I don't know what to say........

I Don't Know What To Say............

I'm writing this on a grey cloudy day when it finally rained a bit after a long warm, dry winter so far. Seems it's captured the mood. Whilst I don't know what to say, I've turned to written words as an attempt to work it out and as a record.

Yesterday came the shocking and most unexpected news that a friend in Nerja had suffered a heart attack and died in the night. The news was generally prefaced by the "no easy way to tell you this but....".  Like most of us, I went straight into shocked denial "he can't be, I saw him yesterday!" apart from which the news was almost universally met by us all floundering around trying to find something meaningful to say and coming up with almost and equally universally "I don't know what to say".

It's a fair bet that this morning none of us have moved much past that point as far as the news is concerned so retreating to the familiar territory of what we knew and loved and will now have to cling to is all the stuff about which we have much to say and will no doubt share with a sense of varying desperation and search for shreds of comfort, and we will all want to pay our tributes and stake our claims to our own little shares of the man as our own personal mementos. I'm lucky as I've also got a decent number of his photos on my wall.

When I first arrived in Nerja and the process of getting to know people and make friends commenced, Julio was amongst the group who formed the solid and regular nucleus of my social life as we gathered regularly in the bar of our Polish friends. He was almost always in any group which gathered if it contained any of his friends. We all have slightly different circles of friends which often overlap and we all have degrees of closeness which dictate who is in our preferred group. Julio seemed to be in most people's. We are all strangers in a foreign land, albeit by choice, and he was no exception being Uruguyan. To that extent I have always considered my best friends here to be like a family - we don't always agree but we belong.

What do I personally know about Julio? He was from Uruguay, had aged parents and his eldest daughter in Argentina, his ex wife and younger daughter in Germany, had been in Nerja a long time, had worked in films, was a very talented photographer and would much have preferred to earn his living selling his work than being a waiter, knew just about every other waiter and bar/restaurant owner in Nerja, was often glued to his phone, was pretty useful with a computer as well as a camera, had an excellent command of English and a wonderful sense of humour, loved cake, could be restless, got cross if his liking for women was interpreted as "womanising", sometimes got offended, learned to say "bugger", taught me a lot of Spanish, helped loads of people when they needed a good Spanish speaker, looked after his Dad until he died even though he had to sleep on a mattress on the floor, loved his daughters, kept in touch with all his friends and was well loved all round. I don't know anyone who didn't like the man, and what faults he had we knew and we loved him anyway.

What I really appreciated about those early months in Nerja was the evenings at La Joya which became my second home as I lived just 4 minutes away in a cold and unwelcoming town house on my own, evenings when Julio and Roberto would tolerate my crap attempts to communicate in Spanish and where I learnt a lot, Roberto told jokes and got words confused with similar ones in English and Julio sorted it out for both of us. He lived just along from me, maybe as much as 30 doors away, and we compared notes on a regularly aggrieved basis on the number of mosquitos plaguing us to the amazement of everyone else in town who never got any. He came to the market with me on a Sunday for a while, bringing his photos to sell, and he was sometimes late or even forgot. So many people used to stop to speak to him on the stall, he really did know a lot of people. Early on his "boys toys" interest became obvious - he could sit for hours and ignore us in La Joya obsessing with his phone on the internet (which in fairness he did not have at home) and the debates over a better Mac or a new, better camera were many. I remember particulary one night sitting next to him and Jane and Nadine, and they were messing about with photos on their phones to distort them - my introduction to photoshop- much to their own delight and my amusement. He also revealed a love for sweet things and cake in particular which became a joke to be trundled out wherever possible especially if there WAS cake. He seized upon my frequent utterance and favourite swear word thereafter most often addressing me as "bugger". He occasionally took things to heart too much and could be offended in an almost childlike way especially when women were involved and even more so if he thought he was being branded a womaniser. No denying he did like women, he was a personable single man of a certain age after all, and to that extent would inevitably attract attention in a town rife with single women of many ages and a visible shortage of eligible men. Notably he remained friends with everyone I knew him to have been involved with at all, which says something else good about him. It wasn't just his photographs we all liked. He really enjoyed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and recently told me his favourite book was A Confederacy of Dunces, but unfortunately I didn't have a copy to give him. He was the epitome of "personable", a good friend to so many of us, and deservedly popular.

 So that is a bit from me about the man, and more anecdotes from those who knew him and his many facebook friends worldwide too no doubt.

A group of us had Christmas day dinner together on the beach; he was part of that. We'd also had carols and mince pies and mulled wine at Danny and Mary's. The day before he died he was with me on the market to bring a box of his latest foam-mounted photos which I was going to display and try to sell for him. He was late because he said he hadn't slept well and he mentioned a pain and said it was since he started smoking again and he would stop again. Hindsight is a wonderful and useless thing. At least I got to see him several times recently. There are people who saw him a lot more and will inevitably miss his physical presence a lot more, there are those who didn't get the chance to see him recently, those who are in different countries and couldn't see him much if ever, and those who knew him via facebook; there are people with a much greater claim to their grief than me, but for all of us the world is a poorer place now and it is inconceivable that someone who just seemed to be everywhere is not anywhere now, except in our heads and our hearts. I hope he knew how many people loved and appreciated him.

And so, back to the reflections on life the universe and everything. I always assumed, when I was young, that an acceptance of death was part of growing older, but nearing the nasty 60 and nowhere near ready, I'm alarmed to find it isn't automatic and every departure upsets and unnerves me. Inevitably the frequency increases with age but come on, he was pretty much the same age as me and if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. As Rod said yesterday, he wasn't exactly top of anyone's list for who might have a heart attack and die. He wasn't old and he wasn't ill that anyone knew of.  And for sure he wasn't ready or expecting that.

Times like these we don't know what to say, we fumble for crumbs of comfort for ourselves and each other, sharing our memories and our grief and our loss, clinging to a little piece of him to call our very own so he won't be taken entirely from us - the platitudes inevitably escape our lips: at least he wasn't ill, he didn't suffer, he wasn't alone, better to go suddenly than be ill or in pain but such a shock for the rest of us, but where does that leave us? Those of us who are alone wondering who will be there when our time comes, and those who have someone dreading the alternatives of the leaving AND the being left, all of us determined to appreciate more what and who we have in our lives, some angry, some disappointed, some sad, some afraid, can we really learn to live each day as if it was our last, to keep in check the potential fear that induces?........we really don't get much better at it, do we? It's spurious anyway, there is no such thing as a good death, there are only better and less painful ways to go, and more or less grief for those left behind. Who do we think we are kidding? We don't miss them any less or feel any less grief and when it's over, that's all there is - how we deal with it. So I'm with King Lear railing in the storm on the moor, howl your pain and your loss, nobody has the right to tell you how much you should mourn, and the only people who don't want you to are at best upset on your behalf and would spare you that pain if they could, and at worst they are embarrassed by and unwilling to confront raw emotion. In Nerja it's a common sight when someone dies to see half the town outside the cemetery to pay their respects and I'm willing to bet Julio will pull a crowd of similar proportions but I will also bet that we will be a much more emotional crowd because culturally we are totally rubbish at dealing with death compared to the ritual and immediate mourning followed by the dignified send off. Stiff upper lip my arse.

We have a lot of words in our heads and on our lips even though we still "don't know what to say". Even me. Hankies out again.

Bye, Julio, we aren't half going to miss you. You bugger.

Postscript : I wrote this the day after Julio died. His sending off on the beach was indeed as well attended as he deserved despite the rain, and for sure he would have been overwhelmed by the gathering at La Joya afterwards. I could hear his voice in my head saying "ohhhh thankyou very much".