Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes

Time seems to have taken on a weirdly different complexion. Less a linear thing, the past behind me, the present now, and the future still out there somewhere, and more of a kind of upward helical spiral with events sitting on top of one another and moments and experiences reprising and returning.

I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. The certainty of impermanence and change has been all around. Relationships that were dead and buried have re-ignited, ideas that had withered are suddenly succulent once more. A failed 10-year project built on so much blood, sweat and tears, many questions, few good answers. A close friend continues to suffer the aftermath of losing his phenomenal, gorgeous wife a year ago, and none of us can relieve the pain. In the last month a best friend has received a bladder cancer diagnosis. Then I got a call just three weeks ago from a very old school friend saying one of our class of ’87 has just suffered a massive brain tumour. And then bam, just 48 hours later a text landed. “He’s passed. I’ll let you know the funeral plans asap.”

Death is everywhere. My Zen teacher also wrote a heartfelt celebration of the passing of one of his close friends this week.

“Helping our Corey cross over was a community event” he said, a beautifully tender way to consider the transition from this life to whatever comes next. “People are weeping, helpful, bright, the whole seems composed, and life is going on, but death always exerts pressure against the complacency of life: Am I free while I’m dying, while those I love are dying, or while it’s raining?”

Wonderfully Zen.

Of course, many followers of the Zen way reject the concept of there being a ‘next’ in the sense of a rebirth. If we are attuned to live only in this present moment and accept the notion of there being no self, separate from everything else, then Dogen Zenji’s description of what happens is fine:

“Firewood, after becoming ash, does not again become firewood. Similarly, human beings, after death, do not live again.”

But who knows? I’ve made a strong commitment to holding uncertainty lightly as I navigate the second half of my own life. And I’m signed up to the imperative of seeing doubt as virtue. Carl Jung knew what was what, and as he said:

“People who merely believe and don’t think, forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping stone to better knowledge.”

We said goodbye to Andy on Tuesday and it was too soon. He was only 55. He shared my late father’s birthday - the 12^th September - he was just 3 days younger than me. It was a poignant send off - somewhere around 22 of his old school mates amongst family and friends. Nine of our old first XV rugby team. Some of us hadn’t seen each other for 37 years - not since we stood in front of the A level results board back in that endless Summer of ’87.

Andy was a hell of a winger - natural athlete - strong, fast, and possessed of a ferocious hand off. He broke all sorts of try scoring records. He was also a consummate thinker. Wickedly smart and natural in any argument - he’d seamlessly swap sides in a debate just to keep everyone’s blood pressure at unnecessarily elevated levels. But he also had a delicate spirit and a deep-rooted vulnerability. He wasn’t confident that he was lovable or loved, and he had a complex relationship with his family. It seemed he struggled with the world a bit more than most. Like many boys who’d had their seven years at our Catholic school, mass every Wednesday, all that jazz, he shook off his faith not long after leaving. But he rediscovered it again late in life and was very close to his God when he died. I’m glad about that. 

In loving memory: Andrew Cole 12th September 1968 - 12th March 2024

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In the pub after the funeral ceremony there was so much laughter, so many re-connections made, so many reminders of how precious it is to be surrounded by people who care. Half the boys are of Irish descent so there was some serious story telling going down. Andy never married and he didn’t have kids, so this really was an old school reunion. It wasn’t long before my brother Aldo came up.

Aldo was six years older than me and in his last year at school as we were in our first year. All the boys knew him. He was distinctive. When Chris Pereira asked after him, I was back in my helical spiral where time hadn’t passed so much as circled away and come back again.

“He died Chris. Summer of 2019. 57.” Chris is consummate in his response. But we’re back at school again, just two beefy but fragile boys, eye to eye, not quite knowing where to go next. I just about manage “Yeah, I know, thanks mate.” And here it all is again. The trauma, the grief. I remember Nick Cave writing about the tidal nature of grief. It is tidal. It washes all over us when it first comes, catching us totally unprepared, flipping us over like a huge breaker, desperate to drown us. In time of course, it recedes, and we’re left with precarious feelings of acceptance, forward movement, and quietness, only for the tide to wash back in again carrying sorrow and anguish and helplessness. And then out it goes again, and we rise above the suffering, temporarily. Eventually the ebb and flow of the pain accumulates into a tideline where all the old memories and emotions cohere and settle.

If we love, we grieve, that’s the deal. And grief scours us clean. Its gift is to starkly illuminate for us all the nonsense we become entangled with. All the bullshit. It spotlights every one of the dreadfully insignificant things that so much of our lives are spent being hung up on. Then they just fall away. But it’s no easy task staying in that illuminated mindset. They will return. One of Aldo’s great passions in life was music, particularly the music of Pink Floyd. There’s a verse from the Final Cut, one of his favourite tracks from one of his favourite albums which perfectly summed up where I was in the immediate aftermath of losing him:

            “Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes

I can barely define the shape of this moment in time

            And far from flying high in clear blue skies

I'm spiralling down to the hole in the ground where I hide”

Aldo was my hero. I didn’t want to have to hide. Not from him, not from the memory of him, not from the world. I loved him from the absolute marrow of my bones. I was lucky - I got the big brother whose immense and beautiful character challenged me to improve my own. The brother whose love and affection and humour so enriched our lives, and whose loyalty, strength and support revealed to me what it is to be a real man. And he showed us all what it is to be truly alive. Vibrantly alive. He transcended so many challenges, physical, mental, emotional, and just flat out decided fuck it, he would be right at the centre of where the action was anyway. He raised everyone he touched just a little bit higher. God I miss him - mischievous, prickly, courageous, resilient old bastard joker that he was.

Grief is so complicated. It brings with it an unbridled basket of emotions. And some of these emotions challenge everything we think we know about ourselves. Grief is like an unforgiving spotlight - it shines the brightest of all lights back on us, like some kind of torturous mirror. But we mustn’t waste it. Because it has within it the seeds of new growth, the makings of a better thing. In the aftermath of the devastation that comes with losing somebody precious, we reset. The other stuff, the tinder dry under-storey, gets burned off right away. And we are left with this strange newness. While it’s unfamiliar and unbearably uncomfortable at first, in time it can become the stimulus for incredible creativity. The very thing we fear will destroy us, becomes the very thing that gives us a newfound creative energy. Like the regenerating forest floor which has survived the fire, the rebound energy is all invested into recovery. New shoots. All the colours a little more saturated, all the tastes a little saltier but at the same time a little sweeter.

If This Is A Man, the Italian chemist and partisan, Primo Levi’s grindingly hard but inspiring memoir of surviving life in Auschwitz, contains the following passage:

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealisable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realisation of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite ……… The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.”

His words are comforting. Wisdom is revealed slowly over time. We must be persistent in the face of pain and uncertainty. I work with old buildings. They are a bit like old people - if they are treated with respect and care they tend to willingly give up their secrets. Longevity after all, is evidence of success. Like the best of them we must wear our patina and our craftsman’s marks like they unselfconsciously wear theirs. I’ve always liked Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame observation:

“Time added to the cathedral more than it took away. Time spread over her face that dark grey patina which gives to very old monuments their season of beauty.”

Time again. Spiralling away both up and down my helical staircase. All those friends standing on numerous treads, on those helical stairs, in that pub, wearing their visible signs of lives well lived, and not so well lived. Each one lovely, each one a stark reminder of the power of compassion and love. Maybe the ultimate measure of friendship is whether it needs constant attention to stay alive. I wonder whether the very best friendships are like the hardiest seeds - they stay dormant for decades and then when conditions are right, they regenerate. I think so. In the blossoming we see that the real nourishment of friendship is not in either party becoming something more, something improved, but simply in the fact of both friends having borne witness together. In the sharing of these unique experiences we get, as the poet David Whyte, delightfully describes it: 

“the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

In loving memory: Aldo Francesco Navato 8th July 1962 - 6th August 2019

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So, here’s to you Andy, and here’s to you dearest Aldo. Thank you for enlightening my journey, a journey that would have been more fun had it lasted longer. But short as it was, it was filled with sweet fruit and much joy.