Strange things happen to the time after a bereavement.  Some hours drag by, most plod.

Whilst each hour takes you further from the source of sadness, though it would seem to soothe, every second is one more in which the person you are missing has not been alive, which is more cause to lament the hours that pass, carrying someone away from you on a tide of time.

I have not seen my cousin much over the last few years.  He married eleven years ago, finally, and his new wife bore him off like a trophy, which she had every right to do and they settled, at last into coupledom, which was all I ever wanted for him.  On probably hundreds of occasions he had visited, had a lovely time and then gone home alone.  It was certainly time he had time as half of a couple.

Then there were the five years I was caring for my mother which left hardly any time for anything else, not to mention all the weeks I tried to live there, followed by all the weeks I tried to live here and there simultaneously.  Then there were the months when the S&H was meeting and marrying his wife, all centred round the death of her father; any spare time left from my family was given to their family.

Then my cousin had cancer and was too ill to travel and so had I and was I.

You always think there will be time.

There is no antidote or cure to the river of time that sweeps all people away from you, that’s just what it does.

You have to make sure you are present in your own life, for every second of your own life.  Time out ingesting substances, is time stolen from yourself.  Time spent living in your head in recriminations or anger or resentment is time you allow the past to steal from now.

My cousin was an accepting person.  He never got in a stew about anything, however I was, was OK with him.  As a result all I remember of all the time we spent together is laughter.  We laughed such a lot at such silly things, we were never together without laughing.

If your time with someone is precious, and all time with people you love is precious because it is limited and you cannot see the end from here, make sure whatever you do in the time you have together will look good as a memory, when a memory is all you have.

Laughter makes a good memory.  Kindness makes a good memory.  Smiling at someone is a good memory.  A lovely paper letter is a wonderful memory, it’s an authentic voice from a happy time.  Gifts are best if made. 

Time itself, time spent together, generously given to me by my cousin who travelled from wherever he was for a Christmas dinner, a summer evening, an autumn afternoon, a child’s birthday.  These are the times I have, safe in memory.  I compare them with times spent with other people. Times going to visit my parents, once I had escaped, were always stressful.  The potential for being wrong was all-encompassing and whatever gift I had taken was never right.  Times spent with my in-laws were difficult too, it wasn’t their fault, my mother-in-law was ill almost as soon as I knew her and needed care, at our expense.

I try hard to make the times spent with the S&H and his family as much like the times spent with my cousin as possible. All laughter, no agenda.

Soon it will be time to pack the memories away and get on with my life.  It could have been the other way round, it could have been him remembering me.

Time is the concept we use to measure the passing of life.  The Venerable Bede wrote that life was as a sparrow flying through a Saxon hall house.  The time spent flying through the house was not the reality.  The reality began when the sparrow escaped and flew free through the wind’s eye at the end of the hall, out from the candle light and into the sunshine.

I hope so.

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A week. Just seven days,so much can happen.  So much emotion crammed into seven days and seven nights.

My cousin died.  He was only 71. I first saw him 65 years ago when we moved back to the North East of England. Instantly he became the nearest thing I would ever have to a brother. We were opposite physically.   I was small chunky and darkish. He was small delicate, blue-eyed with fair curly hair.  I liked dolls and reading. He liked Meccano, mud and trains.  We both liked the Beano and sand.  Living two streets apart we went every weekday to our respective schools.  He went across the river on a ferry, I went in the opposite direction to the posh girls’ school in the next town.  As our mothers were sisters and best friends we saw each other most weekends and every school holiday for weeks and weeks.

The beach was covered in yellow sand, punctuated with sea coal; if you looked up from the ditch you were digging for the sea to fill up, there was always a ship carrying coals from Newcastle to everywhere else, on the horizon. We went to Camel island and climbed the rocks to see the view of the nearby sea stack, stacked with Kittiwakes who would rise, crying into the sky in huge numbers and fall off back to the rock one by one.

Then you could build a sand castle and excavate it, he from one side and I from the other, until you could lean your head in the sand and see each other through the tunnel. Blessedly my difficult, controlling mother was occupied, putting the world to rights to her little big sister.  I was free to play in the rock pools, watch the sand wash between my toes and make sand cars round my cousin. or have him make them round me.

Every Christmas was the same. At his house we played games and he would be forced to show his presents and give me something from his tuck box and make a face.  Quite why they never just had a liquorice pipe put aside for me I don’t know.  At our house the same display of conspicuous wealth, though I never had sweets, sometimes my father would subject us all to a slide show.  ‘Now this is, oh what’s that.  I don’t… oh, it’s upside down.  That’s it. Got it.  No, what’s wrong?  Ah, back to front.’  When he put the lights on we had all gone to sleep.

There was Christmas Tea, a major event for my mother, followed by Just A Small Sherry and Morecombe and Wise.

And we laughed.  We always laughed. I laughed a lot when he was around.

We grew up, moved away. Jobs and so on.  I married, he was the best man.  We settled, he visited.  I had the S&H, he came and played with him under the table, under the bed, on the floor.  The S&H did not want a train set, which was a great disappointment to both of us as we had plans.

He visited a great deal.  He went round the world, sending postcards and letters to me and to my grandmother from everywhere.  Our grandmother said she felt as if she had been round the world with him.  So did I.

There were fleeting girlfriends but they were never going to match up to his mother, who sat up in bed one day at the age of 80 and suddenly died.  One Self Employed Works Outing and Christmas Party at my house he looked up over the turkey and said he’d met a girl at a party and that was how I came to acquire Aussie rellies just eleven years ago.

We even had cancer at the same time but on Wednesday he sat up in bed and died.

Sometimes on the beach, when it was really sunny, the sea fret would roll in like clouds.  You could barely see your feet in the sand, the seagulls sounded muffled and the damp got into everything and made you shiver.

The publisher is a scam. I have adhesions that hurt all the time.  The builders have knocked down the arch, there is rubble outside and junk in heaps inside.  The plumbers have left a hole in the wall.

I can’t even hear the laughter draining away on the tide, the mist is so thick.

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