Everyone gets a fond farewell – One For The Road

I’ve been keeping a keen eye out for a while now, searching forensically for the perfect subject for the first of what will, hopefully, become a weekly column.

Seems like a simple enough job, right?

Surely, if I’ve any ambition of churning out a column every week, indefinitely, perhaps until my mortal conclusion, I’d better not be getting it tight finding something to write about on week one.

Well, it hasn’t been handy.

It is not that my imagination is a baron wasteland, au contraire; there are blossoms blooming under every tree, rivers running wild and free, and dock leaves so luscious you wouldn’t disturb one to soothe a nettle sting.

But, in spite of the abounding beauty, everytime I tried to write, the phrase ‘Start as you mean to go on’ echoed in my head like a prophetic warning, full of unbearable, paralysing importance. I thought I was beat.

That was until a man I knew (a bit) died, and, in true messianic style, with his death, came my salvation.

His mildly regrettable demise triggered two revelations that filled me with unshakable hope.

The first was practical. I had found the subject for my first column.

Result.

The second was philosophical. It didn’t matter what I wrote, because nothing you do in life really matters in the end… WAIT, PLEASE!!

Before you (understandably) jump the gun and presume that I am about to embark on a nihilistic rant lamenting the meaninglessness of life and the absurdity of the universe, I’m not.

What I am referring to is our tendency to extend radical levels of kindness to the ‘sweet, dearly departed’.

For example, the man whose death sparked this idea was far from decent in life, but in death he was all but beatified: Why are we so, almost unconditionally, generous to those whose race has been run?

It’s so unlike us.

Because, let’s face it, the planet is plentifully populated with tubes.

There is a character out there to fit every conceivable obscenity you can come up with.

In fact, you seldom leave the house without having to swerve more than one, and only a liar would deny it.

Surely a tube is a tube no matter what side of the soil they reside, right?

Well, whether you like it or not, that’s not how it works: Death is the purifier of personality, the redeemer of reputation, and there appears to be no person too repugnant to withstand the cleansing quality of the requiem bell.

And everybody plays their part in this posthumous personality transplant, whereby family and ‘friends’ slyly try to remove the person who actually was, and quickly smuggle in the person they wish had been.

And all the way from the wake to the altar, mourners and priests, holymen and heathens, perform linguistic contortions in an attempt to transfigure the bucko in the box.

Grumpy aul’ dolls become ‘stoic women who held their tongue’. Bad tempered oafs are transformed into ‘men of firey spirit’.

Round dodging dirtbags are elevated to ‘quare shrewd boys’ who had ‘nothing to learn’. And I’ve even heard an absentee drunken father jauntily declared by his own neglected child as a ‘rambling man’ who ‘just couldn’t sit still’.

Yes, the rough, ugly truth of life is buried beneath the muck and the favourable light of death is shone upon their memory; the final filter, so to speak.

Until a lock of days ago, I’d have said this was a terrible thing. “Let he who is a tube in life, remain a tube in death” would have been my line, “For that is the only justice from which death offers no escape.”

However, I’ve changed my tune, because poor is the columnist who cannot write, and miserable is he who is completely fleeced.

So, as I stared at that blank page, crippled with self-doubt, considering what to write and whether I agreed that death should be the ultimate spin-doctor, the words of Flann O’Brien came to me: ‘Turn everything you hear to your own advantage’.

Say no more Flann, say no more.