My late brother Simon will never walk in 2023 like the rest of us. He died on the hottest day of last year - July 19th - in Dove House - the only hospice in East Yorkshire. They had placed him in The Princess Diana Suite. There was a framed photograph of her by the swing doors. She had opened this room back in 1992. It was cool like a cave and it only took Simon four days to die in there.
Simon was a difficult human. I had given up asking him over to our house for Christmas so every year in the days just before Christmas, we would meet up at a venue half way between his humble rental cottage in the village where we were both born and my house in Sheffield. This was usually The Lakeside Shopping Village at Doncaster or the motorway services at the M18/M180 junction. There we would exchange gifts, drink coffees and converse about this and that.
He smoked all his adult life and ultimately this is what killed him - cancer of both the trachea and the oesophagus. Any weight he had fell away till he was just skin and bone. Not only did he smoke tobacco, he also smoked marijuana and cannabis and in his late teens/early twenties he changed from being a healthy happy-go-lucky kid who played football and laughed into a morose, withdrawn supercritic and fantasist. He made my parents' lives a misery in the late seventies. Some sort of psychosis happened in relation to the dope - I am absolutely sure of that. It plagued him for the rest of his days like asthma or eczema.
Following his death, I had to start to tidy up his affairs. This was not made any easier by the fact that he had failed to have a will made. I had to close down his bank accounts, sell his Mercedes van and with invaluable help from my wife Shirley, clear out his rental cottage. That took several days. Luckily, his landlord and landlady were very understanding. Of course there was also the funeral to arrange.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/0EI3Jty
