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In bed with Mary – Again

Welcome everyone. Gather around my bed and please ignore a, the mess, b, my scraggy hair and c, my cough. I am feeling a tad better, I must say. Fingers crossed.

So today I thought I would tell you the story of when I drowned a man.

Day 2, The Story of When I Drowned a Man.

I once drowned a man. It wasn’t that long ago. And it was surprisingly easy. He was old anyway and had no hair. He had been rejected by his family and no one had any room for him in their heart, house or life. So he came to me. And I drowned him. I held him down with a wooden skewer and it took about 4 minutes before he stopped bobbing back to the top of the warm soap solution. After drowning the old bald man made by Lego, in the clear soap solution I drowned some toy soldiers with guns in their hands ready to pull the trigger. All toys, unwanted had been donated to me by my lovely friend Louise. Her son had grown out of Lego and into Fortnite in what feels like a week, and so I got the chance to take the unwanted men and drown them in my soap solution to make some interesting soap for children. I told you that there was a dark art to all things soapy which is ironic, don’t you think?

I took my arrested men in solid soap along with other bathroom delights to the Sheriff Hutton village hall market where I sold them to little people and their mums. And children.

Children love bath bombs although making them, is, as I have mentioned a tricky kind of magic and can get one most stressed out. Trust me, I know.

If these children who picked up the Easter Bunny bath bombs knew the way I had been swearing at them whilst making them just the day before, watching as they had crumbled or fell over or just sank in front of me; if they could have heard the language that that little bunny had been privy to, I don’t think they would have wanted to buy one. A bunny bath bomb which I probably told to “stay together you little fucker” isn’t half as attractive as one that was made with encouragement – good little bunny, please don’t break. It is sometimes better to never know what you don’t need to know. If, you know what I mean.

And there are things I don’t want to know, but people who come to my market stall still like to tell me. Facts like, “I don’t have a bath.” I get told this a lot whilst selling soap. “Thank you for sharing that with me” I don’t say. I just nod and say that I do, and that showering is just as good with soap.

The best comment I had, was when a lady in her 70s skipped up to me, picked up every product I had on show to smell it. She took long theatrical nasal inhalations with closed eyes, replaced the bath bomb and then chose another and sniffed again, long and strong so the essential oils lingered in her nasal passage pleasuring her senses. I stood grimacing and silently threatening what ever she held to her nostrils “don’t you dare break apart on me now, you little bath bomb you!” and when she had finished pleasing her senses with my stock, she looked at me, flicked her silver hair and declared with great flair and thespian zeal, “I take one bath every week, and all I do is squeeze a bit of fairy washing up liquid in to the water, and that does for me!”

My eyebrows both jump up my forehead in surprise.

I imagined her running like a maiden from the kitchen sink to the bathroom dressed in a cheese cloth nighty, gleefully clutching the fairy washing up bottle to her chest as she skipped to her bath room in her bare feet. She was so pleased with herself. But I wasn’t sure. She had my essential oil fragrance up her nose, the oil that was Arabian, the oil that was Organic, the Rose Oil that cost £18 just for one teaspoon! And she wasn’t about to part with a penny. I was speechless. But not for long.

 “So, you bathe with your dishes, then?”

She stepped back – a huge step that only the actress Julia Stevenson can get away with, and her coral lips drew into a wry smile. Her eyes narrowed and twinkled. Her thin tanned skin corrugated her forehead.  Then she extended her arm and held up her right finger to me and waved it left to right saying “A ha, Ha Ahh HA.”

She didn’t like my joke.

Well, I didn’t like hers.

She offered me three more disappointing wags of her leathery finger and then off she skipped to the mixed olives and stuffed vine-leaves man on the end. Who had bad breath.

I looked down at my Bath bombs and gentle caressed them whilst rearranging them back into optimum position and quietly thanked them for not embarrassing us both by breaking apart under her nose. I gave them a quick sorry, too. I needed more faith in my soapy products. They had never really let me down before….

On my way home with my £63 pounds in my pocket (hey, get me, rich and famous) I called in to to see one of my ladies. I call her one of my ladies like a hairdresser would refer to a regular client. But she is one of mine. She is lovely.

I did the funeral service for her husband two weeks previous and I want to make sure she is ok.

Let’s call her Doreen, for data collection and cyber security GDPR purposes.  I give her a hug. She hugs me tightly, she is happy to see me and it seems, a bit relieved.

Doreen is now alone in her home since her beloved passed away. She has family around her and so she tells me she has to ‘be strong’ for them. And they in turn will think that they ‘have to be strong’ for their mum. When really, they are all suffering together yet, alone. Her daughters have lost their father, and she no longer has her husband, his face, his warmth, his sounds, his essence, his love, it has physically gone along with his life. His love was everything to everyone.

I give her some soap for the grandchildren and she laughs at how someone can drown bits of lego in a soap bar. They must be batty, she says.

We sit together in the living room. Doreen says she thought she was doing alright until he came home. She nods towards the tall blue urn on the sideboard. It’s a very pretty urn, I say. I like the moon and stars on it. She agrees, because her beloved always loved to look at the moon. He also loved to hear the local owl tooting, until he became hard of hearing and would get upset that everyone else could hear the owl and he couldn’t.

We talk about when he died and how he died and we talk about how comforted she is that he came home. Her beloved came home to die. Just like he had wanted to.

We talk about Boris Johnson whom she likes and we discuss what she’s having for her dinner, and how she has noticed that there is more food in the fridge these days. There isn’t much need to go shopping.

I think of my dad. After my mum died he would tell me, that things stay where they are in the house. No one is moving anything around, he would say. It drove him mad. Just accepting that the person who lived by your side for most of your life is now absent is a curious change to have to endure. Unfathomable.

I share this story with Doreen. She agrees.

She finds things really strange. He isn’t in the bedroom any more and he isn’t sat outside by the window. He isn’t feeding the birds and he isn’t in his chair.

No.

I told her that after my mum died my dad didn’t like being in the house on his own. Not long after her funeral he went away. A lot. He travelled to get away from the home she had left him in where nothing moved or got put away.

Doreen’s late husband didn’t much like to travel, she tells me. He went to the coast a few times but he just loved being at home. I could agree with her. Home is the best of places. I listen to her stories of a man she still adores and we talk about other things, she wants a project to be getting on with and is considering painting the shed in the garden.

I leave Doreen with the soap and she gave me a box of chocolates to say thank you for the funeral service I did for her beloved.

I tell Doreen, I’m thinking I get a group together, of others like you who can talk together. There are so many ladies, and men who are grieving and I meet a lot of them, and you are all in the same boat; the problem is, you don’t know each other. She put her arm around my waste and leant into me, Oh I wish you would, she said. That would be lovely Mary, thank you . Although I think we will have to wait until this coronavirus thingy has gone away before we can get people together, again.

Really? I ask, do you think it’s going to get that bad?

I tell her I will call her with news of a grief get together, so to speak and to call me if she fancies a chat. I have been thinking of doing something like this for ages, no time like the present. I make a mental list to call all my ladies and men and ask them their thoughts on a grief get together. I try and come up with a plan.

I take the short drive home I remember my dad. He was a ‘man’s man’ as people would say. He called a digger a digger. His ashes had been put in a light blue box with white birds flying in a blue sky. It had sat on the windowsill in his house for a couple of years before we got together to scatter them at his favourite fishing spot in Wales.

When mum died I had tried to help him, look after him – which was a difficult thing to do, he was super un-needy.

I invited him to come with me and Oliver to my friends wedding in Norway. Mum had been dead for six months. When I told him there would be fly fishing too ,he was hooked.

Norway that year had a heat wave. On the hottest day in Norwegian record, my friend Hege married her own beloved, Peter. Following the church service we went on a steam boat ride on the lake Mjøsa near Lillehammer. My dad, in a new place, with new faces was so happy. He asked the captain of the steam boat if he could take the wheel and he obliged. I can still see him, drink in one had, super sized steam boat wheel in the other, laughing his tanned face to the hot sun. He had forgotten, I suppose, that she wasn’t there.

Around three years before his own death, Dad went to Western Australia to visit my mum’s brother. This was the last place they had both visited the year before she died, and she had loved running along a beach there. It was called Scarborough Beach.

When he returned home just before Christmas, on his own, he was in a really dark place. He was angry. He lost his temper once or twice, probably more. I didn’t understand. He didn’t want to be around us at Christmas. He didn’t want a tree with lights on, he didn’t want to leave his room. He came down stairs on Boxing day with a hole in his sock and I sent him back upstairs to get dressed properly. Really I should have left him to his sadness, in his warm socks, hole or no hole.

Later he would tell me, through sobs and tears and snot that he had gone to the beach to look for her, he had gone to Scarborough beach Perth Australia to look for my mum. He thought he would find her running on the sand with the sunlight in her bouncy hair. But he didn’t. She wasn’t there. He cried. I couldn’t find her. She isn’t coming home, he said.

I kissed his tanned forehead and hugged him. No dad. I’m sorry. She isn’t coming home. There was nothing else I could say.

And so what is my point in all this? What am I trying to say? From my bed.

Well, here it is. Observe how lots of people want to share with others lots of personal information. Their menopause, the fact that they do or don’t have a bath, a faith, a toyboy. The lady who shared with me her bath bubble preference didn’t know me from Eve. But she told me some thing intimate. But would she tell me over a soap stall that she had just lost her husband? Would she want to share that information? Probably not. You see, grief and death puts us all in a very vulnerable situation, it can make us feel ashamed, afraid, unnerved. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. We should be able to discuss sad things as well as bubble bath. And that is my point. It just takes one person to get the conversation going and it starts with; how are you feeling, today?

But that’s enough about me, lets think of the others who need help and love and support…… …

Click on this link if you would like to support me in my aim to start a charity to support bereaved people. Thank you xxx

Until next time, be happy xxx

I am sat in bed with coronavirus symptoms.

My husband Oliver and daughter Honor keep telling me I haven’t got anything wrong with me. I tell them to leave me alone in my room isolated because I certainly don’t want them to catch what I haven’t got.

I am ok. Fever has gone. But I wait for more.

I have a cough and a sore chest and can’t do much, just changing the bed sheet is now a no-no, after yesterday’s, breathless, drama.

I have time to think though.

I can’t stand watching any more news or drastic stories of death and Covid 19.

There is death everywhere and now when we are faced with the death of Italy’s and Spain’s thousands it’s as though death has started to creep through the channel tunnel. There is gloom in the air. It is as though fear has made the crossing on a P&O Ferry and we all are, shocked. What is this thing, fear and death? How very dare it come to our beloved island and worry us all. Does it have a visa?

But those of us who are familiar with sorrow and grief and knowing what it is to experience a loss, don’t feel the fear so much for ourselves. Only for our families, who may be young, or old.

I work as a civil celebrant these days. I have always wanted to marry people in my own romantic vision of my better self, and I almost performed a marriage ceremony last year. But these days its all funerals and soap. See below how I make my living and fill my soul.

1. I am a civil celebrant working with bereaved families to deliver loving and memorable funeral services with or without prayers or hymns. I am the person at the front of the crematorium talking to everyone while everyone cries back at me. I support the families through their grief. It’s not easy. It does not pay well. But it is emotionally and spiritually rewarding.
2. I make soaps and bath bombs in my spare time to cheer me up. I sell them at village markets and do a mail order service. I make all sorts. The dark art that is making these dissolvable and foaming entities, is both hit and miss.  It does not pay well. But it is emotionally and hygienically rewarding.

I was going to tell a story about my brother but instead today, I will tell you a story about number 1. Being a civil celebrant.

Number one. Being a civil celebrant.

It is a strange thing to become, a civil celebrant. I don’t think I have met anyone who says at the age of six when asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? “I want to bury people and see everyone cry”. No.

When I was asked what I wanted to be when I was 6, I said I wanted to be a comedienne (It was a Saturday night after all and I think we had all just finished watching Les Dennis at his piano). No you don’t, said my mum. You want to be a doctor, or marry a doctor, or be a secretary. No, I don’t. I thought. It was about this time I learned not to tell my mum again that I wanted to be a comedian. It spoiled her dreams.

I loved my mum.

After she passed away in 2006 I waited three years before I tried out being a comedian. I went on stage in Manchester Comedy Club in my smart blue woollen dress, black tights and ankle boots. I was going to stand for five whole minutes and make people laugh before the gong went. I was going to effectively, ‘Beat the Gong.’

 It was the first time I had been on a stage since I played a Nazi general in the Huyton College 1988 School production of The Sound of Music. I had been 15 and had to wear a glued on Nazi moustache, which has haunted me ever since.

Anway, there I was on this large stage in front of a professional microphone.

And there in the distance sat my sister and her family smiling with hope and joy and next to them, my blonde friend, Natalie. Surrounding them were hoards of young men and couples holding onto bottles of beer like joysticks betwixt their denim thighs.

I took a deep breath, i probably touched my fringe, then began to tell my jokes. I thought I was fab. I was not.

Why was no one laughing? Especially when I told my joke about me being the daughter of a publican and having to see a psychiatrist because I was disturbed; “I see drunk people”  – I said this in a whisper. Then I said it again, in even more of a whisper, a whisper with volume and rasping “I see drunk people”

Still nothing.

Had they not seen the film the Sixth Sense? Or were they all deaf? I paused. They couldn’t ALL be deaf?

And then the hackling started.

Nothing can ever prepare you for these two things in life. 1.  losing a mother  and 2. being hackled by the punters in the Manchester Comedy Club.

“Beef curtains” some shouted.

“DO YOU FANCY A SHAG?” came another bellow. I looked through the lights at the little fellow with the narrow nose, just to make sure I was making the right decision. I spoke clearly into the microphone, “Nope!” And this reply, to my utter surprise got everyone laughing. I looked at everyone bewildered. And then, I didn’t have anything else to say.

I had no more jokes, no more will to be there and my black tights in my ankle boots started to shake along with my legs as the adrenalin hit me. What was I doing?

I began to doubt my decision to ever be a comedian.  My six year old decision, clearly hadn’t been thought through.

The compere was sat at the far corner of the stage on a drumming stool, with his long hair splayed on his broad round shoulders. He spoke into his own professional microphone which was a lot lower than mine. “Shall we get her off?” he sneered. He was sat next to a large brass gong, he was holding the gong stick with a padded end. I was threatened with the crowd’s rejection – hundreds all at once about to damn me to the doom of the gong and my big idea of ever wanting to make people laugh.

And then, all of a sudden my blonde haired friend Natalie jumped up on to the stage, grabbed my professional microphone and started telling everyone off in her buttery Lancashire accent. “Right you lot, stop being such bastards right! This is my friend Mary and she just wants a chance. RIGHT? Stop being so ‘orrible and give her a chance ALRIGHT?” The crowd cheered. She continued and walked the stage and pointed her manicured fingers at them with real passion.

I looked at my boots smiling. Yes Nat, you tell them. Then the long haired seated gong master in the corner spoke. “Do you wanna’ ‘av a go, love? You’ll be better than ‘er”

“NO!” said Natalie. “ I do not want a go! She’s come all this way, she is dead funny, and she is so lovely, and you lot don’t know how lucky you are, if you just gave her a chance.” The crowd went quiet. Clearly they don’t like pleaders. I chewed my lip.

The hairy fat gong man uttered some expletives which I will not repeat and did his thing. “BONG”. The dull shrill shook through the air, the bong of wrong doomed us as being unacceptable comedic material and part of me agreed with it.

We were rejected for being crap comedians. Both of us, and Natalie wasn’t even meant to be part of the act. Together we never beat the gong.  We looked at eachother, her with the microphone, me in my blue dress. We walked off the stage. And then suddenly, there were cheers and applause and more shouts for beef curtains. Part of me thinks they were a bit sad to see us go. I on the other hand, was not.

Natalie and I finished our third bottle of wine outside the comedy club in the cold Manchester air laughing and then me crying and then we went back to her house where I vomited.

She was a great friend, Natalie. One of the best.

A few years later, Natalie would die. She left behind her a seven year old daughter and a mother. She left a lover, an estranged husband, a sister, father, brother and friends. She lost and left work colleagues, her job, her life, her child. Natalie lost her life. And everything that went with it.

At her funeral in the Rochdale Crematorium, the vicar stood at the lectern and told us not to think about Natalie’s battle with cancer as being a fight that was won or lost. I can’t remember the exact message, but something stuck with me that day. Watching the vicar talk as he tried to make sense of it all, dressed in black and white with grey hair and sad eyes.  A few years previously this same vicar had performed Natalie’s marriage. Then he had baptised her daughter. And now he would press the button for the curtain to be closed around her coffin as he committed her beautiful body for cremation.

As well as the memory of Natalie’s daughter crying to Somewhere Over the Rainbow before releasing a balloon to the sky for her mummy, in heaven, I can remember lots of tears on my face and big black cars.

We went to a pub for the wake. Her dad walked amongst everyone and made sure that we all had an order of service to take home. Then he drank with his second wife. Under the bay window he would sit and fiddle with the beer mat under his glass of red wine as I told him how sorry I was. He looked embarrassed. I went outside. On the other side of the dry stone wall in the bear garden where I sat with Oliver there were sheep grazing. They were shedding their white wool as they nibbled on the short grass. I cried. He told me not to. I tried not to. I looked over and saw the roof of Natalie’s house in the distance. I had visited her there just weeks before. I knew her eyesight was almost gone when I visited, but she said she liked my dress. I told her I would buy her one just like it. We drank limoncello. I had brought with me from Italy for her. She had hers from a sip cup which I held to her mouth. I used a mug which was sat on the bedside table. She touched my face and told me slowly, thanks mate, I love you. I love you too, I told her. I kissed her warm swollen cheek.

She had two brain tumours, was disabled down the right side and could still express love. She was still the same Natalie that berated the bear baiters at the Manchester comedy club a few years before. She was still my beautiful blonde friend from Lancashire albeit changed and distorted by the cruelty that is illness. She still could feel love.

I see Natalie most days. Her photo smiles at me from behind the mugs in the kitchen cupboard where I keep her Funeral booklet. Her dad was right to make sure that I got one, and everyone else there too.

I would go on to be present at more funerals of friends and parents. Alison’s funeral in 2017 was when I got my chance to practice standing in front of a microphone, again. I think it was this experience that made me think about become a civil celebrant and it was another friend Karen, who just blatantly told me, Mary, that’s what you should do.

But that’s enough about me…… please click on this link and see that I am trying to raise money to help people …… https://gogetfunding.com/alison-bereavement-society/

Until the next time…. be happy xx