I Miss Dead People

And attempt at reflection on death while trying not to be morbid

I was sitting in my garden the other evening listening to the evening birdsong and just trying to be in the moment. We have a Blackbird who lives here and sits on the very top of an old Birch tree around 8pm every evening, and lets rip.

It’s the most beautiful sound and I appreciate how lucky we are to have lived in this place for the past 32 years, a location where there is very little sound invasion from the modern world. On a quiet evening if it’s not too windy, the birdsong really comes to the fore.

I was contemplating the fact that I could hear those sounds, and see the trees and broad expanse of sky. I was a conscious, living being with functioning senses and I was aware that I was very lucky. I’m 68 years old and I try to find time to really appreciate the life I’ve had and am still having.

I have known plenty of people who I would love to share a moment like that with me. It’s nothing special, it happens to everyone if you live long enough. As the years pass, more and more of the people I’ve known, worked with, loved, admired, even been fearful of have died.

And they don’t come back, I know that’s a daft thing to say, but we’re all used to people we are close to going overseas or moving away from us, but they are still around and they might, and sometimes do, come back for a bit.

I think of Liz, my first love, a romance that started when were at school together 52 years ago. She was a wonderful, loud, confident Australian girl with a funny nose and big hair. I was besotted.

Our love was never consummated, not because she was shy and retiring, far from it. Nothing happened because I was hopelessly inadequate until quite a few years later.

Liz got married and moved back to Australia when we were in our early 20’s and although we exchanged the odd letter, I never saw her again. She died in her early 50’s and I still regret not travelling to the isolated farm she lived on in Western Australia to see her one last time.

Linda, a neighbour in a house I lived in who became a close friend died much, much too young. At the time we lived in the same building she was dating someone who is now rather well known and every time I see his name in the credits of a movie or TV series I remember that time. Linda was only 32 when she passed away. She was such bright light in the world, such an incredible, loving and enthusiastic person. Always positive and funny and it still feels wrong she was stolen away so young.

Then there’s Michael. No one who met Michael forgot about him, he was, literally, larger than life. Michael was a New Yorker, bigger, louder and funnier than any Brit I’d ever known. I think it’s fair to say we became good friends. He was from a totally different background with a completely different world view but we go along famously. He was what is loosely referred to as a property developer, there are quite a few buildings in London that were built or developed by Michael. He was incredibly supportive of what, at the time, constituted my ‘showbiz’ career, and I was grateful to be able to occasionally work as a demolition expert in properties he was developing.

I would have been hopeless at building or improving buildings, but for some reason I was a dab hand at ripping the interior of a building to pieces and piling it into a skip on the street. Michael passed away very suddenly in his early fifties, leaving a wife and two wonderful young children. I was in Australia when I heard the heartbreaking news, I’d seen him just before I left the UK and we had promised to meet up when I got back. I miss him, he would never have sat peacefully with me in my garden, he’d think it a total waste of time, but he would have made me laugh as he told me I was a dull old fart.

Chris, one of my closest allies and long time work partner. Chris was very gay, and I say that because that’s how he described himself. “Even at 11 years old, I knew I wasn’t just gay, I was very gay darling.”

He was also without question the most empathetic, non judgemental and creative man I have ever met, but a man who lived with a real curse.

Chris was an alcoholic, not a heavy drinker or a drunk, a proper, full blown self destructive alcoholic. I was woefully useless at trying to help him, eventually, after 5 years working together in various guises we parted company and I never saw Chris again. He died in his sleep, again, in his early 50’s and it was only later at his memorial I learned what he had done since we stopped working together.

He’d completely sobered up and spent the last five years of his life working with the amazing HIV and sexual health charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust. I discovered that he had received the letters I’d written to him, mainly asking how he was and telling him of the birth of my two children. It was explained to me that he had completely cut off everyone who knew him when he was drinking, he had to put that period of his life firmly in his past for his own safety.

More recently, Addison, a man I had worked with on and off for 40 years died in his early 50’s. Clearly there’s a pattern here, people who have maybe indulged consistently for 25 to 30 years have a limited shelf life.

However, once again Addison had seemingly stopped all substance usage for the few years before he passed away, everything except tea.

I couldn’t really describe Addison as a close friend, just someone I knew quite well for a long time, someone who was immensely entertaining. I spent a lot of time at many Edinburgh fringe festivals in his company and that was always a wild and crazy time. He was a walking anecdote generator, if you spent time with Addison, no matter what, you’d have stories to tell afterwards.

In the last 3 years of his life I would occasionally have afternoon tea with him because I was one of the few people he knew who didn’t drink. He would gossip about various show business scandals as he drank cup after cup. He absolutely loved the people he worked with and was incredibly devoted and loyal to them, I was merely on the fringe of all this. Apart from the occasional bit of scandalous gossip, he made me laugh so much my stomach muscles ached for days after.

I miss all these people but one thing I have learned, as you get older, you kind of become used to hearing news of a friend, family member or work colleague who has shuffled off. As the years pass these become too numerous to recall, one of the reasons I’ve been toying with writing this and putting it on Substack.

It may be a mistake and I’ll remove it and many more, I don’t want to be morbid but I wanted to record them somewhere outside my own memory.

If you have been, thank you for reading.