Get Into The Light: Chapter Twenty Three- Crematoriums Are An Insult To Us All

Chapter Twenty
‘The wheel keeps turning the sky's rearranging
Look my son the weather is changing
I'd like to feel that you could be free
Look up at the blue skies beneath a new tree.’
‘Hymn of the Big Wheel’, Massive Attack.

When someone dies you realise that all the things that usually trouble you day to day seem meaningless, tiny and ridiculous. And even bigger things- like losing your mind and having to take anti-pyschotic medication, these things seem meaningless, tiny and ridiculous. Your mind does this cruel thing where it gives you small gaps of time when you forget what’s happened. During these gaps you might find yourself laughing at a re-run of The Golden Girls or feeling hungry when you see a pizza advert on TV. You might even enjoy running your head under the shower or playing with your budgie and watching him intently as he tries out his new plastic skateboard. Then suddenly the gap shuts like two steel walls being slammed together and you remember what’s happened and all you can do is cry. And what really upset me was the suspicion that each time I cried, it was STILL ALWAYS ABOUT ME. I wasn’t feeling sad for Lynette. OR WAS I? It felt like I was just feeling sorry for myself, that I’d lost such a good friend, that my life would be empty, thinking about the fun we’d had cycling to the market, picking through the busted hairdryers, broken prams and finding the perfect sequinned clutch bag, then ordering a ‘Coffee Verkeerd’ and sitting outside a cafe smoking and talking about Joost or Pete or talking about the band and what we’d do once we were famous. Okay we weren’t Simone De Beauoir and whats his face. Or Lichtenstein and thingy-me-jig. We weren’t intellectuals. We repeated the same conversations countless times and never seemed to get close to resolution. We weren’t very articulate. We lacked clarity and structure to our talks. To be honest most of it was nonsense but now and then we’d hit on something important and perhaps get one step closer to some semblance of self-awareness. If we’d written a book it would have been called- ‘The World is Quite Perplexing Most of the Time Isn’t It?’ I knew Lynette had no idea about the grand themes of life. Despite being two years older than me, she really seemed to believe in the soppy love affair, that people settled down for life, that the job or career you’d dreamt of landed in your lap and this optimism, this childlike, stupid optimism had got her nowhere. Was I feeling sorry for Lynette? Yes perhaps I was. I was sorry that she’d had such high expectations out of life.

It wasn’t even fair that she’d had no time to reconcile with Pete. Pete was at the hospital all that time but she’d been out of it, unable to see him sitting at her bedside, cancelling his Penguin appearances, sleeping in the chair all night, trying to console her parents. She hadn’t even had the pleasure of seeing how much he cared and the fact that she’d probably been right all along. He was THE ONE.

Carl and I didn’t communicate. Even though it was nearing Summer, the weather seemed universally grey. The TV was on all day. At night the images played back on my retinas so I awoke and immediately climbed back into the TV because it was still on, had been on all night and Carl wasn’t sleeping. What do you say to one another after a friend has died? ‘Well that was pretty bad eh?’, ‘Who saw that coming?’ There were no words to summarise what had happened. And I was too embaressed to talk about feeling sorry for myself. I suspected Carl already knew this as we were now at that terrible stage where the curtain swings open and you see your partner in all their insufferable glory. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d have discussed with Lynette. She would have told me I was thinking too hard - then we would have mashed some potatoes up and sat laughing at Oprah. Or we would have spent the afternoon drawing outfits for our international tour. And again I was back to remembering all the things we’d done together. Feeling sorry that they weren’t going to happen anymore. So I was feeling sorry for Lynette – yes I was.

On top of this there were lots of reasons to feel guilty. Firstly there was the fact that perhaps I was too concerned with myself rather than Lynette (that was a big one. A really big guilty trip). The second was I’d barely talked to her recently because she’d become so boring, yawning on about Pete and how he was the most important person in her life, thirdly I’d always kind of hoped some type of ill will on Lynette. Of course I didn’t want her to die. But she was so good looking, such a magnet, such an annoying fuckwit of a girl that I’d certainly fantasised about her breaking her nose, or ending up with four fingers on one hand or chronic alopecia. We all have those thoughts about our loved ones. Then there was even more guilt when I looked at Carl and thought how I should be reaching out to him, now was exactly the time for us to cling together and comfort one another but instead I wanted to stay in my box, didn’t want to speak to him, certainly didn’t want to sleep with him, found every sentence he uttered wrong, just entirely wrong. They say grief brings people together. Or it drives people apart- which one is it?

I would have done anything in that moment to leave Amsterdam and sit in my old childhood bedroom eating cereal out of mugs and mooning over my posters of Edith Piaf (I didn’t even like Edith Piaf but I liked black and white moody photographs of her- I was so pretencious! Lynette would have laughed. She thought all English people were pretencious).

The cremation was GHASTLY. I never use that word because it sounds like the type of thing a toff would say, someone looking down on the rest of the world but GHASTLY is a good word and will suffice on this occasion. I never want to visit another crematorium. When I die I would rather be burnt on a giant bonfire and have fireworks and jacket potatoes backing beneath my thighs. It amazes me that a crematorium is the best concept we can conjure up in order to say goodbye. It wouldn’t even be acceptable for a family pet to be dispatched in this way.

The speeches were okay. I should have said something but I couldn’t because all I could think about was myself and how I was feeling right now. I was too scared to share these feelings with the rest of the world. I felt sure that everyone else was grieving properly. Was spending the time in thick contemplation. There was a photograph next to the coffin- a photograph of Lynette but she looked nothing like Lynette. She was chubby and must have been taken when she was still a school girl. I wanted to go up and shake her Mum for using that photo- Lynette would have been mortified and we had plenty of beautiful photographs – in fact the whole music video was an ode to Lynette.
I tried to think up the adjectives I would have used in my speech. That Lynette was a proud, selfish, vain creature. She was incredibly unreliable. She danced like she really didn’t care what other people thought. She had a great eye for fashion. She was very skinny. She cried a lot. I never saw her without a full face of make up. She was very generous. She was generous, loving, funny and a complete show off.

Carl sniffed. I realised I’d tuned out completely. I was good at understanding Dutch but there were times when I just stopped listening because it was too much hard work. Lynette’s father had been up there for some time now. I squeezed Carl’s hand. Tried to build some sort of bridge so we no longer felt like two people who had just met. I couldn’t cry because I understood very clearly that crying had no discernable benefit. Lynette was not coming back. I looked up and caught a glimpse of Miss Ellen a couple of aisles away. I felt a flash of anger. I’d kind of felt she was cool to begin with. I’d dug the whole ‘I’m fat and proud’ routine. She seemed geniunely different. Yet she’d resorted to petty bitchiness in the end, fighting over a man, making another woman feel bad- she wasn’t a real feminist. I wondered if she felt guilty about the way things had worked out. Bob van Veen was standing next to her looking solemn. I’d always suspected he fancied Lynette. I’d seen him watching her from afar. Perhaps he’d have been happier poaching Lynette instead of Miss Ellen. Of course Miss Ellen could sing but these days it really didn’t matter. Image was everything. He still needed a young, good looking girl to get people to listen to the music. People weren’t going to turn up to watch a buffalo in a bikini.

Pete was standing next to Lynette’s Mum. I hadn’t even seen Joost arrive. Wasn’t sure he was here. Just at that moment Pete opened his mouth and looked up at the ceiling. I felt so sorry for him. Genuinely sorry. Nothing to do with me. I was conscious that I was feeling empathy for another person! I wasn’t thinking about myself. Except now I was because I was thinking about what a nice person I was feeling empathy for Pete. I contemplated head butting the bench in front of me, just to switch the chatter off. I’d heard an elastic band was a good idea. Apparently if you wore an elastic band on your wrist, you could ping it every time you had a negative thought. I needed a giant elastic band, one big enough to encircle my entire head, one I could pull back with both hands and then allow to slap back onto my forehead till all the nattering disappated. Till I just focused on the moment that mattered.

‘Tragic just tragic,’ I heard a voice behind me say.
‘Yes did you see them at the Marcanti Plaza? They were brilliant.’
‘Such a shame.’
‘But she was a complete drug head.’
‘I think they all were.’
‘One of them went mad apparently. Thought she was related to Michael Jackson or something.’
‘I heard about that too.’
‘She almost got sent to the asylum.’
I could see Carl’s ears prick up. I knew he was hoping I’d ignore these gossips but I couldn’t help myself. They seemed to be making some dumb link between the cycle accident and our hedonistic lifestyle. Did they really believe the two were connected? I’d thought Dutch people were so liberal, so open minded about drugs but actually they were just as prudish and disapproving as everyone else.
‘It wasn’t Michael Jackson. It was Prince,’ I hissed turning round to face them.
I recognised one girl from the cloak room of the Milky Way, the other one looked vaguely familiar too. Neither of them said anything. I think they were scared. Even though I was no longer locked in pyschosis I could readily conjure up the crazy eyes. I would use it to my advantage in later years. There is no better repellent than looking unhinged – people are always worried that you’re about to publicly embaress them. Carl pulled on my hand and I turned back to face front.
‘I need some air,’ I said.
Squeezing past Carl, I headed down the aisle and left. It was cool outside. It felt like a relief to be out of the surreal cement shopping centre vibe. A squirrel was running up the driveway. For a second I thought perhaps this was Lynette’s spirit manifesting itself, trying to reassure me that the way I was grieving was fine, that she was okay with what had happened that she was in some Buddhist middle way ready to become an Eagle or whatever the next step would be. I spent a few moments watching the squirrel as it ran up the exterior of the crematorium and then disappeared over the other side.

And that time when I cried, it was all for Lynette.