Goodbye Uncle Albert
I’m not really sure what to write. Some time this morning in a hospital in or near Kings’ Lynn (I don’t know the details, for some reason right now the details don’t matter), my great-uncle Albert, husband to my mother’s mother’s sister, passed away. He’d been in hospital a few days, his heart was weak, his health (and indeed that of my great-aunt Gwen) has been deteriorating for a number of years.
Yet it’s still difficult to accept that he is no longer with us. I didn’t see him much; I doubt this will cause me to see Auntie significantly more often. They were always there; part of the familiy, part of each other, even if we did usually only see them at Christmas and Easter. I remember Uncle’s love of his garden, until he was no longer able to maintain it. I remember when they moved out of their bungalow to a flat because they couldn’t keep it and its frankly enormous garden tidy anymore. That was only a few years ago. I wish he’d been able to carry on gardening.
I doubt I’ll really grieve until the funeral. It just doesn’t seem real yet, but seeing Auntie without Uncle… that’s what will make it hit home. Right now it just doesn’t seem quite real.
It also surprises me that despite its inevitability, we’re completely unable to deal with death in a sensible manner. We feel numb, we feel grief, we get angry, we shout, we cry, we sit and stare into the distance, we comfort ourselves with empty platitudes that it’s better where he is. We even make up elaborate stories explaining what happens to people when they die, despite not actually knowing. And we will never know. Individuals may claim to know, but as a race we will never collectively truly know and understand what happens to us when we die.
And that’s very odd.