helen-louise's journal

My Uncle Hughie has been successfully funeralised and buried. I am still processing.

There were easily 120 people in the church and another 120 or so at the hall afterwards, but they weren't the same people. A lot of people only went to the church, and a fair number only went to the hall. It must have been about 200 people in total.

My mum collected the donations made in his name to the British Lung Foundation, and there are a lot of names. Not necessarily a lot of money because people gave what they could, but £5 from a poor person seems more meaningful than £30 from someone who is really quite rich indeed. Ahem.

The service was in the religious denomination which my uncle grew up in, which is not the same as the Christian denomination that most of my family belong to. It was fine until the sermon, at which point we were berated for something like 15 to 20 minutes by a VERY LOUD pastor about this particular denomination's views on death, resurrection, the imminent arrival of Jesus on Earth, Judgement Day, and the state of our souls. This was not only extremely far from my own beliefs, but from most of my family's beliefs as well. ( Might be triggery, I'm not sure. )

It's very odd not learning your own uncle's real name until he happens to die when you're 37. Even weirder to have the loud pastor talking about "Ewart" instead of "Hughie". It made it easier to dissociate the weird religious beliefs about what was happening to "our brother Ewart" though.

It was an open casket funeral, which is not usual for the UK, and there was a point near the end of the service where everyone was invited to go up and view the deceased. I thought it was creepy as a concept - the thought of anyone who happens to be at the service looking at you when you're dead, rather than the way it's usually done here with private viewing by family and specifically invited friends in a chapel of rest before the service. But there was time set aside at the end for the family, so I went up then, and I'm glad I did. I can't say I enjoyed seeing my uncle dead, but I would have regretted not going.

My mum, Richard, and I got volunteered to go and decorate the hall, which meant we didn't go to the burial. I'm glad of that. Not a fan of burials at all. Apparently it was a bit of a fiasco because my uncle's family's religion meant they wanted to see him properly buried, whereas the people in the cemetary use a mechanical digger to fill in the grave, and can't do that until everyone is out of the way. Hmm.

We decorated the hall in Jamaican colours - green, yellow, and black, with balloons and ribbons. Uncle Hughie's best friend couldn't cope with the funeral so he went straight to the hall, and was extremely helpful in setting everything up. There was a bit of a panic when the caterer didn't turn up quite when we expected, but then when they did arrive they were incredibly well-organised.

The hall looked like one of those rainbow nations things, with many people of visibly different ethnicity and culture. Everyone was wearing formal, respectful clothing suitable for a funeral, but from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Only one of my dad's six siblings married someone of the same nationality as himself, so my family is brown and white and black. If you lined up me and my cousins, you wouldn't think any of us were related - at least, until you looked beyond the colouring. There are several pairs of brothers who don't look as though they belong together, where one takes after their darker-skinned parent and the other takes after the lighter-skinned one. A lot of people thought Richard was my mum's son and I was her daughter-in-law.

Uncle Hughie's friends were impeccably dressed black men in zoot suits and trilby hats, only needing a saxophone to fit into a 1930s jazz club. They asked if the family would mind them setting up their dominoes, as it was what they usually did with Uncle Hughie, and my dad decided it was the right and proper way for them to remember him. So they sat there playing their game while the rest of us talked and listened to reggae music.

I talked to lots of people I haven't spoken to in ages, and discovered that at least some of my cousins have grown into reasonable human beings. I am still dreadful at smalltalk, but near the end I finally found the courage to go up to one of the people I recognised and say "excuse me, I think you must be one of my distant relatives but I haven't a clue who you are". He turned out to be my Aunty Maureen's best friend's son, who I last saw when I was about 10!

That is as much as I can manage right now. There is still lots of processing. More than you'd expect for the death of an uncle, I think, but my family is Weird.

My father thinks he's going to walk me down the aisle.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Please comment below with all of the reasons why this isn't going to be happening.

I've reached new and exciting levels of wanting to kill someone (or at least, since I'm not terribly violent in real life, wanting to stab a cardboard cut-out of them repeatedly in the head with a fork). Actually, I have two different sources of stress right now:

1) my father, who is being A Git about the wedding plans (much more later).

2) the Graduate Committee at College, who seem to have decided that I'm "too disabled" to do the project I am supposed to be doing. Don't even ask right now, I have to keep enough spoons for the inevitable SHOUTING that is going to occur.

Last Saturday (16th) I went to the Joan Miró exhibition at the Tate Modern with Tim & Peter and my mum. He is one of my favourite artists, but I didn't realise until I saw the publicity for this exhibition that he was male - I thought it was the woman's name Joan, not a Catalan spelling of the man's name Juan. That's made me slightly sad because it means there are even fewer famous female surrealists.

The exhibition was awesome anyway. Lots of great paintings, plus a series of 50 pencil drawings called the Barcelona Series, which were incredibly inspiring, because I can draw boggle-eyed toothy monsters like that! (Some of them remind me of the Prince and his cousins from Katamari Damacy!). I often feel that modern art "doesn't count" if it involves a level of skill which I'd be capable of, but apparently I disregard this opinion if I really like it?! Hmm. I also really liked the Head of a Catalan Peasant series, especially the one which is a portrait of Richard.

Afterwards we went to Pizza Express, which is a typical thing to do with Tim & Peter, and walked over the Millennium Bridge to St Paul's Cathedral, where I investigated new and exciting ramps in the ground. Oh, and missed the train that I'd booked assisted travel on, due to the lift in Waterloo Station being broken and no one knowing about it to tell me. Had to go ALL ROUND THE OUTSIDE to get in through the level entrance. Grrr!

On Friday (22nd) we went to Devizes to see Richard's mother's grave and also various alive members of his family, namely his father, stepmother, sister, her husband, and nephew. It was VERY VERY SUNNY and we spent several hours outside, walking round the Caen Hill Locks. Well, they walked, I wheeled. Except I got "hilariously" stuck over one of the narrow bridges while Richard temporarily forgot I existed due to taking photos. There were dozens of people around to help me though. Heh.

On Saturday (23rd) I collapsed in a heap and slept for 18 hours, and then we went to see Wolfsbane. More about that later.

On Sunday (24th) Tim & Peter came round and we played Portal 2, and went to Pizza Express, where a waitress we'd never seen before "recognised us". This may be something to do with our tendency to take plushie animals with us to dinner. We get recognised everywhere we go even semi-regularly for this reason.

On Monday (25th) Marcus (hatter) came round and we went to look at "the trees" in Richmond Park, including my favourite tree. I had an altercation with a bus driver who refused to let me on because he already had "two buggies" occupying the wheelchair space - I pointed out that wheelchairs take priority over buggies and the guardians of the small children moved them out of the way for me to get on. If they hadn't been reasonable, I would have written down the registration number of the bus and got straight on the phone to Transdev (the bus company who runs that route), since it was totally ridiculous of the driver to assume that a wheelchair passenger should have to wait 15 minutes for the next bus when it blatantly says that the space is for wheelchairs! I probably should have done that anyway, but it would have required spoons which I don't have.

Photos of some of these activities to follow in next post.

Alarming phone call of the day: my mum phoned at 7:43am to tell me that the block of flats she lives in was busy burning down, but I shouldn't worry because everyone had got out (!).

Apparently the fire started about 3am in a top floor flat. Their smoke alarm went off, but none of the alarms in the building are wired together - something I said was an accident waiting to happen when I lived there. As no one was in upstairs, the fire continued for several more hours, until the downstairs neighbours smelled smoke and woke up at 6am. They rang my dad, who went outside to look and found the fire was so bad the roof was about to collapse. He told my mum to ring the fire brigade while he went round pressing all the neighbours' doorbells to wake them up (!). Many of them didn't answer because they thought it was a prank caller (!!). Yes, some of these people are lucky to be alive. The fire was bad enough for the fire brigade to close the road for several hours, and Richard said the top floor flat where the fire started is completely gutted.

It's quite frankly crazy to build timber-framed flats with no communal fire alarm system - let alone blocks with only one usable fire escape. It's taken this fire for people to realise their windows are too small to escape through, another thing I said when we lived there. By 2pm the loss adjuster from the building's insurance, the council planning officer, and reporters from both local newspapers had all been round, so I'm hopeful some good will come out of it. Kingston is nothing but new-build blocks of flats (if you want a house, you have to buy a Victorian terrace or semi), and I wonder how many of them actually have a sensible fire system. If we can get this reported, perhaps the council will stop approving plans for blocks of flats with inadequate safety measures, and it may even save some lives.

I do feel sorry for the people who went away on holiday and will return to find their home is destroyed, though :/

Several years ago, there was a thread on alt.polyamory entitled "RJ's history with 'indirect' communication", in which rmjwell tried to articulate what it was about indirect communication that bugged him so much. This rapidly turned into The Thread That Ate alt.poly. I remember it spanning a good 2000+ posts (Google Groups suggests 3157) and several months.

One of the things that came up in that thread was the idea of people saying one thing and meaning the polar opposite. An example was given of a visitor saying "What a nice, fresh breeze!" and meaning "Please close the window". That completely blew my mind. If a visitor in my house was to remark on the pleasantness of a breeze, I would either sit there continuing to enjoy the breeze alongside them, or offer to open the window wider. I certainly would never get any idea that the person was cold and wanted the window shut. The idea that someone could say something so utterly contrary broke my brain.

So, a few days ago, we received a letter from an elderly relative that is so full of indirect communication, we hardly know how to interpret it. So I'm asking all of livejournal to offer insights.( Read more... )