Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Let’s do this together
We said goodbye to our friend Carol on a beautiful sunny autumn afternoon earlier this week in a small village church in Hampshire.
The rule of 30 at funerals meant we were a small but perfectly formed group of all those who o loved Carol. But the rules also meant no hugging, , and I felt helpless as a woman I didn’t know sobbed on her own at the back, and I couldn’t go over and squeeze her hand.
Thankfully it also meant no singing, or rather warbling from the congregation, which is always bum-clenchingly awful unless you have a proper choir. I have a morbid fear of being buried to thin, reedy voices singing All Things Bright And Beautiful and someone blowing their nose halfway through it.
I hadn’t seen Carol in a while as she was shielding from Covid, but her long fight with breast cancer took its toll and she succumbed to the disease two weeks ago, quietly at home, with her husband Jamie and family.
The service was just as Carol would have wanted, mainly because she wrote down her precise wishes just before she died.
There were nods to her homeland such as lighting tiny white candles and the Lord’s Prayer being said in Swedish.
I’m surprised she didn’t manage to crowbar Abba in there somewhere too, although we were given white roses to place on her coffin to the strains of Mary Poppins singing Let’s Go Fly A Kite, which had to be rewound four times as it took 30 of us that long to file past.
Which sort of summed Carol up – beautiful and also a bit disturbing.
We all held it together admirably until Jamie’s dad Pete choked up all the way through his farewell speech.
When Jamie took to the lectern, he thanked his dad for his words adding: “At least it was better than your wedding speech!”
Which was true – although Jamie and Carol had been together 32 years, they were only married four years ago after Jamie, as he says, had been on the run long enough. We were all there, including their dogs as funny-looking bridesmaids, which at least meant the best man had no one to get off with. Well, at least I hope he didn’t.
Carol was funny and brave to the last, and as Jamie told mourners: “It was our anniversary a couple of weeks ago, and as she lay in bed, I said, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got you a card.’ And she said, ‘It’s OK, I haven’t got you one either!’”
Her Swedish best friend reminded us of Carol’s way of dealing with the awful disease, which also tragically cut short the life of her darling sister Lu-lu not long after the wedding.
She said: “Whenever I caught myself telling Carol my problems because she was such a good listener, she’d chuckle, ‘Look it’s not a competition, but yes, if it was, I would probably win!”
That was Carol – warm, kind and pragmatic, but also tough with a very Nordic sense of the absurd.
She raised thousands for cancer charities with her favourite social event, afternoon tea, and I will never be able to look at a delicious slice of cake again without thinking of her.
If our lives are only as meaningful as the memories we leave behind, and how we made people feel, then Carol was the very best of us.