Losing Mark will never be right, but at least we tried to make it better
It would have been easy not to do it. I don’t know what other families who lost loved ones during the pandemic have done about that whole, desperately sad ‘celebration of their lives will be held when it is safe to do so’ line that punctuated so many death notices during the time of desolate nonfunerals — but time passed and restrictions stayed and then more than a year had gone by and even if we were still barely breaking the surface of our grief, there was a sense that other people had moved on. That maybe, without ever opening, the window for a gathering had passed.
And then I went to The Best Friend’s mother’s funeral. The first without any restrictions or limits or people standing apart in church grounds watching the Mass on their phones. And it was everything that my brother’s funeral should have been: a church full of people and afterwards, conversations in the pub that soon turned to songs and stories and guitars and laughter and everyone ordering Pina Coladas because that was the cocktail she always made when the ladies went away on holidays together. An Irish funeral; the kind we do so well.
I went for a run a couple of days afterwards and I was thinking about all that and something had to give. And when it did, and I realised that the timing didn’t matter because Mark deserved a night like that, there was a single white feather on the ground in front of me — Mark and I used to communicate through daily phone calls (twice on Saturdays); now I talk to him in my head and he responds through white feathers and the occasional tinkling of the wind chimes on the tree closest to his grave — and when The Best Friend arrived to meet me for a walk a couple of minutes later I was bawling crying in a way somebody who’s just buried their mother is more entitled to, which would have been embarrassing if she’d been anyone else but she’s not The Best Friend for nothing.
And so a plan began to build. And last Saturday night, people came. Loads of people. I had estimated 30 when I booked; by nine o’clock, we had to ask people to move further back into the room because we couldn’t get any more through the door. There might have been a hundred people there at one point. And here’s the thing: they were almost all Mark’s friends. Loads of them. People I hadn’t seen for decades. People I hadn’t seen since they’d lined the driveway up to the church while we walked behind the hearse. People who might have moved on but still wanted to celebrate a man who had brought laughter and daft antics into their lives. It turned out that a lot of people loved my brother and there’s no best before date on that.
And everybody was in great form and the few pockets of sadness were filled with the memories of madness and when I said a few words Mark’s best friend made a sheep noise which was perfect because Mark and Davy always made sheep noises at inappropriate times — once, when we were all still living at home, I witnessed one side of a 15 minute phone call between the life-long friends in which there wasn’t a single word spoken beyond ‘baa.’
And then the guitars came out and we sang the songs Mark used to sing and my kids sang Harvest Moon and I had to take a moment but it was only a moment. And he’d have loved the whole night: the music, the laughter, the stories, the pints, the fact that his wife has started playing the guitar again and that our mother, who we thought might stay for an hour, became the oldest person to ever be thrown out of The Orchard at 2am.
Another wise woman once used a line about loss that has stayed with me since. ‘You can never make it right,’ she said, ‘but you can try to make it better.’ Last Saturday night we tried to make it better. When I opened my eyes on Sunday morning, I looked at the photo of Mark beside my bed and warned him that there better be a significant feather in the garden for me. When I walked out into blinding sunshine, it appeared to be snowing. Dandelion clocks, hundreds of them, swirling down from the sky for a full minute while I spun around in their fluffy cloud. It would appear my brother is diversifying. And that makes it better again.