How to Say Goodbye. Katy Colins

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ funerals for them, and my secret weapon had arrived in the form of Facebook.

      I had been working with the family of a nineteen-year-old, Mollie Stevenson, who’d died after being hit by a car whilst crossing the road. Like many nineteen-year-olds she had been obsessed with social media, and her family proudly told me that her Facebook account had been memorialised by one of her friends. Intrigued, I’d created a Facebook profile, never having had much need for one before, and had then searched for this memorial page after work one night. It was like being given an invitation into the private life of this bubbly, happy and sociable teenage girl.

      Her whole world was available for anyone to see. There were recent statuses at pop concerts, nights out and pictures of hipster meals she’d tried; endless snaps and pouting selfies with the same group of friends; numerous check-ins at places around town where she liked to go. I made sure to stay as discreet as possible, only looking and never commenting, amazed at the picture I could build up of someone’s life, even once they were dead.

      I suddenly had a wealth of information about Mollie and her habits, hobbies and likes, allowing me to get creative with ways we could incorporate this into her funeral. Her mum and dad were understandably inconsolable and, although eager to give her the best send-off, you could clearly see that they were too lost in the tunnel of grief, shock and pain to think of ways to honour their daughter.

      Which is where I stepped in.

      Over a couple of evenings after work, I trawled through her page, and those of her friends, and was able to imagine the life Mollie had led. Her family were delighted with my suggestions of ways we could make the funeral more personal for their wonderful daughter. Obviously, I never admitted where I’d learnt this information. When Frank asked, I’d told a white lie, saying that my own (fictional) nineteen-year-old cousin loved the same sort of things that Mollie did – the trendy milkshake bar she liked to hang out at, the hula-themed nightclub in town, Arianna Grande. I knew I was stretching the definition of honesty by doing this research, but I was sure it was the right thing to do. It was as if Mollie herself was helping to plan her own funeral.

      All the subterfuge was worth it when Mollie’s parents came up to me after the packed-out service, thanking me for going the extra mile. I hadn’t felt a high like it. Guests wore bright floral leis, had ‘One Last Time’ playing as they entered, and drank freakshakes at the wake. We’d managed to turn the desperately sad occasion into a unique tribute to this young woman who’d been taken way too soon.

      *

      Thanks to Mollie, I had learned that most people lived their lives online, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others to discover even after they’ve died. For every funeral after Mollie’s, I scheduled in time to do my own research into the lives of the people I was lucky enough to be taking care of. After all, you can’t take this day back and repeat it. We all only get one shot at a goodbye. I took it upon myself to make sure that, for my clients, it was the closest thing to perfect it could be.

      Of course, this wasn’t without its obstacles. Some people’s Facebook accounts were set to ‘private’, although it was sometimes still possible to view the biographical information they’d listed, as well as their lists of friends – many of whom had public accounts, which made it possible to glean information second-hand. Another hiccup was that many people simply didn’t have Facebook accounts. For my older clients – those who hadn’t become ‘silver-surfers’ – it was a little trickier to track them down online and build up a picture of their full lives. However, they were often in the albums of their family members, mentioned in a status celebrating a birthday or anniversary, or snapped along with their grandchildren.

      Aside from Facebook and the other social media sites, there were other online avenues to explore. Google searches yielded newspaper articles, profiles on business websites, features in local community forums. Everyone, it seems, has some kind of digital footprint, and anything I could find about my clients would help to inform how their funeral would play out. This is our last moment in the spotlight, after all, and it’s the personal touches that people remember, even years later. I’ve had families come to me because of the funerals I’d arranged for people they knew, telling me that the extra details had meant so much, and had made sure it was memorable for the right reasons.

      I sometimes struggled with encouraging Frank to think outside the box – not that he knew where I was getting these bolts of creativity from. He was a traditionalist at heart. He was fine with families requesting mourners wear Hawaiian shirts, matching colours, or even a quirky memento of the deceased’s hobby, as long as it wasn’t too garish. But he wasn’t as quick to get on board with the extras, like the time we had a unicorn leading the funeral procession. This was something I’d organised for a young girl, Ava Harper, aged just seven, who I’d learned had been obsessed with them. Her recent birthday party had been unicorn-themed, and I managed to find a pure white horse whose owner dressed her up as a unicorn for regular visits to the children’s hospital. Casting her red-rimmed, exhausted eyes on the tastefully decorated horse, I saw her mother smile for the first time since meeting her.

      Linda and Frank didn’t know that I used social media to create my personal goodbyes. It probably wasn’t against the rules, but I’d decided it wasn’t something I needed to shout about. It was another reason I tended to do my digging at home, in the evenings or weekends. I had three services coming up that I was struggling to find details for. I was soon lost in the timelines and news feeds of people I would never get to properly meet in real life.

      It was only when my stomach rumbled that I checked my watch and realised I should probably think about starting dinner.

      There was a game I liked to play, which was to open the cupboard with my eyes shut and pull out a tin, and whatever I landed on was my supper. When I’d told Ms Norris about the game a few months ago she’d burst into such a fit of laughter I was worried I’d have to call an ambulance. It wasn’t right, a woman her age having such a reaction like that. I worried about her health at the best of times. When she’d finally composed herself and realised that I wasn’t laughing along too, she’d tilted her head to one side and gently patted my hand and given me a strange, desperate sort of look. I busied about and made her another cup of tea. She’s not mentioned it again and neither have I.

      But I still carried on playing my game.

Chapter 3

      It was my birthday. I was grateful that so far that morning neither Linda nor Frank had made a fuss. Or even acknowledged it. I’d had a text from my mum telling me she’d give me my present when she saw me next. She was busy travelling around Latvia with a new boyfriend in his retro campervan, so I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d not heard from anyone else, but then I wasn’t sure who I expected to get in touch. The one person I foolishly still wanted to hear from had long forgotten about me.

      The first birthday after Henry had left me was the worst. By the end of the day I felt wrung out from all the adrenalin that had coursed through me every time my emails pinged or my phone rang, imagining it was him ringing, him emailing. Of course he hadn’t sent me a card in the post, he hadn’t sent me anything at all, not even a text message. That evening I cried and cried. He was the only person I wanted to hear from on my special day, and I got nothing. These days I didn’t raise any hope of hearing from him, and the acceptance did make the hurt a little easier to bear.

      ‘Ah, Grace, there you are.’ Frank wandered out of the employee bathroom wiping his hands on his pale grey suit trousers, breaking my thoughts. ‘Team meeting in five, guys!’

      He wasn’t going to sing Happy Birthday like last year, was he? I wasn’t sure I could stand that level of embarrassment.

      Luckily, СКАЧАТЬ