How to Feel Better by Cathy Rentzenbrink

Author:Cathy Rentzenbrink [Rentzenbrink, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2023-02-06T17:00:00+00:00

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

There is a final piece to be placed into the jigsaw of the story of my brother and his sister. I’d like to share it with you here.

Matty died in 1998 and there was a big funeral but, as far as I remembered, we were never able to face the final stage of picking up his ashes from the undertaker. I fretted about this over the years but didn’t want to ask my parents about it, partly because we all avoided the subject of Matty for fear of causing each other pain, but also because I didn’t trust my memory. I had been anguished and out of control after the funeral. What if there had been some kind of ceremony that I’d blotted out because I’d been so mad and drunk?

In the course of writing my first book I finally asked my mother. She told me that we hadn’t collected them, and that they were safely held at the undertaker’s in Yorkshire, along with other uncollected urns, some going back fifty years. A friend who works as a bereavement counsellor told me it isn’t uncommon for ashes to remain unclaimed, especially in the case of a difficult and untimely death. We weren’t the only ones who’d been unable to clear the final hurdle. Once again I felt a poignant solace in not being alone.

Now, my parents and I felt it was time and after many slow, cautious conversations we decided to scatter Matty’s ashes in the sea at Falmouth and then have a small slate plaque placed on my granny’s grave in Swanpool cemetery.

My granny chose and bought her plot several years before she died. It’s near her parents’ and she’d go to tend their grave and then spend time sitting by her own future resting place, looking out over the sea. I was fond of my granny and thought of her as an old lady, though she was only fifty-nine when she died. It seems a young age to have put so much thought and planning into death, but she had already had one bout of cancer and my granddad had died four years earlier, after his second heart attack, so perhaps that had concentrated her mind.

We thought of burying Matty’s ashes in the grave itself, but it didn’t feel right to incarcerate him again, after he’d spent so long in a persistent vegetative state. I wanted him to be free and unfettered and liked the notion of casting him to the winds, so that he would settle into the sea that had delivered our father to his first chance meeting with our mother on Custom House Quay in 1968.

I had imagined collecting Matty from Yorkshire myself and escorting him down to Cornwall by train or car, but in the end this seemed too eccentric, or too logistically difficult, or some fiendish combination of both.

By Christmas, we were ready. Or were we? The stonemason in Penryn had not returned our call and that seemed to be a sufficient reason to delay.

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