OPENER / ANDREW TUCK
After life
This will get a bit meta but stick with me because I just want to say thank you – yes, to you. Last week I wrote this column (if you missed it, perhaps click here as otherwise what follows might make even less sense than usual) sitting at a dining table in Stratford-upon-Avon, in the very spot where a borrowed hospital bed had been sitting just two days before and in which an amazing woman had just died. As every week, I then sent my copy to the sub editors and, later in the day, I even suggested how to illuminate in image a topic that, for once, had stumped our wonderful illustrator. Although why he couldn’t have thought of depicting the spirit of a deceased aunt rising to the next life as a sardine inside a seagull I cannot fathom.
On Friday evening I saw the final proof and, as this was about his aunt, Meg, I asked my partner David to make sure that I wasn’t being disrespectful by adding the odd garland of humour to a painfully fresh obituary. He said it was all good and that he particularly loved the touching illustration of the dove soaring to heaven. I kept quiet at this point, banking on his clipped-winged ornithological knowledge never revealing the seafaring truth.
Finally, that night, the Weekend Edition headed off into the ether to hopefully arrive in your inboxes in time for breakfast. This is where the thank you bit comes in because, as the dispatch started landing in one time zone after another, so came the correspondence. Yes, condolences and, wonderfully, a connection to a woman whom readers had never met, but also powerfully their – your – stories of loss, of not being there for the final moment, of reflections on ageing and personal fears for the future. Perhaps it will prove fleeting but something happened this week: a crackle of connection across email. I dropped my guard and perhaps a hundred readers did too. So to Bruce in Florida, Sally in Melbourne, Emil in Lima, Chai in Malaysia, Erik in Amsterdam, João in Lisbon and everyone else who did or didn’t write – thank you.
Now, before we start holding hands and dancing in a circle, the wise words of Monocle readers should be set against the card that we received from a lovely neighbour. What you need to know as background is that she is religious and if you do her even the most modest of favours, she promises to pray for you (I hope she comes good on this because I am going to need all the help I can get).
So I was expecting a card with perhaps a heavenly vision (none of that seagull-and-sardine nonsense) and some solemn words. However, she had selected one with a photograph of an all-white dog, lying on its back, wrapped in a white towel and with a slice of cucumber over each eye. At first I thought they were coins and that this was a dead hound; did she think it was our dog that had passed away? Anyway, that vision was trumped by the printed message inside the card – a very to the point “Oh dear”. Anyway, it has brought me untold joy all week. Although if that’s the depth of her religious thought then I am not sure how far those prayers are going to get me.
So how about this for a deal. The funeral is in a couple of weeks – that’s two more potential columns, maximum, after this week as far as you are concerned. If I promise to strike the right balance, how about we continue to talk about some of the big stuff? I’ll tell you a few things that I think are important and I will also reveal whether it turns out to be a wise or truly terrible idea for me to read last week’s column at the commitment. (I have raised my concerns; can you really say “incontinence pads” in a church?)
And to keep things nice and Monocle, perhaps we can also have a word about legacy – how we can do something that leaves a positive mark, however small? Because that’s the one bit that has me worried.
