Well, yesterday turned out to be one of the most interesting of days because I had been invited down to Reading by one of my close Oxfordshire friends and we had arranged that I should go by train and he would pick me up at Reading railway station. I had decided to go via Warwick Parkway because having trekked along the M42 instead of heading north to Birmingham International one goes south for approximately the same distance. There was one change at Banbury but this is absolutely non-problematic because I alighted from one train and its successor was due along in 15 minutes on the same platform. So my train arrived in Reading and I was on time and met my friend who was waiting for me just beyond the ticket barriers. My friend treat me to a meal in a Toby Carvery which I must say was a pretty good meal – over lunch, I gave my friend a detailed account of Meg’s passing and he mentioned some books he had read that dwelled on this very subject. Then I accompanied my friend on a couple of errands and we ended up in a bijou little coffee shop with an excellent hot cappuccino which I really enjoyed. So my friend was very kindly and supportive and has witnessed Meg’s decline over the months and years and was relieved that Meg’s passing had been so peaceful. So we will be in constant touch with other, as good friends are, in the weeks and months ahead and there are various things which, at the appropriate time, I need to ask his advice upon which is how to dispose of a collection of about 1,000 academic books. One the way out and also on the way back, my attention was divided between reading the Swedish book ‘The Gentle Art of Death Cleaning’ and the Soduku in The Times. The Swedish book is a very gentle read and I am barely half way through it but I not learned anything earth-shattering by reading it. I chose the ‘Fiendish’ version of Soduku and although I have not completed a Soduku puzzle for a couple of years, I was delighted to get the fiendish one solved and managed to come to a final solution when only about a minute away from my final train destination. Getting home was a bit nightmarish at first until (eventually), I got the SatNav to point the car in the right direction and the rest of the journey home was unproblematic.

A couple of nights go, I was rummaging through some old shoe boxes where we store some yet-to-be worn shoes, wondering whether in the past, I had bought a pair of good slippers which I had not yet brought into use. Our chiropodist who called around the other day informed me that I was losing subcutaneous fat from the soles of my feel (part of the ageing process?) so I thought I had better ensure I was better equipped in the footwear department. I did not find any slippers that I may have had in stock but nestling among the shoe boxes were some shoe inserts, one with a gel cushioning and other just being a pure leather ‘Clarks’ insert. When I come to think of it, Meg always used to tell me that the shoes she had tended to wear out from the insides first. Now these two inserts fitted my newly purchased German ‘house shoes’ absolutely perfectly so they must have been exactly the right size in the first place. So now the shoes I am wearing around the house in place of slippers have that extra degree of cushioning which I am really appreciating. I tell myself that if I need extra cushioning when I put on my outdoor shoes, by the same token I probably need some extra cushioning for what I wear inside the house so I have made an absolutely fortuitous discovery of something I have probably had inside the house for a decade and not brought into use before until now.

Last night, after I had returned from my train trip and wonderful day out, I had a little doze followed by the obligatory mug of tea and then decided to have a video chat with my niece in Yorkshire. She, as a teacher, was sitting in front of a huge pile of children’s work books which she had to assess in order to make end-of-year reports and I suspect that she welcomed a break from this fairly thankless task. I remember all too well how my heart used to sink when faced with about 50 student essays, each of which took a minimum of 20-30 minutes and which had to be marked and then returned within about a fortnight. This inevitably meant some late nights spent in marking which I grew to dread as the years passed by. We exchanged news about my preparations for Meg’s funeral which are now largely complete and then about post funeral plans which is to spend a little time in Yorkshire seeing my family for the first time in years. Then when I have recovered from this, I intend to visit Spain perhaps on my own and perhaps with a friend, but we shall see. It is now three weeks ago since Meg died and family and friends have rallied round magnificently bu I suspect that the real psychological ‘low’ may come after all of the activities of the funeral have died down and I am left on my own (and hence my holiday plans). I have to say that I think I am coping pretty well to my ‘post-Meg’ life as we had known each other for 59½ years and practically all of my post adolescent life as we met when Meg was 19 and I was 20. Incidentally, I came across a statistic recently that only 8% of dementia patients die at home, the most typical place being a residential home, a hospital or a hospice. So my experience with Meg dying peacefully at home is only an occurrence of about 1 in 12 which I actually find a great source of comfort as ‘only the best for Meg’ I must say that the prospect of Meg spending her final days anywhere else than at home surrounded by family, friends and a familiar environment was anathema to me so I am more than happy with the way that she actually spent her final time on this Earth.

The day before yesterday, just after lunch, my son called around and he is much more familiar than am I with a piece of photo manipulation software which goes by the unfortunate name of ‘SmugMug’ but which is actually excellent and we both have a subscription to it. My son is much more familiar with it but he achieved a degree of presentation with it which is much more professional than my efforts in HTML and which can be easily augmented and reorganised as new photos come to light, which they are doing. Yesterday evening, I continued my trawl through the folders to see if any more relevant photos of Meg came to light. It was the day wen our domestic help calls around and she thought, with a lot of justification, that we should to de-clutter my principal bedroom which of course has not been slept in for practically a year when Meg moved into a hospital bed downstairs and I slept on a camp bed besides her. I must say our domestic help worked like a demon and I worked alongside her. Principally, we managed to get rid of a pile of tights, stocking and socks in great variety and this released some chest-of-drawers in which clothes could be housed. Meg had quite a lot of jewellery and general bric-a-brac which required some careful sorting. Between us, we managed to process one half of the room and the other half will follow next week. Then I had to make a dash to see the undertakers or a chat about the next step forwards.

The visit to the undertakers turned out to be remarkably productive. I had taken the precaution of buying a pack of 5 small capacity USB memory sticks and on one of these was a photo of Meg in our lounge with one of my nieces and her children. It was fortunate to have a clear picture of Meg without an arm around her or a glass of wine in her and and I believed this photo would crop exceptionally well to provide a good photo to mount on the coffin (which I believe is the custom) and also provide the definitive photo for the front cover of the order of service. Then I received a phone call from the undertakers and the very nice lady with whom we are dealing could just fit me in for a quick consultation at 1.00pm. This turned out to be an incredibly useful and productive meeting. I gave her the Order of Service which our Eucharistic Minister had already prepared for us and she was happy with this and was going to send it on to the relevant artwork department. I explained to her how my son and I had been going through collections of old photographs but we had not made a final selection. However, there was one view of Meg which showed her at her best, as it were, but this photo would require some cropping. I explained that our domestic help who had been a professional photographer and still had a lifelong friend who worked in our local ‘Photoshop’ shop on the High Street would do a wonderful job in cropping it and then inserting the photo into a frame to sit atop the coffin during the service. But the lady at the undertakers explained that they could all of that and as I had taken a USB memory stick with that one photo on it, she forwarded it on to the relevant department. The other three or four photos (one for the back, perhaps a couple for the inside) will follow as soon as my son and I have made the relevant selection which we will do later on tomorrow. I then turned my attention to the music tracks which we required and I explained how I had acquired the various .mp3s that were required and I would let the undertakers have them. But it was explained to me that they were already plugged into a system (called ‘Obit’ I think) which accessed a library of thousands of pieces of music. We located the two pieces of music we required for the crematorium committal part of the service (which will be quite attenuated) and the one piece required for the church. So these have already been chosen and plugged into the system ready for us and will be accessible once we get to the crematorium. We have chosen a sad piece of Mozart when entering and a joyous piece when leaving which I think Meg would have really enjoyed. The one piece I was unsure about was the sound system at the church to play the Handel we have chosen upon leaving the church which I have to say is a real ‘weepy’ but I will not divulge just yet. This was no problem for the undertakers because they bring along their own equipment with powerful speakers to fill a church and that takes care of that. I showed the assistant the rolling displays of the photographs of Meg’s life which I and my son had prepared and this was to be played during the ‘tea-fest’ in the afternoon. One very old photograph has come to light of Meg pushing our son around in a little buggy when he was aged between 1-2 years old and we lived in Manchester and this will be included. By an accident of organisation, this photo appeared before the wedding photos in our display but we had a little giggle about this and located it in a correct time sequence immediately after the wedding photos. The final thing that I did was to take along some religious mementos to place inside the coffin. One of these was a little plaster statue of ‘Our Lady of Lourdes’ which Meg had always kept besides her bedside for decades and alongside these we had a little folding tableau devoted to the recent Pope Francis as well as a metallic souvenir of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela which we know so well, having attended multiple pilgrims’ masses there. So these three devotional objects are to be placed within the coffin and I shall not miss them but I am sure that Meg would have appreciated the gesture highly. Then I returned home and spent an hour or so in the afternoon taking some photos in which Meg’s head and shoulders could be usefully ‘cropped’ and I now have a selection of about nine of these, one with our close friend Jo who is no longer with us and one with two of her cousins. The difficulty with cropping is that we typically have arms around each other and one has to be careful when selecting what to crop not to have a disembodied hand resting on a shoulder.

The evening before yesterday brought another pleasant surprise in the form of an email which came to me out of the blue. When Meg and I lived down in Hampshire, we lived in a little town called Hedge End and we had bought a house in a Close where there were several young children. Now about three or four doors down, lived a doctor and his wife who was a midwife and whose motto on her car was ‘We help people out’ and they had two children aged 7 and 4 when we first moved there in 1998. The two children came along and introduced themselves and from that point on, the closest possible bond was forged between Meg and I and the two children. The point was that we were the age that their grandparents would have been but their own grandparents lived a long away down in Devon but we were only three or four doors away. So we saw the children nearly every day or nearly every other day and Meg was always there (and I was often there) when they called around. Now the daughter learned from our brother who wrote to us yesterday about Meg’s passing and wrote the most moving and touching message it was possible to receive. In her email, the daughter had written and I quote ‘Any child who is lucky to have a bond like I had with the two of you, is a very lucky child indeed. I hope that knowing how much of an impact Meg had on people’s lives brings you some form of comfort in this time’. Now the daughter will be in her 30’s and works in London (I think) but is going to move heaven and earth to get to the funeral if she possibly can and she can always stay here with me for the night if that should prove necessary. I do hope that we can see her again soon because these two children were actually the nearest thing to grandchildren of our own that it was possible to have and we had so much mutual love for each other. We still have a photograph of the two of them displayed in our lounge but of course it was taken in their pre-adolescent days and now they are very much grown up. I can remember very vividly our very first encounter with the children because the older brother had brought his younger sister along with him when he came to introduce himself. He told us his name and announced that ‘This is my younger sister, ——‘ The little girl stamped her foot and exclaimed ‘I am not his little sister. I was last year when I was three but now I am four!’ I have replied to her email to me, expressing the hope she can attend the funeral but if she can’t make it she could always perhaps pop along and spent a weekend here when we can exchange pleasant memories. I have asked her permission if, like her brother’s email, I can quote much of it in a Tributes section of the website I am dedicating to Meg. Whilst on the subject of writing a website, I have discovered during the night how I only to have add a two word instruction and a numeric parameter to the CSS in my HTML code, in which the page is written, to turn my navigation buttons into much more aesthetically pleasing buttons with rounded edges which improves their appearance no end. Although I have several books on HTML and CSS, I find I can get the answer more quickly by consulting the web rather than looking for it in a book.

As it turned out, yesterday was a very different type of day. My normal Pilates class was cancelled because the tutor is taking a half-term break and so I knew that I had a lot of the morning free. So I devoted to a lot of time hunting through my hard disk folders to locate photos of Meg which we can use in an ‘Celebration of Life’ presentation. This was quite a challenging and time consuming task if only because I have my photos split over a selection of folders which are named according to the holiday location or the year or the event such as anniversary. Even when I located a photo it was not always suitable if it was taken in a dark restaurant or with a crowd of people where Meg appeared marginal. As it was, the photos that I did find and select always seemed to be with me (as I used to get someone else to take the photo) and generally displayed Meg with a glass of wine in her hand or nearby, so that it appears that we led the most dissolute of lives. Most of the photos I have located are what might be termed ‘holiday snaps’ and I did tend to snap locations rather than people but I did end up with nearly fifty. I chose those photos that showed us at either family events or with our close friends which is fitting, I feel, for a display of this type. Locating the photos is I think one task but getting them into a ‘rolling display’ is another thing. I do have a large A4 book in which I write down computing tips and techniques and was soon able to discover what I had done nearly eight years ago when I had unearthed some software which gave a rolling display of our original wedding photos back in 1967 and which I utilised on the occasion of our 50th anniversary which was nearly eight years ago now. But I did manage to adapt this software as ‘all’ I had to do was to replace the approximately one dozen photos of our wedding with nearly four times that number now. This task absorbed me all of the morning and I worked on it practically non-stop apart from a brief break to go and collect my newspaper. The only way to make sure that everything worked was to play it through which at 5 seconds per photo took four minutes for a complete tun through. Incidentally, I have a huge ‘mp3’ file of all of the wedding music we had played in 1967 and I have this playing in the background. The first track is the well known organ piece by J. S. Bach ‘Wachet Auf’ or ‘Sleepers Awake’ which is highly appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, we chose it as the track to which Meg walked down the aisle (or should it be the knave?) in 1967 and which our Eucharistic minister (and organist) is actually going to play for us when we start off proceedings on June 11th. It is one of our favourite pieces of music and many people will know it as the ‘Lloyds Bank’ music when they used it for the advert featuring a black horse several years ago. The music is not synchronised to the photos but when one accesses the website containing the rolling display and the music, you get the music playing in one tab and start off the display with another tab. Well, all I can say is that it works!

Just after lunch, my son called around and he is much more familiar than am I with a piece of photo manipulation software which goes by the unfortunate name of ‘SmugMug’ but which is actually excellent and we both have a subscription to it. My son is much more familiar with it but he achieved a degree of presentation with it which is much more professional than my efforts in HTML and which can be easily augmented and reorganised as new photos come to light, which they are doing.

Yesterday the day dawned with a brilliant blue sky and sunshine which is unusual because it was a Bank Holiday and one expects the weather to be bad for UK Bank Holidays. The night before, I had gone through many of the contacts in my mobile phone and posted them a simple message containing the link to the website containing the details of Meg’s funeral arrangements. I am really pleased that I took the effort of posting this one page website because in all of the messages, it only takes one click and the all of the details of the church and the post-funeral afternoon tea in the Holiday Inn are revealed and what could be simpler? I must confess that my heart sinks somewhat when I know that a Bank Holiday is in the offing because many of one’s normal routines are disrupted. But the week ahead is going to seem relatively empty as most of the administrative tasks associated with a death have already been undertaken. I am trying to make a best guesstimate of how many will turn up at the church and later the hotel so that we know how many to cater for but I am working on a figure of about 50 at the moment. I need to assemble some photographs and also make sure that I have the relevant music tracks stored on USB memory sticks but this is probably going to be an ‘evening’ type job as I will ensure that I get out and have plenty of fresh air whilst we have a bit of summer to enjoy. A little thing that happened which actually gives me quite a lot of comfort is that when our friends called round who were fellow parishioners and had actually just lost the father to dementia, the daughter of the family who had spent a lot of her life in Mexico was shown the lounge where Meg had slept in the last year of her life. This room is now completely restored back to it status as a lounge but without some clutter that had built up during the years and the daughter remarked ‘What a wonderful peaceful atmosphere there is in this room!’ She reckoned that since her Mexico days she was incredibly sensitive (as are the Mexicans) to the emotional atmosphere within a house and home and whilst there may be nothing in this, there are some people (including many of the young carers for Meg) who would say that they were very much aware of, and sensitive to, the ‘aura’ within a house or room. I did spent a certain amount of time going through some of the email contacts that were not in my mobile phone contacts giving them details of Meg’s funeral just in case, despite the large travel distances involved, anyone else would want to come to the funeral. It is horrible to know about these things after the event which has happened to me once or twice in life.

Yesterday morning, I started to saunter down the hill to collect my daily newspaper but not going at a great pace. I hand delivered eight notifications of Meg’s funeral (five to near neighbours and a further three to more distant ones). I had wondered whether to take any spare copies of me and, of course Sod’s Law came into play because on the way down the hill I bumped into one of my Pilates class mates walking her dogs and another wheelchair-bound resident of the street who always seems to keep cheerful. A soon as I arrived in Waitrose, I treated myself to a coffee and the very kindly Asian partner who looks after me liberated a packet of 4 yum-yums for me (Meg’s favourite confectionary when the cafe was in operation) for me to drink with my coffee. During the course of the day, I received two further messages each heart warning in the extreme. One was from a couple of our De Montfort University colleagues, now married to each other and living in London. They replied to an email of mine saying that having known Meg for 45 and 50 years respectively of course they would attend the funeral. The female colleague was very kindly to Meg when she was suffering so much with a bad back and visited her at our home on several occasions – and we played a massive practical joke on the other that we shall no doubt remind him about when we meet. The other email was from a near neighbour of ours in Hampshire and was only a young lad then but now is ‘grown up’ and studying at Sandhurst. His email detailing the influence that Meg was so revealing that I have asked his permission (very readily given) to be published on a tribute page which I am compiling for Meg from various people. I have asked the two Spanish ex-Erasmus students to do the same as well as the four young carers who had such a deep bond with Meg so when all of the tributes get put together they will be an inspiring read, I am sure.

When I consulted the TV schedules for the evening, there is going to be a biography and an assessment of Jane Austen starting at 9.0pm followed at 10.00 by one of the classic versions of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I think that I may go to bed at 9.00 with a thick blanket around me and watch the highly rated biography in bed and so it will matter if I fall asleep. Meanwhile the film of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ can wait for a catch-up on the BBC iPlayer tomorrow afternoon. I find that I have been so busy in the last week that my TV viewing has been somewhat attenuated. I must admit that I have not had much time for any reading over the last year and a half because a lot of my time has, of necessity, been devoted to Meg and I am extremely pleased to have navigated this part of my life successfully. But I do need to continue with my decluttering activities and one job to be done is to take a pile of books from the shelf of a coffee table and put them in a place where they ought to belong. The first book is a ‘Guardian Stylebook’ which is a guide for writers and this is probably worth a detailed browse. The second book that fell into my hand, as it were, was called ‘The Diet Whisperer’ and seems to be a class apart from the ordinary diet style book. The authors are a couple of doctors for a start and the front cover of the book offers the possibility to ‘supercharge your metabolism, reverse diabetes and harmonise your brain clock’ so it is probably worth a serious and detailed study, particularly as it seems at first glance to be so scientifically grounded.

Just like the day before, yesterday was the second day of what might be termed a ‘normal’ weekend, as I get used to new patterns and rhythms of life. I spent a certain amount of time when I got up just after 6.00am to see if I could stitch in the funeral directions into my blogs so that family and friends who will have to travel a distance to attend Meg’s funeral will have clear instructions to feed into their SatNavs such that they can find St. Peter’s Church, Bromsgrove initially and the Holiday Inn for the post-funeral tea fest. This took a little longer than I thought but I then showered and breakfasted and was looking forward to the rest of the day. My breakfast routine has changed slightly as Meg and I used to have some porridge to start off the day and I followed this up with a slice of toast with Bovril on it. But in a desire to cut down on both carbs and salt, I now prepare myself a couple of rice cakes upon the first of which I spread a little olive oil rather than butter and some Bovril whilst on the other I am putting a smear of an almond butter (advertised as ‘no palm oil’) which I espied in Aldi the other day. I also buy a pack of four little avocados of the ‘Ripen at home’ variety and am then having one of these each morning with a little Thousand Island dressing and the contents scraped straight out of the skin with a spoon. No sooner had I finished breakfast when my very good University of Birmingham friend phoned and he invited me to go and meet him on the park bench that he, I and Meg used to occupy in our COVID and immediately post COVID days. This invitation I readily accepted and when we met up, we were trying to think how long ago it was that we used to sit on this bench together and it must have been the better part of eighteen months ago. In the park, I met four acquaintances well known to me because they generally have a dog which they are exercising and to each of them, as I was evidently without Meg, I imparted the sad news. Two of them that I know better and are also ‘friends of friends’ I invited along to the funeral as I am sure that we will have spaces to spare and having recently posted the website with details of the funeral arrangements, I was able to give them the URL so that they would have a reminder of the due days and the venues involved. One of the acquaintances who has a magnificent labradoodle dog had his wife die last February of cancer but in his case, he was mourning the demise of wife/partner No. 2 or No. 3 I cannot remember which. After a very pleasant stay plus coffee from our own flasks in the park, it was threatening to rain so my fried very kindly gave me a lift home which I really appreciated but not before we had bumped into my Irish friends which is always a pleasant surprise. As soon as I had bid adieu to my friend, I jumped into our own car and went down the hill to pick up a copy of the Sunday newspaper and then had to think about getting some lunch. I had already put some ham in the slow cooker first thing this morning, but to complement this I used some of these ‘steam’ bags of vegetables and then made myself a small portion of mashed potato from some ‘Smash’ that I had in stock. I must say that it was a a bit of an effort to prepare myself a ‘proper’ meal rather than just having a snack but I am pretty determined that I should continue to prepare myself one good meal a day so that I do not slide down the slippery slope of not looking myself and my diet responsibly. Naturally, this was eaten in front of the TV but, of course, there was no Meg with whom to share my meal.

After lunch, I decided to text one of the young male Asian carers for whom Meg and I had a particularly soft spot and in the text gave a link to the recently posted website with the funeral details. He had immediately sent this around the entire group of cares in the company (using their sort of ‘Group chat’ facility) and this was marvellous because with one click the carers, have all of the details of dates, times and venues. He told me that he and one of the female carers in his little circle of young carers were talking the other day about coming to visit me but he himself had just experienced his first car crash and his car was off the road until it was repaired. Having seen carers four times a day for a year, their absence is starting to be felt, although I have been very busy in the last week. Then I made a video call to my sister and we shared the latest news. I think she was a little ‘down’ for quite understandable reasons as the house in which she had lived for the last fifty years had just been sold and this must seem like the last of one’s bridges having been burned. After this, there was a little gardening job to be undertaken although it turned out to be not so little. Before I can mow the back lawn, some large trailing brambles had fallen across it. So I went down the garden, snipped off each of these and then spent some time cutting the brambles into shorter little lengths so that they could be easily accommodated in our garden waste wheelie bin. This little job had to be done as I could now proceed with the weekly cutting of the back lawn (a job for tomorrow) until these brambles had been cleared out of the way. I have a little treat lined up for myself as there is a David Attenborough CGI film on ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ which although a repeat, I feel I will really be able to enjoy.

It is now two weeks since Meg died and yesterday was to be something approaching a ‘normal’ Saturday as last weekend I was sitting in beautiful sunshine in a friend’s house in Hampshire helping to celebrate his 80th birthday and chatting with two of my closest friends from my University of Winchester days. As I walked down the hill towards the centre of town, I cannot fail to notice that I am not walking as well as I used to and my back and hips are feeling the strain. What I think has happened over the past months and probably a year or so is that pushing Meg in a wheelchair – first a simple transit model and then a heavier and more sophisticated model – has meant that I have ‘de facto’ had the assistance of the equivalent of a giant wheeling frame. Strange as it may sound, pushing Meg in her wheelchairs has proved easier than just walking on my own. I think that I may have to severely limit the walking that I do until I built up my strength again as today I did allow myself the luxury of a brief saunter along the High street and the journey back seemed quite a struggle for me and I had to stop a few times to have a rest. I suspect that when pushing Meg a bit of adrenaline rush assisted me but now I am having to do things a lot more carefully. Although I am not a natural ‘pill popper’ I may have to resort to some Ibuprofen first thing every morning until my hips and back are in a better place. My son had arranged to be in the house before he journeys down to Watford to see his in-laws but we discussed the type of footwear that I now probably need to give me some extra cushioning when I walk any distance. I did intend to go to Droitwich to visit a shoe shop I know where the manager really looks after his customers but I have bitten the bullet as they say and ordered two types of footwear, one a trainer recommended by my chiropodist the other day and the other recommended by my son today – they will both take the best part of a week to actually arrive. I cooked myself some lunch finishing off some meat-in-gravy left over from a day or o ago but filling enough, with baked potato and some fine beans.

In the afternoon, I started to watch a film of the opera ‘La Traviata’ but given that the whole opera is based around a heroine who is dying (of consumption) from the very opening of the opera, then this was a decidedly bad choice of viewing. Fortunately, I was saved from myself by the fact that YouTube encounters buffering problems where the whole transmission/down load ‘freezes’ but on this occasion I was not too unhappy. It had been intention to do a mowing of the back lawn but the weather turned a bit rainy and I thought that this could be left for another day. I received a text from my Italian friend from down the road but when I tried to contact her, her landline was engaged and her mobile diverted to a callbox so I felt a little thwarted by this. Yesterday evening, I decided to engage in ‘normal’ living by resuming my attendance at the Saturday evening Mass in my local church. I had not attended during the latter stages of Meg’s illness when she could not be left and I think it is probably fifteen months since I last attended. I was not particularly looking forward to this event but I was greeted very warmly and affectionately by several of the congregation, some of whom had already heard about Meg’s passing. The congregation has more than its fair sprinkling of Irish Catholics, including one sprightly gentleman who was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and was only given three months to live but is still with us at least ten months after this prognosis and was still well enough to read some of the lessons. Last December, he took a photo of us in the Waitrose cafe and forwarded it onto me at the time but said that he would do so again. What a remarkable and inspirational man he has proved to be, ready at any time to meet his Maker but not yet called to join him. So I received quite a degree of emotional warmth and support from the congregation, some of whom I am sure will probably attend the funeral (and I hope the funeral tea) to give Meg a good send-off. The phrase which crosses their lips most frequently about Meg is that she was ‘such a lovely lady’ with which sentiment I naturally agree. After I had returned home and had some soup, I decided to phone my niece and I was glad that I did. She informed me that many of my Yorkshire family were arranging their lives so that they could make the long journey and attend the funeral and anticipating that some might have long journeys, this is why the funeral was timed for 12.00pm midday. Upon hearing this news, I busied myself for the rest of the evening preparing a one page website with directions for the funeral including a link to the church (so that they could recognise it) and a link to the Holiday Inn (which also contains a map). I have put the website URL in various places but I repeat it here so that it can be easily found:

https://meg-funeral.kesland.info

There is actually a way that I can that ‘kesland.info’ is actually me and nobody else but I won’t go in to the explanation at this particular point except to say that my birthday date is encoded into it. Some readers of this blog may be able to work it out for themselves. I have started to think about the numbers of people who are likely to attend the funeral and of course estimating this takes some guess work. But the Holiday Inn have been good about this and I know that if the numbers fall short I will still be charged for the contracted number but if I were to exceed this by even quite a significant amount, they would ignore this. I suppose this must be a common problem that they must meet all the time in arranging funeral teas.

Wednesday, 11th June, 2025

Here is a link to the details of Meg’s Funeral Venues:


Venues

The evening before yesterday, I got into contact with my University of Winchester friend whose wife is also very ill so that we could have a discussion of over Meg’s final days and months. We are both of the same mind that Meg had a very peaceful and probably tranquil end to her life being at home and surrounded by family and friends. We both had to speculate how different things might have been were she to have survived another year and her final destination would be a hospital ward or a residential home where, with the best will in the world, she would not have experienced the type of environment that we managed to sustain for her here at home. So all in all, I am very happy that Meg’s final months, weeks and days passed the way that they did and can only feel a quiet satisfaction, and considerable relief, that I managed to play my part in making Meg comfortable and peaceful, in both body and mind, as I actually achieved. Yesterday morning, I tweaked Meg’s eulogy which is now the sole item (so far) in a little website I have created and I am sure the tweaking will continue until the last moment. I have practiced reading out the piece I have written so that I can get the pauses and the intonations in the right pace – and particular manage to cope with a particularly powerful and emotional last sentence of farewell. I am finding that if I rehearse this often enough, I can do it a tad better each time whilst keeping my emotions under control.

Yesterday turned out to be a busy, busy day. I walked down into town and having picked up my newspaper treated myself to the ‘free’ coffee Waitrose makes available to card holders who bring their own mug. Whilst drinking my coffee I was approached by a lady with whom I chatted occasionally when Meg and I went down and sat at the ‘Chatty’ table in the Methodist Centre which is just off the Bromsgrove High Street. In the days when I could get Meg in the car, we used to go to this centre on a Wednesday morning and always found the company welcoming, friendly and ecumenical. But it was too far to push Meg when we had to rely upon a longish walk, pushing Meg in the wheelchair. Seeing I was alone, this acquaintance discerned what had happened and reminded me that was still a very friendly crowd were I to reestablish going to the centre on a regular basis each Wednesday. I may well do this but it is also the day when our domestic help calls around and we have a lot of practical things to discuss with each other and to do. On my way back up the hill, I also knocked on the door of th lady who is a supervisor in our local Asda and with whom I made common cause when we were attempting (unsuccessfully) to fight across local developments that were impinging upon both of our properties. She is in the business of downsizing but indicated a willingness to help with anything that she could in view of Meg’s passing and I may seek her assistance on a catering matter in a few days time.

After I had regaled myself with some coffee, I went across to the Holiday Inn which is only 300m away from the end of our road as I had an appointment with them at 11.30. Actually almost everything of any significance had already been decided but we managed to nail down one or two things. The most important is that they are quite happy for me to bring in my own Cava to provide a toast for Meg as they could only supply Prosecco. I was quite happy to pay what is termed ‘corkage’. Corkage is a fee charged by a restaurant or venue for allowing customers to bring their own alcohol (typically wine, but can include other beverages) to consume on the premises instead of purchasing it from their bar. Now my neighbour who is the supervisor at Asda said that if I could find what I wanted in Asda and bought a fair quantity (some 9-10 bottles) she would pretend it was for herself and have a staff discount applied to it, so I shall almost certainly take her up on her kind offer.

When Meg was alive, we used to visit a special club held in a nearby village where we would meet with fellow dementia sufferers and their carers. There, we met a couple who were fellow parishioners of our church and they had a very interesting daughter who had spent a lot of her life in Mexico married to a Mexican husband. As our son spent a pre-university year in Mexico, then the two families had joint experiences to share. The father of the family had fallen and broken his hip and the upshot after what seemed to be a series of medical misadventures was that he died in circumstances not at all described as peaceful. So over a pre-arranged tea, we shared experiences of the passing of our loved ones and the other family seemed to have had as unhappy a time as it was possible to imagine. I described in detail how Meg had died so peacefully with family and friends and even ex-students around her and then felt a little guilty when I heard the account of the death of the father. But they were quite happy to talk about these experiences. not really having the chance to share these them with anyone before. The surviving wife and daughter are coming to the funeral and the daughter who had an interesting career as a dancer and is currently a teacher gave me some useful advice how to cope with the eulogy. I had heard from another source that the eulogy she gave of her father’s life was inspirational and I will certainly follow some of her advice. After they had left, the front lawn beckoned even though the grass was not looking particularly unkempt. So, I gave it a first cut and then sat on the front garden bench to treat myself to a chocolate ice-cream lolly. This is something I would not normally do as I would popped inside to check on Meg but now things are different. My next-door neighbour, a very jolly and supportive Welsh lady, came and sat on the bench beside me and we swapped stories and jokes. I then carried on and got the second, transverse cut done before going indoors and thinking about tea (more ice-cream!) and watching the cricket on the TV.

Yesterday morning I seemed to be a little ahead of myself so I thought I would at least make a start on preparing the words of eulogy which I am to deliver. at an appropriate point, in Meg’s funeral service. The priest has allocated me a time slot of 3-5 minutes so I intend to use absolutely the whole of the 5 minutes allocated to me. With hardly any searching, I managed to find a program on the web which give a timing for the words that you specify with options for a slow, normal or fast reading speed. Utilising this, I ascertained that 650 words should take exactly 5 minutes so I need to ‘cut my coat according to my cloth’ to use an old fashioned expression. These speeches or a mixture of biography on the one hand and a highlighting of the achievements achieved in the life being celebrated and so I started writing knowing that I should need to be economical and concise in what I was to write.

The day is my normal shopping day and I managed to get off in plenty of time as I do not wait until carers have come and gone. I must say that the experience of today was nowhere as painful as a fortnight ago (I missed out shopping last week) but there were still a few ‘pangs’ as I wandered up and down the middle aisle where I used to buy bits and pieces that I thought might be useful for Meg. My son helped me to unpack the shopping after I got home. He also looked at the first draft of the eulogy and suggested useful refinements and one or two corrections of fact. I dare say that it will be tweaked quite a lot before eventual delivery. I will have a text copy and my son can read it out if I get overwhelmed with emotion. I have also received the excellent news that our ex-Erasmus student who managed to get here on time and have a few last words with Meg is also flying over for the funeral. I have asked her if she can prepare a few words of her recollections and appreciation of Meg which she can share with us at tea time before we all have a sip (gulp?) of Cava, the Spanish champagne. In the late morning, I drove myself down to our local Health Centre where I do my Pilates because I had booked a session for myself with a physiotherapist as I fear that my back has had to bear a lot of the strain of caring for Meg over the past year or so, Actually, her assessment was that my back was in fairly good condition but some regions of it need a bit of working on it to restore mobility. She is going to recommend some sessions fo me which might take some time to arrive but in the meanwhile she has agreed to request the doctor to authorise a back X-ray to ascertain that I have no nasties lurking and to help to direct any treatment options. The doctor has already agreed and I should await an appointment some time. After I got home, I cooked myself some decent lunch and started on my afternoon tasks.

About a week ago, I had ordered a duplicate marriage certificate, as required by the Teachers’ Pension Agency. This arrived this morning so I could complete the form, scan it to have a photocopy of it and then include with the application form a copy of the death certificate and the duplicate marriage certificate. This was then sent off using the ‘Signed For’ service from the Post Office and I set about my second task of the afternoon, which was to dispose of a specialised little plastic container of ‘sharps’ (used syringes deployed by the District Nurses to give sone final injections to Meg) The first two chemists I tried refused to accept the container, one even telling me I should go the hospital to dispose of it but eventually I was steered towards another GP practice (not my own) which shares the same building where after a fairly lengthy wait in the queue as their computer system was down eventually the container was accepted with, I felt, a degree of reluctance. But I was anxious to finally dispose of it as it was the very last item of medical equipment that remained as un unpleasant reminder of the way in which our half of our lounge was converted into a bedroom. But our domestic job has done a magnificent job in re-arranging the pieces furniture to their former locations and the whole room now looks and feels so much more orderly (as some clutter has been removed) and I will continue with my efforts to bring the rest of the room into good order as well. But I did find time to write a special text of thanks to our domestic help ho had done such a good job in restoring our living room to rights it, one half of it having been a downstairs bedroom for the past year. There are times in your life and this is one of them when needs a trusted friend to help you sort things out and, of course, later on we will Meg’s clothes to sort through and eventually to throw it. But I am determined not to push this too far into the future because it is not a job to be delayed for too long so that we can all move on, as they say.

Being life-long cricket fans, Meg and I used to enjoy the highlights of the current Test Match which was often broadcast under the title of ‘Today at the Test’ generally from 7-8 in the evening. Now this time just about coincided with the time that Meg’s care workers arrived to pout her to bed so I have not sat down and watched this for well over a year. Yesterday, though, I watched England play Zimbabwe whose team is not in the top flight of cricketing nations and the Zimbabweans were put to the sword with England finishing the day at 498 for 3 at the end of the first day. The whole transmission was a succession of boundaries as three English batsman scored centuries. Later in the evening I had a good chat with my University of Winchester friend on whom I can always rely to cheer me up if I feeling a little morose. I have actually not watched much news or TV in the last week or so as other things have occupied my attention.

A night or so ago, I received a surprise phone call from our chiropodist who wished to make the following request. A near neighbour was in contact with an old lady whose husband had died and she was in receipt of all kinds of medicines and dressings and did not know how to dispose of them. I gave the chiropodist my telephone number and the lady then contacted me so that I cold tell her about the way in which I disposed of all our excess medical supplies to aid the Ukraine. I passed on the email contact that I had and I trust that my chiropodist’s neighbour will manage to make contact with the Ukrainian lady so that even more unwanted medicines can flow to a place where they are needed and appreciated. I have told quite a few people now how we managed to dispose of these medications and how happy it made me feel (and probably Meg as well if she can observe from a better place). Yesterday morning, my son and I had allocated ourselves the time and space to utilise the government ‘Tell Us Once’ service whereby all government departments with which an individual mainly has had transactions are informed about their death. A special reference number was given to us by the Registrar when Meg’s death was registered and this is the key that starts to unlock the process. In practice my son and I found the site to be well designed and easy to navigate but we did appreciate that ‘two eyes are better than one’ when it comes to supplying critical credentials. Meg did not have a driving licence but the two key numbers were her National Insurance number and her Passport number. The whole process was completed in about 20 minutes and we were pleased that that this went without a hitch. I walked down to town to collect my newspaper and the staff at Waitrose let me have a bottle of cordial for free as well as giving me a lemon drizzle cake for my elevenses and yet another bunch of flowers. The staff at Waitrose have been overwhelmingly kind and sympathetic to me and I am so appreciative of all of them. Last week when our domestic help was here, she and my son did a sterling job in clearing out all of the impedimenta associated with a bedroom downstairs and so the task this week was to give the carpet a through hoovering and to restore the furniture to the position that it used to occupy so that we now have now reclaimed all of our Main lounge. It is true that a coffee table-top of clutter has been left for me to process but this will be a labour of love and I will set to it with a vengeance.

When we held our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations, these were split into three so that my family in Yorkshire could attend one, family and friends in the Midlands attend the second and finally our Spanish friends and some cousins and friends to attend the third held in Spain. I have a videoclip of Meg making an off-the-cuff speech to our family in Yorkshire in September, 2017 and most of the clip is Meg speaking although I did join in with some observations about how proud I was of Meg (as well as some jokes) towards the end. When I was up during the night, I constructed a short and memorable link to the website where this videoclip is located and thus I was able to show it to our domestic help whilst she was having her mid-morning coffee. This, of course, was Meg at her absolute best speaking without notes and without hesitations and with a clear memory before the cruel manifestations of the dementia were to appear a year or so later. I wanted our domestic help to have a wonderful memory of Meg at her most fluent and most typical and we were both so very pleased that we could enjoy this videoclip together. There ere various little games and pastimes I had bought for Meg which I hoped (in vain) that she could enjoy but our domestic help was pleased that she could utilise them on the residential home in which she worked. After our domestic help and son had departed, I did not feel particularly hungry so wondered if I could squeeze in a visit to the Bank in order to close down Meg’s account. This flying visit proved fruitless as I needed to see some personnel who were at lunch and it would, in any case, take some time. So I returned home and awaited the arrival of our hairdresser who, of course, only has me to process. Her own brother had died a few months ago and she is busy disposing of unwanted effects and trying to sell his flat so we empathised with each other that we were both fully cognisant of what we were going through with the processes that take place after a bereavement.

When I eventually got to our bank for the second time that day, the person who saw me could not have been more sympathetic or kindly. For a start she had two close kin who had dementia and her own husband had died, very quickly, of throat cancer. The bank official had managed to locate a really old savings account which was almost 30 years old and which we had totally forgotten about with £28 in it. This was ‘rescued’ and then the other trivial amount of money in Meg’s main account will make its way over eventually into our joint account whilst Meg’s individual account will be closed down. I had a briefcase full of documentation but all that was necessary was a death certificate (which was photocopied and then handed back to me) and my own ID (driving licence, passport) The procedures seemed quite thorough and meticulous with lots of checking along the way and I was in the bank for an 1hr and 20 minutes. But as I walked back to the car, I realised that Meg, in the eyes of the state, does not officially ‘exist’ anymore as this morning’s and this afternoon’s procedures will have closed down all of Meg’s financial dealings with the state (and the bank) On the way home, I spotted my Irish friend doing some gardening so I gave him a quick update on all of our news to date.