in the midst of life

Death does seem to have a knack of crash landing on life, and so yesterday evening we gathered at my brother's house and ate the ham and the Waldorf salad that they had ordered from Marks and Spencer before we knew the trajectory of my father's final illness.  After all, my mother had to eat something, and probably did not want to spend her eightieth birthday sitting in the dark by herself, and it was an extremely good ham and it would have been a shame to end up tipping half of it into the food recycling bin.  After some muttered behind-the-scenes debate my brother even brought out the Happy Eightieth Birthday chocolate cake that had been hidden while he saw how things went, on the grounds that my father would have wanted her to have a nice birthday, and that she and my sister-in-law and the grandchildren all like chocolate cake.  The emergency back up plan had been to slice it up so that you couldn't read the words on the icing any more, and give it to the local church.

This morning I took my mother back to the hospital to collect the medical certificate, one of the many documents she will need to present to the Registrar of Births and Deaths to obtain a death certificate.  I saw from the useful booklet the hospital gave us on Saturday, and which I managed to snaffle two copies of so that I could have one as well as my mother, that we were required to register the death within five days.  That's quite a tight timescale, especially given the office at the Bereavement Suite only opens on weekdays.  If your loved one dies after office hours on a Friday it seems you have already used up two of your five days before you can even get the medical certificate.

On the way home my mother asked me what people did whose religions require them to be buried on the same day, and I had to admit I didn't know.  I think they would just have to ask their deity to excuse them, on the grounds that the local laws and customs were not adapted to their religion.

Then we drank tea in her kitchen and admired the collection of cards that had already dropped through the letterbox while trying to remember who else we ought to tell, and the name of the solicitors holding my father's will, and discussing the relative merits of Colchester and Weeley crematoriums.  I suspect that the great rush of things they need to do keeps people going until after the funeral.  Then the whole situation probably hits them like a tonne of bricks.