Death admin.

“We are slowly working through the death admin.”

The message was from my niece Jules, Gillie’s daughter – Gillie, whose funeral I wrote about here. Jules and her sister are meeting at their mother’s house at the end of May to start thinking about what to do with it. “It feels a bit too soon,” she said, “but has to be done.”

Death admin.

It is a phrase that stops you in your tracks, if you let it. Administrative. Procedural. Managed. It does exactly what language under pressure always does. It wraps the unbearable in process, contains the grief inside a to-do list. The death certificate, the bank accounts, the subscriptions that keep billing the dead, utility bills, log ins and passwords.

And then the house.

I was taken directly back to 2014, to the time I spent settling my uncle Dennis into a nursing home and getting to grips with his affairs. I wrote about it in a piece I had rather forgotten. Re-reading it just now, I found this:

Going through their papers (my uncle has kept everything) I found a cutting from The Guardian, a short piece, Little boxes of past lives by Peter Preston – about how the memorabilia stored in our garages and lofts will mean little to those who one day clear them.

And as I have gone through my uncle’s brown cardboard boxes, files of papers, treasures and bric-a-brac I have travelled the years of his and his wife Otti’s lives, 40 before marriage, 40 married, and my uncle’s last lonely 10.

I still have the Peter Preston cutting. It is here, in my files, exactly where it should be. A small piece of yellowing newsprint from the Guardian, December 2005. My uncle had clipped it from the paper and kept it. By then, Otti had been dead less than a year. He was, I have come to understand, already thinking about it. About what would one day have to be done.

And the thing about Preston’s piece – published some twenty years ago now – is that the anxiety it describes is completely unchanged. How much of what we keep will mean anything to those who have to clear it? How will they know what mattered? The stuff in the boxes is only the bare bones; the rest – the life that gave those objects weight – will by then be gone.

Jules and her sister will meet at Gillie’s house at the end of May, and they will begin. I am sure it will be tender and it will be difficult. There will be things they cannot decide about, and things they cannot throw away, and things they find that they did not know existed. And there will be, I suspect, the exact same feeling I had standing in my uncle’s flat: that you are travelling a life, and that most of it has already slipped out of reach.

“It feels a bit too soon, but has to be done.”

It always feels a bit too soon, I think. That may be the point.

Losing a friend

I had my own set of keys to Gillie’s house. I will, as I said at her funeral on Thursday, give them back to her daughter Jules. But holding them these past few weeks, I have been thinking about what a key actually means between friends.

It’s not about access. Rather it’s about the decision that was made – at some point, probably without ceremony, and certainly without being made a fuss of – that you are the kind of person who should be able to let yourself in. That you are, to use a word that doesn’t quite capture it, trusted.

Gillie’s friendship worked like that. Unconditional in practice, though not in the sentimental sense. She had standards. She had views. She was, quietly, firmly, a second-wave feminist who had given her daughters a train set and stacked Spare Rib on the shelves when I was young enough to find it illuminating. She was a Samaritan. She became a psychotherapist. Into her eighties she was volunteering at the food bank.

She never just drifted through life.

She was also, technically, my ex-sister-in-law. A category that the English language has never been able to make sound warm. The marriage to my brother ended. That’s the official record. What the official record doesn’t show is that by the time the marriage ended, Gillie and I had been in each other’s lives for the better part of thirty years. You don’t simply reclassify that.

At her wake I talked with Stephen, her first cousin, who had also spoken. We recalled the old saying: you don’t choose your relatives but you can choose your friends. He was thinking about his own journey with her, from obligatory family connection to something chosen.

I was thinking about mine.

The thing about friendship with someone like Gillie is that it doesn’t require maintenance in the way that some relationships do. You didn’t have to perform it. You could arrive, with or without warning. I had the keys – and within minutes you would be talking about the things that mattered: the friends she had lost, the books she was reading, the next holiday, the grandchildren coming to stay, whatever was coming next. There was always something coming next.

She is gone now. The gap where her friendship was is very raw.

I shall give Jules back the keys. But perhaps not quite yet.