It's the love that lasts

What was more shocking - the fact that my 50 year old second cousin had died, or that I found out on Facebook?  Or, was it the fact that I cried?  I cried like I loved him, really loved him, yet I hadn’t seen him in at least three years, and following that occasion I had decided I really wouldn’t mind if I never saw him again.  

He barely acknowledged me, and I was appalled at the person he had become.  It was at my brother’s house.  I had travelled a long way to see my brother, and Terry was there.  He had become a frequent visitor.  He was a mess, and was looking to my brother for support, but it was too much for him.  It wasn’t the fact that Terry needed help which bothered me though.  It was the fact that he seemed so utterly self centred, that his needs and his suffering was so much more important than the needs of anyone else; that he seemed so oblivious to others.  I had an hour to spend with my brother, and he’d told Terry he couldn’t see him when he called, but he turned up anyway.  He’d met a girl, and he had to tell my brother all about it there and then.  And the way he talked about her appalled me so much, that I couldn’t stay there to listen to it any longer, and so I left.  In the six months or so that my brother and Terry were close, my brother had rescued Terry after a suicide attempt at least twice.  He tried to help him face up to his alcoholism, but he was in denial.  My brother had had problems of his own, so was sympathetic and wanted to help, but he wasn’t equipped to help him.  Terry wanted to become my brother’s lodger, and when my brother refused, he lost interest and moved on.  

But when I cried, I wasn’t only crying for his family: his long suffering parents; his sister; his children; and his grandchildren left behind, or my brother who I knew would carry some guilt that he couldn’t help him.  When I was crying, my head was filled with memories.  Memories of when we were younger.  Memories from before it all seemed to go wrong.  There were 10 years between us, and he had been the cool older cousin admired from afar.  He was handsome, friendly and funny.  He reminded me of my first childhood crush, a young John Travolta.   When I was a teenager, he would sometimes give me a lift home from school if he was passing.  As a self-conscious fifteen year old, he took me for a ride on the back of his motorbike - the first and last ever time - it was exhilarating and I loved every second of it.  I can still picture the moment, with my arms wrapped around his leather jacket as we leant into the corners;  feel and hear the crunch of the leather, the roar of the engine, the wind catching the ends of my long hair and the heaviness of the helmet; and that feeling that I wanted the moment to last forever.  And it has.  And it will.  Another treasured memory was an evening in my early twenties, when we shared a few drinks and the family secrets - slightly embellished, but very amusing.

Interestingly, the day before I heard the news, I was having lunch with friends, when one of the ladies said how moved she had been by the media reports following the brutal stabbing of Ann Maguire by one of her pupils.  Ann was reported to have been such a loving person who did so much for so many people, and there was a huge outpouring of love for her.  One of the men in our group said that, though he didn’t know Ann and had no reason to think anything that was said about her wasn’t true, it always surprised him how people are exalted when they die and held up to be saints.  He used the example of his own headmaster’s funeral, where he was said to be the saviour of his school, when he was anything but.  We are none of us so perfect as we might appear to be at our funerals.

Isn’t that they way it should be?  There are some lost souls devoid of love and conscience, take Jimmy Savile as an example, but for the rest of us, we are perfectly imperfect in our own way.  We all have a darker side and have done things we are less proud of, but in the end, its the love that lasts, as love never dies, and that is how we should and will be remembered.  So hopefully, I will be able to go to my second cousin’s funeral, and if I do, although the last moments we shared together were not the best, I will be there with the rest of them, celebrating and remembering the love in his life, and the loving ways in which he touched mine.