The aftermath

July 2024

The administrative processes around death and burial will be familiar to all who have experienced a loss, so I shouldn't imagine that what we experienced was unique. We made it harder for ourselves by wishing to conduct the funeral as quickly as possible. If we'd agreed a date the following week then I wouldn't have had to get quite so familiar with people at the GP practice, the Register Office, the medical examiner and the coroner's office, and we wouldn't have been at the cemetery 30 minutes before the funeral started still not knowing whether the burial would form part of it. But it worked out fine in the end, even giving us a few opportunities to smile.

Dad was a medical doctor through and through, and although his body could not be donated for medical science because he died at home, he managed to donate his non-Parkinson's brain for research into Parkinson's disease. He was strongly anti-religion, and we reflected this in our choices at the funeral. There were a couple of readings, an 'appreciation' of his life constructed by the remaining four of us and read by Lola II. The coffin went into the grave with another reading, and mum recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead, either because she wished to or for the Jewish people in attendance, I couldn't work out which. Maybe both. Then we went off for tea.

I was away staying with mum for very nearly a week, sometimes with Lola II and Sister D and their husbands there too. On the day after the funeral we'd long been planning to take mum over to Lola II and Mr M's for the day, and there seemed no reason not to go ahead with the plan, and we even persuaded her to stay overnight. Mum reviewed and gave her seal of approval to all changes that had taken place in their house since she was last there, and Lola II arranged to borrow her regular adoptive dog as a treat - for him and for us.

It was good to come back home afterwards, and I tried to recall the effort I'd put into reflection while I was on retreat, and my determination to change my lifestyle, but it all felt a little remote. I'm trying to take the steps I worked out then to make positive and constructive changes, particularly around food, exercise, Internet access and meditation. 

We had planned a day for the Buddhist group team to come together on Sunday at my house, and it couldn't have been a better time to meet. Since then I've done pretty well with my resolutions - there's been no chocolate or snacks, I've enquired at the local leisure centre about what I might do for exercise, I've meditated every day (which absolutely wasn't the case before I went on retreat) and I have set an alarm so I don't spend more than 60 minutes at a time sitting at the computer. Which is one reason why this blog post has taken so long to put together.

I also went to the doctor with my hurty arm, which (as so often happens) started to hurt a lot less as soon as I made the appointment, but I've got some heavy duty anti-inflammatory drugs to take for two weeks anyway, and a self-referral to a physiotherapist. I also joined an online meeting of the Comms team for the Warwick Folk Festival and I'm still pretty confident that they won't try to put me in charge. Then I went back to mum's for a couple more days to continue with the admin, and here we are, two weeks on. Apart from mum not being tied to the house any longer, everything feels very much the same as before.