing session he told me a secret. I forgot it the next day, but he reminded me. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone while he was alive, He said he didn’t mind who I told after he was dead.
We sometimes spoke about death and who would die first. He wasn’t sure it would be him, especially after I had a stroke or rather a series of them, at one of which he was present, though neither understood what it was. He said it was like I had been poisoned.
Over the past months his health was obviously deteriorating. We put it down to his diabetes. On Jan 3rd I phoned him in the morning and we arranged to meet in the Dove in Broadway Market at midday. He didn’t turn up. I was worried about him and kept ringing all day, but he never answered the phone. I rang Joe who was out of London, but who had his keys. He called round at 1.30 in the morning to find Terry alive and asleep. In the morning I got a furious email from Terry telling me to mind my own effing business. He came close to deselecting me as his friend. So it was like the little boy who cried wolf. When we couldn’t contact him after the end of March no one dared to do anything much about it.
Here is a quote from the philosopher R G Collingwood:-
The funeral is an emotional reorientation of a different kind. The mourners are not, essentially, making a public exhibition of their grief; they are publicly laying aside their old emotional relation to a living person and taking up a new emotional relation to that same person as dead. The funeral is their public undertaking that they are going to live in future without him. How difficult an undertaking to fulfil completely, which of us knows his own heart well enough to say?
I first met Terry in 1971. He came to live on the top floor. I was in the basement with Simon and his mother, the landlady was in between. His wall was plastered with Cuban revolutionary posters. Though we disagreed about politics, we had other things in common. By the measure of the school year we were the same age. We had both just come back from lengthy trips to India. We were interested in hippy culture and modern literature, though he was more into music than I was. For years he used to make up tapes for me.
Over the next few years we lost touch a couple of times, but ran into each other again. He came to live within walking distance. I have drunk more beer with him than anyone else. We tried certain drugs together, there was one woman we both slept with , and we sometimes worked for the same employer.
Reaching your sixties, when a close friend dies you lose part of yourself. Terry knew more about some aspects of me than anyone else. It was the same the other way round. One evening after a heavy a boozing session he told me a secret. I forgot it the next day, but he reminded me. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone while he was alive, He said he didn’t mind who I told after he was dead.
We sometimes spoke about death and who would die first. He wasn’t sure it would be him, especially after I had a stroke or rather a series of them, at one of which he was present, though neither understood what it was. He said it was like I had been poisoned.
Over the past months his health was obviously deteriorating. We put it down to his diabetes. On Jan 3rd I phoned him in the morning and we arranged to meet in the Dove in Broadway Market at midday. He didn’t turn up. I was worried about him and kept ringing all day, but he never answered the phone. I rang Joe who was out of London, but who had his keys. He called round at 1.30 in the morning to find Terry alive and asleep. In the morning I got a furious email from Terry telling me to mind my own effing business. He came close to deselecting me as his friend. So it was like the little boy who cried wolf. When we couldn’t contact him after the end of March no one dared to do anything much about it.
Here is a quote from the philosopher R G Collingwood:-
The funeral is an emotional reorientation of a different kind. The mourners are not, essentially, making a public exhibition of their grief; they are publicly laying aside their old emotional relation to a living person and taking up a new emotional relation to that same person as dead. The funeral is their public undertaking that they are going to live in future without him. How difficult an undertaking to fulfil completely, which of us knows his own heart well enough to say?
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