GUNBLOG 21 - ’Shirokoma’ - The Truth Will Set You Free -

 17th March 2008

I keep trying but I just cannot fucking write this. The Englishman in me, and that’s pretty much the lot, is saying that the sensible thing to do … the respectful thing, is to simply act like nothing happened and pick up where I left off.  Write about some gig where no-one saw us being sensational or one where a bunch of people saw us suck.  Write about how we all got so ambulance drunk we wound up busting each other’s teeth with pool balls stuffed into tube socks.  Write about whatever terrible bullshit happened to good people on ’News 24’ last night that neither you nor I give a fuck about this morning.  Write about tits and terror in the red tops or how somebody paid one-hundred-and-fifteen thousand dollars for a lock of Che Guevara’s hair.  Write about the Arts waving a white flag under the rolling thunder of Britain’s defence budget.  Write about whatever the fuck I like, because nobody’s going to notice that they haven’t heard a peep out of me for four months in the first place.

That was the game-plan but I can’t seem to spit any of it out.

The wrench is that I lost my brother, Paul, on the 20^th October 2007.  He died in Collonge-Sous-Seleves in southern France, just across the border from Geneva.  He was forty-six years old.  A little less than three months shy of his forty-seventh birthday.

His loss, like most others, has knocked a lot of people about very badly.  Maybe this is because the suddenness left no opportunity to set things straight or to say any goodbyes (there was surely enough to be set straight and there were surely enough goodbyes to be said), or because, in life, my brother tended to spread himself rather thinly.  On one hand there are the many people who knew him only for a matter of hours and yet consider him to have been amongst their best friends.  On the other there are five children by four different mothers, at least three of whom knew him and each other barely, if at all.  Indeed, at my brother’s hastily arranged funeral in Annecy, it fell to me to introduce two of his children to each other.  Twenty-six-year-old Hollie and fifteen-year-old Maria are two of the most wonderful creatures under God’s blue sky.  Neither one knew the other existed until after their father was dead.  For Paul this was the last in a long line of successful escape attempts from the jaws of responsibility.

Of his three fine sons, two (Lyric and Liam) are perhaps a little young to understand the nature of the loss that has befallen them but the eldest, Vincent, idolised his father in spite of his absence and remains utterly gutted.  He, like the others, is strong, sharp, wise and funny, and will survive and succeed.  He, like the others, is the spitting image of his Dad and harbours enough of his personality to drive his poor mother consistently crazy.  He, like the others, never leaves my thoughts for a second.  It is a great irony to consider that, if it were not for Paul’s death, I would probably never have had the opportunity to develop a relationship with these beautiful nephews and nieces of mine.  I try not to dwell too much on this tragic paradox.  No good can come from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

In the wake of the maelstrom of Paul’s death, when the responsibilities, the wakes, the funerals (yes, there have been a number), the scattering of ashes, the recriminations and regrets, the hours of phone calls and the mountains of paperwork were done, I, like many others, began to come apart.  But through the love, patience, grace and understanding of those who stood beside me, my stumbling did not result in a fall.  They know who they are and they know how indebted I am to them.  It will certainly take a little more than a ’good drink’ to put me back in the black.

It is said that we grieve for ourselves.  I find that I grieve for my mother and father.  To lose a son is not the natural order of things.  I grieve for Paul’s kids, who knew only tastes of the love of which he was so abundantly capable.  I grieve for the wallets of those to whom Paul owed money (too late now, motherfuckers).  I grieve for the pirates that must now sail without him.  And I grieve for the poor souls whose eternity in the next world has just been summarily fucked up by the arrival of the high-volume, hard-drinking, light-fingered Devil Himself. 

Give ’em Hell, Bro.  I love you.