Death of a friend raises questions of faith and the consolation of love

I WAS IN London recently for the funeral of a friend who emigrated as a teenager, without much education, and worked with asbestos for the first seven years of his exile, before moving on to work on “the buildings” and manage pubs.

Unfortunately asbestosis caught up with him and so last week his children closed his coffin and laid him prematurely in the ground. He died in hospital with an oxygen mask, his children around him, and his wife standing at the doorway.

But I don’t think of him stretched on the cold slab of a hospital morgue. I see him as a boy, playing billiards in Thurles, when he should have been doing his school homework. I see him on the boat for Holyhead, bristling with excitement, or outside a dancehall, in drainpipe trousers, or leaning over the wall on a summer’s evening to chat with a 16-year-old English girl who became his lifelong companion.

I see him as a boy, forever young, because as TS Eliot said, we cannot bear very much reality.

Although I met a man at the funeral with a six-year-old son who didn’t embroider reality when the child asked, “Where do people go when they die?”

His father simply replied, “Into the ground.” Which is, of course, the existential reality but sometimes I prefer the embroidery.

In my mother's house there was a statue of the Virgin with Child, a perfect blue and white example of that porcelain womanhood which withered when Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch.

The statue stood on the bedroom mantelpiece until mother moved to a nursing home, where she now lives happy and content. When I was commissioned to tidy up the house, I put the statue away in a box with holy pictures and other ornaments.

But this winter I took the plaster Madonna out again and set her on a window ledge, at the turn of the stairs, where she looks down on me as I ascend.

I thought motherly love might help me through the darkest days of winter. I hoped that the religious icon would console me. But it did not. It remained a chalky inanimate thing, and I fretted that my faith had finally dried up.

Except for emails. In the weeks before Christmas I started sending emails out into the universe like prayers tossed into the grotto at Lourdes.

Each day I sent messages to old friends, new friends, and people who weren’t really friends at all but just happened to be in my contacts list.

It was as if in the dying days of the year, I had permission to say more than I normally say. People who are depressed sometimes find ways to unburden themselves.

“Sadness is not a bad thing,” I wrote to a friend, “though lying in bed on a winter’s day unable to do anything but weep, is something most sensible people might try to avoid. Anyway, Happy Christmas.”

To an old girlfriend I wrote; “Hi there, hope you’re well. Haven’t been in contact for a long time. I suffered some ill health during the summer. So as I sit here by the stove I am thinking of you.”

I wonder what she thought of that, after 30 years.

To another one I wrote a few pages, summing up the past few decades in my life, and then finished with the words, “But I am talking too much. It’s more important to say I love you; you are a wonderful human being and that’s all we need to know about the existence of God.”

The emails were just a desperate attempt to sustain faith in something, during this national depression, as 70 per cent of the country worries about how to make ends meet in the coming year. And statues were never more than props that protected me from too much reality. Though the big problem is figuring out what exactly reality is.

“You’re as beautiful as ever,” my old friend said as he lay dying in London, because he saw his wife forever young, as she was when he was selling Sunday newspapers outside the church in Hayes, in 1963.

On that fateful morning she asked her mother for money to buy a newspaper, an unusual request from a teenage girl. But she got the money, and so the die was cast; she looked into his eyes and she found her man. And he found his faith, not in a statue, but a living person that sustained him until his last breath.

You’re as beautiful as ever,’ my old friend said as he lay dying in London, because he saw his wife forever young