‘I made contact with one of the bereaved, a very old friend of mine, to pass on my condolences. I’ll admit to being slightly thrown when the phone was answered by the person I was certain I’d been told had passed away. Nevertheless, I asked to be put through to my old friend to console them on the death of the person who had actually just answered the phone, if you follow…’
These however many lockdowns of the last year have left me fatigued, as they probably have you. It’s been 12 months of isolating alone in my case. A year of trying to stay motivated, looking at new ways of tackling face mask bagginess, wondering what had happened to my constant companion of the last couple of years prior to lockdown, the muttering, which more or less vanished as soon as we entered the pandemic era. I’ve found myself bubbling, de-bubbling, re-bubbling, in-between bubbles. There’s been lots of bubble-related activity, though I’ve spent more time analysing the bubbling, working out whether it’s safe for me and my aunt and uncle to bubble, than on the actual physical bubbling itself. This whole thing has just been so strange, like one of those Sci-Fi stories I’ve sought to avoid since childhood, Sci-Fi and Fantasy not being my glass of decaf coffee at all.
One of the strangest instances I’ve had in the last twelve months came at the start of December last year when I heard from my aunt that someone we knew very well from south London’s now near-vanished old Spanish community had passed away.
I made contact with one of the bereaved, a very old friend of mine, to pass on my condolences. I’ll admit to being slightly thrown when the phone was answered by the person I was certain I’d been told had passed away. Nevertheless, I asked to be put through to my old friend to console them on the death of the person who had actually just answered the phone, if you follow…
My old friend picked up the phone and I offered my condolences. The plus of these situations, for the introvert like myself, is that small talk is not expected. There’s no preamble. You just get straight to it. You’re right in there with the, “I’m so sorry to hear…”. I try to avoid the ‘Sorry for your loss,” whether saying it or writing it in condolence cards because I think it’s an Americanism that came here around the time the first series of NYPD Blue changed TV forever back in ’94 (’93 in the States). I’d never heard a British person say ‘sorry for your loss’ prior to that.
Moving on, I found myself in the very unusual situation of offering them my condolences with regards to the person that had just answered the phone. I’m not sure what I thought was going on. I know I’d started to question the information my aunt had given me. She can be, well, she is, the most chaotic person I know, but still, I found myself thinking, ‘Surely she couldn’t get something this big wrong?’ I moved from that line of thinking to telling myself maybe some elderly brother I’d never heard of, with an identical voice, had come to stay with the family during this difficult period.
As I consoled my friend on the loss of the person that had just answered the phone, the first thing they said was, ‘You mean, the man that just spoke to you on the phone?’
Yes, that man…
Obviously that man was still alive. It was, I learned, his wife that had passed away. While I offered my condolences, again, I did feel they’d been completely undermined by the commiserations I’d offered on the passing of the man that was still clearly alive. I didn’t feel the re-condolences delivery was pitched with the right sort of grave tone these situations demand. Obviously, my original condolences had been fresher, more off the cuff, heartfelt. The second one was a lot trickier, you know. The freshness had gone. It was slightly disingenuous. I’d just been completely thrown.
‘So, hang on,’ I heard the Not DECEASED say in the background after my cock up was relayed to him while I remained on the phone waiting to offer my condolences next to his daughter, another friend. “You mean to tell me that **** calls to offer his condolences because he’s heard I’m the one in the ground. I answer the phone. He knows it’s me, but he still offers his condolences?” I couldn’t work out if he was angry or amused. Regardless, it was good of them to then accept my re-condolences for the relative that had actually died.
I didn’t specify where I’d received the incorrect information, but they knew my aunt. They know of the helter-skelter way she manages her day-to-day life. That’s where we all knew the trail led back to. She’s scatty. It’s not an age thing. With my aunt, this kind of thing could’ve happened forty years ago.
I called my aunt that evening. ‘You gave me the wrong information,’ I told her. ‘It wasn’t so and so that died. It was his wife.’
‘I never said he’d died. You can’t pin this one on me.’ My aunt replied. ‘It was the wife. I told you.’ She finished by again calling me by the wrong name. I took it on the chin. After all, it was me that was in the wrong here. A year earlier, I don’t think I would’ve got this kind of serious information wrong.
Can I read anything into this? Was the stress of a year of lockdown, of being on my own every day and night, the muttering long gone, behind this? Or was this simply another door, taking me deeper into middle age, opening up, further scrambling my increasingly scattered thoughts?
In a way I was glad I couldn’t attend the funeral owing to lockdown rules. I felt any condolences I offered to the NOT DECEASED would’ve required some acknowledgement that I’d originally thought he’d died, and I wasn’t sure how I would’ve brought that up. Would I have acknowledged the incorrect condolences as a preamble to offering my condolences for the loss of his wife, or would I have offered my condolences first, before trying to find a segue that could take me to what by then would be a well-honed anecdote concerning offering my condolences to his niece on his passing AFTER he’d picked up the phone to me?
I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with that. Segues within SMALL talk aren’t one of my strengths.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
Podcast: Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available