I wish it wasn't real
Remembering, with love
On the drive to the funeral, one of the things I thought about was how some people can’t see images in their mind. I’d read about it that week, a cognitive phenomenon called aphantasia – I wondered what that must feel like. I was sat in the back seat of the car – my brother-in-law was driving, my sister beside him in the front, and a friend in the back with me. I was staring out the window, my eyes trailing a timeless English countryside that made me think of school hymns and Hardy and Austen, the towering grey blocks of London now some 50 miles behind us. It was around midday and the blue sky was as clear as glass; on either side of the road, undulating expanses of green. The view seemed serene and still, until I saw the horse. There it was in the distance – a solitary horse with its rider charging across a field, the sun’s sharp winter rays rendering its form a majestic silhouette. I thought of Black Beauty. Then Boudicca.
We drove past so fast that it vanished in seconds. But because it had also reminded me of Muybridge’s Horse in Motion photographs, the animal I saw in the distance continued to gallop on loop in my head for several minutes longer.
I didn’t mention it to anyone else in the car. Maybe because it seemed unimportant. We were en route to a treasured friend’s funeral and the conversation was heavy with sadness and shock, occasionally punctuated by memories of happier times, which then weighed down the sadness more. Or maybe I didn’t mention it because our friend who had died had a strong connection with horses and spotting this lone rider felt significant. Almost sacred. Perhaps part of me worried that to speak of it would render the sighting too ordinary. We were in the countryside after all, it wasn’t that special to pass someone horse riding. I kept it to myself.
It was icy cold when we got to the cemetery. Discovering a piece of paper pinned on a noticeboard with our friend’s name typed up on it, next to a time slot for her service, felt like a wound we hadn’t prepared for. I gripped my sister’s hand because I saw her heart crack once more. A hundred cracks on an already broken heart.
My sister had met this friend at university, they had lived together as students and kept a closeness that went on to span more than two decades. A real-deal friendship. One of those rare ones. It was something I tagged onto, because in my default role as younger sister, I often turned up wherever my sister went, hoping her friends would adopt me, as if I was some kind of package deal. Not everyone took the bait, but this friend did. She epitomised ‘big sister energy’. Even as a student, she seemed so rooted as a person, so fully formed. The adult she grew into was layered, forthright and unique. She was smart and sweet and kind and joyful and comforting and consistent and generous – and I probably took so much of that for granted, expecting her 25 years of friendship with my sister to extend into half a century and more. I presumed this person would just be there, growing old alongside us. I guess you never imagine the alternative.
As we waited to go in for the prayers, I told my sister that I kept seeing flashes from the film Four Weddings and a Funeral in my head. ‘I know it sounds odd,’ I added. But really, it wasn’t so strange. I was thinking about friendship groups ruptured by loss. Of milestone moments shared. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, new babies and more – my sister and her friend had shared so many of these occasions, from bringing in the millennium together to, just five months ago, celebrating my niece’s bat mitzvah. The night before the funeral, I had looked through photos of that party – how implausible it seemed that just a few months earlier, on a warm summer’s eve, there they were, throwing silly shapes on a dance floor in a field.
After the service, we walked towards the grounds. My boots sank into grass sodden and spongy from the week’s downpour, the earth increasingly muddy as we got closer to the grave. The sun’s glare was now a haze behind the mourners, who were huddled together in devastation. I stared at the coffin. I’m not sure why, but I imagined a butterfly floating down and landing on the pale wooden box in front of us. I saw it resting there, its large wings coloured with kaleidoscopic swirls of reds and pink, the wings opening and closing, as if echoing a heartbeat. As the butterfly pressed more firmly into my imagination, I wished I had the power to will it into being. I wanted it to be a sign, some comfort for the family – I have no idea why now, but at the time, it seemed very important that I try. The butterfly seemed so real in my mind, though, of course, it wasn’t.
What was real was what was in front of us. Something deeply painful and cruel and unfair.
Something that made no real sense at all.
Several hours later, after being with her family – a time that is not for me to share here – we set off for London, the sky dark, awash with stars, the air so cold and brittle we could see our ghostly exhales. On the two-hour drive back, I stared out the window, but this time I couldn’t see much except for what was lit up by bulbs. Vehicles, factories, flats and houses… how incomprehensible that the world still went about its business.
Before I headed home to my husband and young boys, I paused at my sister’s house to see my niece and nephew. I hugged them tighter than they probably wanted. Asked them how school was. They wanted me to listen to their piano practice and I enjoyed watching their little fingers navigate the keys, searching out the right notes. Then my niece asked if I wanted to hear her singing homework.
‘Of course,’ I said.
She looked around, slightly embarrassed, then began.
I walked across an empty land,
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand…
I recognised the song. Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know. How strange hearing a 12-year-old sing those words given I could remember when the song was released twenty years ago.
She sang a bit more:
Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?
I'm getting old, and I need something to rely on…
I held my eyes open wide, willing tears not to spill.
Then she jumped up and said she had a dance to do, too. She had a show in January she was in rehearsals for. She seized her mother’s hands and made her join in. It was nice to see my sister smile. For a couple of minutes, I watched them both dancing – my niece in her school uniform, my sister in her funeral outfit, her eyes tired from crying – and I thought, life is a tightrope. Please may we keep on dancing, please can we all keep laughing more.
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