Hindsight

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teens/early twenties he changed from being a healthy happy-go-lucky kid who played football and laughed into a morose, withdrawn supercritic and fantasist.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.

Simon had made some provision for his old age by taking out a pension policy with a well known life assurance, pensions and savings company. He had named me as the sole beneficiary but dealing with them has been nightmarish. So many e-mails, so many phone calls and so many lengthy waits in between. Resolution still seems a long way off and until I get that I will still feel chained to Simon - unable to truly break free. By the way, none of the money will come my way for I plan to honour his dying wish - to distribute it amongst his nieces and nephews.

Simon was my childhood playmate. We wrestled, climbed trees and collected caterpillars. We slept in the same bedroom where we waited excitedly for Father Christmas to come. We made sandcastles and mud pies and music. I loved and cherished him as siblings often do but later that love evaporated. He seemed to resent me passing my A levels, going on to university, travelling the world, having a steady career, getting married and having a family as he got left behind - still smoking his roll-ups and his dope and grumbling bitterly about anybody in authority. It was always their fault.

Perhaps, to some extent  we all live in the shadows of what we might have been but this was more painfully true of Simon than of most people and he felt it like a rash. If only he could have lived his life again. If only.