Gone Gone Gone.

The first one to go was R, husband of her for many, many years and not long into retirement. He was the kind of guy you heard a bit about but saw nothing of. I can’t say I had a problem with that but if I had ever been introduced to him I would have been gracious and generous with my questions. They say that people feel good in a conversation if you ask them lots of questions, though when they say questions I presume they don’t mean ones like “why don’t you just fuck off?”. R died at the age of 65, dropped dead on a golf course from a heart attack. Whether he’d cleared that tricky bunker will remain a mystery forever. The heart attack (which is like a cardiac event, only one that is terminal and is called what it is: a heart attack) can’t have been a whole lot of fun but at least it was quick and finished the job; no long years of stroking dogs, wolfing down blood pressure tablets and clutching on to fractured hopes. As R’s wife pointed out soon afterwards: he had died doing something he loved. There’s something very satisfying in that, but then I would say that because I’m still alive and he isn’t. And now she can get on with working out the rest of her life, which I truly hope is as good as it can be.

Next up was another R; younger, brasher and definitely a lot more Frencher. He was a good man but boy could he make life an extra bit of a pickle. His self confidence was off the charts and his ambition not very far behind, always thinking of the next great idea to make a few more friends and bit more money, which is fair enough if you have that kind of engine. He was also a friend, though I hadn’t seen him in a fair while, which is sad but not really something worth regretting for too long. We had exchanged a few messages in the middle of summer and by the end of it he was dead. As far as I know he was fit and well but then he also rode a motorbike, which evens things up pretty quickly. He was riding that stupid thing when he collided with something bigger and harder, something that was always going to come out on top, if you get my meaning. As far as I know he died on the spot, which is good because what life he might of been left with would have very likely been a lot less pleasant. He was in the middle of a divorce and had two young children, which makes the whole thing much harder to swallow. I made my peace by concluding the messages we had started only a few weeks before, knowing well enough he will never get to read them. Poor bugger. He was 47.

Last of the bunch was B. Now he really was something special. I’d only known him for three years but it may as well have been thirty. As well as being the finest Australian I have ever met (you can judge for yourself if that’s a good thing) he was a stellar man and great company and the fact he isn’t here anymore is one that demands more than just a little reflection. He was one of those doomed sporty people who rode bikes and ran for miles with his eyes closed but could never go fast enough to beat the cancer that was slowly eating him up from inside. He’d appeared to win the first round, a few years before I knew him, but we all know that cancer isn’t the type to lie down and vanish forever and so back it came with a bloody vengeance and now it’s fulfilled its destiny and died along with him. I last saw him at his wedding on a brutally cold January morning in Oxford. He’d kept himself much more to himself after that and I wasn’t in the close enough circle to get a look in. It probably would have broken my heart anyway – a thin man made medieval gaunt by a disease he could never dare to dream of conquering – seeing that warm smile turned inside out with sorrow and the back of those dancing eyes racked with pain or numbed grey with futile medication. He was also a member of the 47 club and now that makes me feel like a real survivor, as well as somehow much older than I actually am. I’ll miss him, and think of him, the most.

Still, pull yourself together. Life is full of sad things but there is still joy to be had if you look in the right places. We are born sick and forced to be well, and then expected to survive from day to day until the light dims and then goes out altogether, so we can turn to shit in the ground or dust in the air. So enjoy what you can and try to ignore the rest, and take some comfort in the indisputable reality that living forever is no substitution for dying too young. And what’s the point in overthinking life when it’s all held together with tissue and spit? R.I.P, the beautiful dead; I shan’t be seeing you later, unless all that afterlife horseshit turns out to be true, of course.

G B Burton. 27.09.2025