Memories...

I’ve got something of a chequered history with death: lying in bed counting out my heart beats and wondering how many more will come my way.  It’s a lifetime obsession - the single source of my insomnia, something I’ve suffered with, on and off, since I was nine years old.  Because of near misses, mainly.  

I am thinking in this way because of the sudden death of DN (a man whose African name was the first I managed to pronounce properly.) I found out he’d died on Facebook.  Please God that my passing is not announced in this way, with ‘friends’ (including me in this case) writing RIP as if the world itself would end without its intervention.  I’m in Cornwall when I discover DN’s death, and then another cliche pops from my (admittedly quite drunk by this stage) mouth, “I’m blessed, I say...” Blessed in what way, I want to ask myself?  But I’m too far gone to manage it. 

In the voracious way of social media death, you read everything.  Or at least I would have if I hadn’t been in Cornwall, a place where smart phones aren’t so clever after all.  What I did read was this ‘DN 1966-2017 (with a broken heart...) - I read this by chance.  By sheer fluke of being somewhere with wifi.  By chance.  Like death.  The post had 170 likes by this stage, so I am late to the post.  Many of my ‘friends’ have got there before me: loving, sad face, like.  It’s true: our grief is heartfelt, sad-faced.  DN was a very, very good man. 

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