As the oldest surviving member of a family I now feel the pressure to keep in touch. I remember my mum saying something similar about Auntie Daisy, who we hardly ever saw before her parent's death and never saw after. I tried to write Christmas cards but never posted them because keeping in touch isn't something I'm good at. In my enthusiasm for maintaining connections with the living, I bought an address book. I was thinking that I should fill it, so that even if I don't use it then it could sit in the bureau, waiting for my children to find when I die, so that they can flip through it and wonder who is still alive and would like to be contacted. Then they could repeat the cycle and buy an address book of their own to fill with long lost friends and relatives, who may, or may not still be living.
With any address book, there comes a time when you have to decide whether to remove people. In my Mum's book there are some people who are crossed out and re-entered several times with different addresses and a few who are crossed out and not re-entered. I wondered if these people had died or were just not people she wanted to stay in contact with. The problem with someone being dead is that you can't ask them. Well, you can but they don't answer and if they do then you are certainly having a breakdown.
Because we all die...sorry if that was a shock.....I'll start again with that thought in a moment. Yes, that's the one thing we are all going to do and as you get older more people that you know will have done it. When I was about ten I read Frances Cornford's poem, Recollection, and thought how nice it was. The author was proud that she knew someone that had died and it seemed to me a lovely way of looking at death. When you are a child, people you know dying is a strange, rare and peculiar thing. As you get older, it's normal, except that we pretend it's not. Anyway, back to the original thought.
Because we all die there will be dead people in your address book. It then becomes a choice whether to remove them or leave them there. These days, we don't really have address books. Who am I kidding? We have hundreds of them. Every phone has a list as does every social media account. I was looking through my Facebook friends and noticed how many dead people were there. You don't remove the deceased from your social media and they can't remove you. For some reason it feels too final. I can imagine that if I live long enough and write enough blogs about death then at some point I will be friends with more dead people than living ones because the living ones will remove me.
When people fall out in films they say, "You're dead to me." This is a weird expression because when someone has died then you do everything you can to not forget them. If you have argued with someone then you want to forget them. You wouldn't keep your enemies in your address book or as Facebook Friends.
A few months ago, my daughter's boyfriend of six years, decided that he didn't want to be with her anymore and that she should move out of their shared rented home. It was a complete shock to us (and her) as we had just come back from a holiday together where they seemed to be making plans for the rest of their life (house purchase, engagement, babies). In his mind, though, they had been drifting apart for a long time and this had absolutely nothing to do with the young pretty girl that had recently started work in his office who he is now in a serious relationship with. This event led me to privately calling him The Shit, or Serial Shit because he has a history of breaking up with girls in a bad way. (Serial Shit =SS: remember those initials because if I ever write about memories of when they were together he will appear as SS) The shock of them breaking up felt like a death to me. We had welcomed him into our family albeit with reservations that he still had to prove that he was good enough for our precious daughter. Despite my private nickname for him I sent him a nice message and hoped that he was happy. He replied and I assumed that we hadn't fallen out but that his status as a family member was extinct. I decided to treat his status in my address books as a late friend. When they were together, he read my blogs and always hoped to be in one. What a shame, he'll never know that he's finally made it, as he decided that I am no longer to be kept in his address book. I can see why, the dead never pop up on your Facebook timeline to criticise your life, except in Facebook memories, which can be a total shock.
This morning my Dad seemed to be questioning my reluctance to go back to work after a long Christmas break. Thanks Dad for continuing to remind me that I really do like my job and it will be good to stop eating cheese and get back to normal.
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