6 months on

A while ago I read an article in the Guardian about how a Mother, knowing she had a terminal illness had filled a freezer with home cooked meals for her grown up family to eat on significant occasions in the year following her death. At the time I thought how poignant that was and how it would be difficult to eat the first Christmas dinner after your parent's death when they were no longer there .... It was hard enough seeing my Dad's timings and cartoons that he had written in chino graph next to the cooker on the first Christmas after he died, no one had had the heart to rub them out till then, though my Mum did shortly after. As someone who adored Christmas it all seemed strangely two dimensional without him...

Well today I am eating, not a Christmas Dinner but a chilli that was cooked by my dearest friend a couple of weeks before he died. He was a great one for cooking in bulk and then freezing extra portions so there was always something nice to eat when he was too busy to shop or cook or had arrived home late from one of his many foreign travels After his death I liberated one of these from his freezer thinking of this day, however...

I almost can't bring myself to eat it knowing how ill he was when it was made and what a struggle it was for him to be bothered, though to the last week the rest of the world wouldn't really have known, only those who saw him take off the public persona and slump in a heap of exhaustion and pain from metastatic prostate cancer.

So today, six months after I sat by him and held his hand for hours and hours as he gradually struggled to leave this life I am going to sit down at a beautifully laid table with appropriate music and a bottle of the finest Bordeaux to accompany this last morsel and raise a glass to the most positive, welcoming, interesting and loving man I've had the pleasure to know.

I do though also have his hand written recipe for said chilli , complete with instruction, (appropriately!) to chop several scotch bonnets.....so if I want to recreate it and by doing so try to conjure him back, I can. I shall always smile and remember a most remarkable man when I do.