The Grim Reaper

Just heard the dreadful news that a close friend who lives some distance away dropped dead last Friday. She was a complete original, an artist, sparkling, talented, who'd somehow ended up in a dead end place because her parents left her a house and she was out of a job. I had only spoken to her on the phone the day before. She had just spend five weeks doing the job from hell, dispensing tickets at a theme park and dealing with the worst examples of Joe Public. She walked out last Tuesday and three days later, she was dead of a stroke at 58. What a dreadful waste of one's last few weeks on earth. What with my boyfriend's stroke and the death of another friend at the hand of a hit and run driver a fortnight ago, I feel buffetted by the wings of the Grim Reaper.

We were very close, soul mates in a way. I could tell her things, even the most outrageous thoughts, that I could tell nobody else. I am angry, angry, angry. She always called me her 'bezzie' - her best friend. So why did she not come dancing into my dreams and tell me? Instead, this leaden gap of five days during which I carried on with my life and didn't know her sparkly spirit had passed on. I just don't believe it. My mother died in her sleep and I was 200 miles away, but I knew. She came to tell me. The room filled with warm pink light and I had a feeling I had been swept by the wing of an angel, even though I'm not particularly religious. The room was full of love and I went to bed with raging flu and slept like a baby, but next day got worried that she wasn't answering the phone and rang her gardener, who had a key. I caught a train, still with a high temperature and full of flu, and arrived to an empty house as the police had taken her to the police morgue. They didn't release her body for a week, though I went there every day and begged to see her.

The elephants have it right. When one of their herd dies, they crowd around, visit the corpse, feel it with their trunks, weep, come to terms, lay the relative or friend to rest in their hearts, minds and souls. We need to do this, too. There is an overbearing need to see the body of the loved one, to convince oneself that they really are dead, to see their shell and know their spirit no longer inhabits it. It's a natural part of the grieving process, I think. Hence the dreadful suffering of those whose loved ones have simply disappeared.

Death is an unfinished symphony. A conversation abruptly terminated before the final words have been said. Cymbals are crashing a cacophany in my head.