When a friend dies

By Shevlin Sebastian

At 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, May 15, I logged on to take part in the funeral service of my friend George Joseph, who died of Covid comorbidities on May 7, in a hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts. The service was taking place in the 109-year-old Notre Dame Catholic Church at Southbridge, Massachusetts. George’s friends had logged in from different parts of America, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, and in India, from Kolkata, Kochi, Jaipur and other places.

At the start, Gina Kuruvilla, George’s cousin, gave a eulogy. “George was very kind,” she said. “He was one of those people whom everyone will agree did not have a single mean bone in his body. He loved his family. He especially loved Tessy (wife). He talked about you so much.”

I knew George because we lived a few buildings away from each other in Kolkata in the 1980s. He was 6’2” and heavily built. I was 5’6” and frail. It was like David and Goliath. We regularly met up with friends for an evening adda, sitting on a low wall by the side of a road.

We gazed longingly at the girls in the area, and we watched as one friend adopted an almost foolproof method of getting a woman’s attention. He would go up and say, “You are beautiful. Would you be interested in acting in the movies or even theatre?” Our friend was a theatre artist, so what he said was correct. He also knew people in Tollywood.

Many girls stopped in their tracks, zapped by this question and with immediate stars in their eyes. And then our friend, with his silky-smooth tongue, would make the necessary moves to go on a first date. And he succeeded most of the time. To his credit, one or two even tried their luck at the theatre.

We would laugh but felt envious of his skill. This was a time before the mobile phone and its irresistible apps, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp. So, it was not easy to get access to the fairer sex, at all.

Sometimes, we went to George’s house, when his parents went out to work and his sister was in school. Our morning college finished at 9.45 a.m. Then we would sit and chat, have several cups of tea, and listen to music. George introduced me to rock bands Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tul but I never became a fan. I preferred the simple tunes of Abba, Boney M, Carpenters, and the Bee Gees.

All these thoughts passed through my mind as I watched the mass. It was a beautiful church. It had numerous large pillars, and it seemed like the floor was made of mosaic tiles. The priest, Fr. Ken Cardinale gave a sweet sermon and remembered some funny moments with George. With relief, the audience laughed.

I couldn’t believe George had passed away so quickly. The last time I met him was a couple of years ago, when he came to Kerala to meet his mum. We sat in the coffee shop at the Gokulam Park hotel, just opposite my former office, in Kochi. George had prematurely greyed. It was only that time had passed, but the ease of conversation and the camaraderie remained intact. We spoke non-stop for one-and-a-half hours.

During the mass, normally, I would have switched off Whatsapp. This time, for some unknown reason, I kept it on. Soon, a friend wrote, as he watched the service, ‘One by one, we will all have to leave’.

I quickly typed out, ‘Yes. This is unavoidable.’

There were messages from other friends.

One asked for a link to the service.

And some, like Suresh Reginald, were present in the church. Suresh has been George’s friend for over 50 years. He stayed just two houses away from George in Kolkata. Like George, he is 6’ 2” but slimmer. Now he is based in Lexington, Massachusetts, an hour’s drive from the church. They remained in touch (George had worked in India, Singapore and Brunei, where he spent several years, before he migrated to the US).

This is what Suresh wrote after attending the service: ‘The funeral service was perfect. The message from the family brought back warm memories of George, always kind, always high-spirited, always joking, and sometimes the jokes were funny. The sermon was given engagingly by Fr Ken who knew George well. There were about 200 people present, filling the church up with social distancing in place. It was a gorgeous, sunny, and warm spring day, with not a cloud in the sky. Tessy's faith has provided her with an enormous reservoir of hope to handle these weeks of adversity with a positive outlook, and she continued to display this inner strength.’

Indeed, Tessy has a deep faith in God. And this faith will sustain her, as she faces a future without George, who had been by her side for 31 years. It will be tough, very tough, but time, as always, will be the healer.

Because of Covid deaths all around, mortality is at the forefront of our minds.

On Saturday morning, I had read an article in the ‘New York Times’ about an American nun, Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble, whose mission has been to revive the practice of memento mori. This is a Latin phrase that means, ‘Remember your death’.

As the reporter Ruth Graham wrote, ‘The concept is to intentionally think about your death every day, as a means of appreciating the present and focusing on the future’.

In the article, Sr. Aletheia said, “My life is going to end and I have a limited amount of time. We naturally think of our lives as a kind of continuing and continuing.”

George’s death, the first in our group of friends, has made us all focus on our own cessation of life. When will it end? At what age? At 61, 65, 71, 75, 86 or 91. It doesn’t matter. But the years are limited now. The youthful feeling of an endless life ahead has long gone.

The service concludes.

I close off the link and get up.

In Kochi, it is pouring now — a heavy, pulsating, and intense rain, accompanied by howling winds. The effects of Cyclone Tauktae, which hit the Gujarat coast, were being felt in Kochi.

I could not step outside.

So, I walked up and down the house, trying to shake off my melancholy mood...