Suzanne Harrington: My advice after a funeral - see your friends often, don't wait

Suzanne Harrington. Pic: Andrew Hasson.

An American friend dies in Glasgow.

A faulty heart valve — one minute he’s alive, a moment later he’s not.

Rachel Cusk writes of such instant, catastrophic change in Aftermath: “A plate falls to the floor; the new reality is that it is broken.”

He lived alone, his relatives far away in a US city reminiscent of The Wire.

He’d left there long ago to make a new life in Europe, but when he dies suddenly, none of his relatives could get to Scotland.

When you’re poor, you can’t just jump on a transatlantic flight.

He might as well have died on the moon.

So the funeral is organised by what Armistead Maupin calls the logical family, rather than the biological one.

Turns out organising a funeral remotely is greatly complicated by the fact that nobody has a spare suitcase of cash down the back of the sofa.

There is no will or death instructions, nobody is legally connected to anybody or shares any DNA, and nobody other than the deceased lives in Glasgow, or even Scotland.

Core members of the logical family become overnight experts in complex death admin.

Friends in a van drive 10 hours up and 10 hours down the motorway, to clear his tiny flat.

Years of our friend’s life in boxes and bin liners, hastily labelled, as though we are helping him move house.

Another 10 hours up, 10 hours down the motorway for the funeral — a lone piper leading a wicker coffin through the Glasgow monsoon.

Pishing it doon.

Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin instead of hymns, and later, afternoon tea instead of the pub — Celtic are playing at home, and the logical family is not in a football-crowd state of mind.

We gather, rain-soaked, in a Glasgow tea room awash with Rennie Mackintosh, and remember our friend with tea and cake.

The irony of death is how it can divide families but bring friends together.

Faced with sudden loss, but not fighting over a will or dealing with decades of simmering resentment, the friendship group bonds like superglue.

Drivers drive, admins admin, organisers organise, cooks cook, tea is made, stories shared — everyone brings whatever they have.

We walk around an unnaturally warm Glasgow the day after, marvelling at it all.

At being alive, and having each other.

Our senses heightened in the aftermath of sudden death.

There have been other deaths amongst our wider group, of course, there have.

Deaths you could see coming a mile off — the self-destructive ones not as invincible as they’d hoped, the fragile ones whose grip on life cobwebs light, the unlucky ones carried off young by cancer.

But there’s something about a sudden unexpected death that picks you up and shakes you; it’s the shock of Father Ted dying at 45 rather than the acceptance of Father Jack dying at 77.

You expect your granny to peg it in her 90s, but not the fresh-faced to suddenly die unwrinkled. 

Hug your friends. Make time for them. See them often. Don’t wait.