I attended my first burial today. By that I mean a proper hole-in-the-ground, handful-of-soil burial, earth to earth and dust to dust; none of this open-curtain-shut-curtain business. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, warm sunshine easing aside the nip in the air as we stood in the village churchyard. Exactly the sort of day, as someone commented, that our neighbour Gary would have been pottering in his front garden, intercepting the residents of the close for a quick (sometimes prolonged) chat as they came and went. Instead he was the centre of attention in a different manner.
Gary, bless him, was going deaf and consequently turned his TV up so loud that at times it kept Adam awake. I really didn't want to raise the subject because I knew he would feel bad - and fate intervened in a cruel way to prevent the discussion. Instead my last conversation with Gary before his sudden death was about our lawn, specifically its recovery after being covered in building materials for nearly a year. I can't think of a more fitting topic to conclude our years as neighbours. Not long after we moved in, he took it upon himself one day to mow our front lawn. He continued to do so occasionally even after his own front garden had been paved, for no other reason than that he was a kind man. And he loved to talk about lawncare and his plans for his garden.
Fleetingly I was sad that those plans never came to fruition. Then I realised that if Gary had lived to 120 he would never have finished. He was a planner and a tinkerer, but not a completer. (Sarah might say I should know.) The front garden was presentable, but the back expressed a paradox of beauty and chaos. He spent many an hour using some of the noisiest mowers you'll ever hear, one of which he later donated to us. Many more hours were devoted to spreading sand, fertiliser and other concoctions designed to produce a perfect square of grass. He'd been a greenkeeper earlier in life and it showed in the results. But the only time the edges were ever strimmed was when I did it for him. And his garden was also a collection point for homeless tools, upturned outdoor furniture, empty pots and lengths of mesh, timber, hosepipe and the like. Anything that ought to have had a home in one of his three sheds, didn't. My occasional guilt at the state of our garden compared to my neighbour's aspirations, tended to dissolve as soon as I actually looked over the fence.
You know what? That was the great thing about Gary. He loved people and loved life - sometimes to the extent that we wished he would slow down a bit - yet he never pretended to be anything other than himself: ordinary, human, contradictory and fallible. The number of neighbours at the funeral today was proof that the close won't be the same without him.
Gary Goodchild, RIP.
