Very recently, a friend of mine passed away. I’m stumbling around, peering into the big empty hole he has left in my life.
I agree, but it is individual choice. This Bill is divisive — as subjects such as religion and politics are.
I’ve only known Bernard for four or so months. I was introduced to him by a friend of a friend. One of those random things that drop out of the sky when you least expect it. One day, you’re eating an ice cream and next minute, your going for an interview with a stranger to see if he thinks you’re a ‘fit’ for him and his story. He was looking for someone to write his biography, urged on by friends, and not found anyone suitable.
Bernard and I clicked the moment we met. And from that afternoon, we were in each others lives intensively. I walked in to his apartment to find a tall, lean man seated at a table with an oxygen machine beside him and plastic cords attached into his nostrils. He had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was in the palliative stage. His eyes were large, dull, sad.
We began work in earnest because, in his words: “I don’t have much time, I can feel myself getting worse.”
I threw myself into the book. Living and breathing it. Most everything else in my life went by the wayside. We two strangers quickly became friends. We cried and laughed together most days. He shared his secrets with me and he got to hear a couple of mine.
I watched Bernard’s eyes turn from dull to bright blue as the weeks scurried by. One of his close friends told me they had never seen him so happy and that was my doing. Thank you, Bernard’s friend, but it was a two-way street. Not only did Bernard, a man who lived for purpose, have purpose again – to tell his story – I had the great privilege of telling that story.
Along the way, Bernard had some revelations about himself. Good and not so good. He saw himself through new eyes. Many unanswered questions, and held beliefs were answered and fell by the wayside to be replaced by new beliefs which made him think that perhaps he wasn’t such a scoundrel, or lacking as a husband and father as he had once thought.
In the writing of a biography, there is zero room for inauthenticity. Truth and vulnerability are everything. Bernard held nothing back and showed vulnerability every moment. The beautiful thing for me, was that he trusted me with his heart and soul. Not easy for a man who had seen a lifetime of loss; a man that had been used and stolen from because of his naïve and soft heart. Don’t get me wrong, he was no saint. Living with him would have been tough at times. His standards and expectations of himself, and therefore others, were some of the highest I have ever encountered.
He asked me: “How come you know how I work? You seem to understand me so well.”
“Easy, Bernard. Your personality is the same as one I lived with for 26 years.” I think Bernard and I were meant to meet because I did ‘get’ him. Many others would not have coped with his ‘my way or the highway’ stance. They would never have been able to navigate through his ‘rightness’. I had become a pro at it long before we met. We had a great mutual respect for one another and as much as I, and the book process, brought to him in the form of purpose, laughs and happy times, he brought to me.
I’m just finalising the cover design then the book goes to print. On telling my son that Bernard had passed suddenly, quickly (thank the universe, chance, ‘God’, or whatever), he commiserated with me then quietly in his wry way said: “I guess you go with the headstone cover then, Mum.”
I wish I could tell Bernard this, he would have laughed his socks off.
Bernard’s greatest wish was to see the book in print. He said to me two days before he passed: “I cannot wait for you to walk up my stairs, sit with me and show me our book. Then we’ll have big grins on our faces and pat each other on the shoulder. Then I can go peacefully.”
Unfortunately, ‘life’s what happens while you’re making other plans’. Bernard will not get to hold his life in his hands in the way he wanted, but he did get to hold it in its telling.
RIP my stubborn brilliant, creative friend. You are missed. (DEIRDRE THURSTON)