Bye-bye beside the Bay

I felt terrible about not having seen Hazel for one last time before she died. At the same time, I was relieved, because it meant my last memory of her was of a cheerful person enjoying the view in her almost-completed home. I heard that she was having a hard time with the chemotherapy, and sent her a couple of texts, and then one Friday morning, as I set off home, there came a text message from my youngest brother preparing me for bad news.

I also felt terrible about missing her funeral, but at the same time, I felt relieved, because the church and civic ceremonies I have sat through previously had accentuated the feeling of loss but not offered any real comfort or helped me to accept the parting.

I was glad, therefore, that I made it back for her memorial and found it an unstructured event, not planned according to any set pattern but following her wish that all those who missed her should meet in a hotel by Studland Bay and go down by the water's edge to say goodbye. It was the first time I had visited the sea in more than 2 years. It was a bright but cold March day, the first promise that spring was with us once again.

We squeezed into the largest room the hotel had available, people whom I hadn't seen for nearly fifteen years in some cases, to find some display boards with photos everywhere, and a slideshow of more photos and odd video clips playing on a big flatscreen. I hovered around in the entrance corridor close to the door, marginalised by the need to find the toilets earlier on, and heard rather than saw the people who expressed their tributes. Her eldest brother gave a perfect imitation of one of her mannerisms that for a second gave me a bright mental picture of her there in front of me, and I had to shake myself and blink several times.

Down on the sand beneath the low cliffs at the western edge of Studland bay, another brother found some tinder and half-burnt logs at the barbecue site and soon had a driftwood fire burning. I watched my mother taking this doubly hard, because she too has been diagnosed with an inoperable condition and knew that she had only a limited time left, but we had all assumed that Hazel was going to be alright, she was young and strong and loved life so dearly it was unthinkable that she should lose the battle so soon. I noticed that our sisters-in law tended to form a tight-knit community, as though the men in my family were particularly tricky to live with and therefore notes needed to be exchanged and methods of handling us shared amongst them. And now they are one less.

We wrote messages on notes which my youngest brother was going to put into a bottle and carry to Scotland, to be cast into the sea off the West coast, together with her ashes, so that all her memories and remains could be back in the land that she came from. I didn't read what my partner had written, just flipped the sheet over and put my own scrawled words on the back. A basket of dried flowers and heather sprigs was passed around, from which we picked whatever caught our individual fancies, and then went down to the whispering water to throw them into the narrow margin between the wet and the dry, and I was able to say out loud 'Goodbye Hazel' with no inhibitions of a church-like echo to fling the quiver in my voice back in my ears. Appropriately, a large white ship put out to sea from Poole Harbour.




I will still miss her, I will still find myself mentioning both of their names when now I should only say one, and I still feel that it was so cruel that she should go this way, but I do at least feel that I have said goodbye properly.

The photos that follow have no captions or explanations, they are random images that mean something to me