Farewell Dear Bob
Bob 1978
10 February.2016
Bob wrote the script for his final movie in which, albeit absent, he would both direct and play the starring role. He chose the location of his last resting place, the music and exactly when it was to be played. He chose Humanist undertakers, his casket, and even what was to be drunk at the party afterwards. Yes, he referred to it as a party, and he wanted his family and friends drinking champagne. John and Frank followed Bob’s script faithfully and organised everything with sensitivity and strictly according to Bob’s precise written instructions.
Bob played the music for his funeral service to Jake and me on several occasions over the last couple of years. He got a great kick out of the juxtaposition of the sublime voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler’s ‘Farewell’, from ‘The Song of the Earth’, and the raw energy of Blue Oyster Cult ‘Don’t fear the Reaper’. There he was at his desk, where he spent so much time, laughing like a drain at the changeover, running an internal movie of his own funeral. I’m not sure he knew just how moving, and unfunny, the music would be on the day and he certainly didn’t foretell what a large number of friends, old and new, from near and far, would make such efforts to turn up to say goodbye to him in a little glade in the middle of nowhere.
The night before Bob’s burial, there was a small gathering, a chance for a last meal together in Bob’s kitchen for his family and a few close friends, some old and some more recent. In many ways, it was like so many similar occasions down the years when Bob would import me, his erstwhile galley slave, to do the shopping and cooking for his brothers and sisters-in-law. Except this time, the main man was missing; like a light bulb had been blown, the house seemed so much darker than usual, and the air peculiarly thin in the particular oxygen that Bob imparted to social gatherings. All evening I had the strange, and stupid, feeling that any minute he’d turn up in a taxi from the airport, just as he had done so many times when we lived there, burst through the door, same wicked grin in place, laughing, and tell us he was only joking.
Still, we managed as best we could; told and listened to old tales, some funny, some now sad on the back of Bob’s final departure. Glad of each other’s company, we smiled and shed a tear or two before retiring in the hope of a good night’s sleep before our last goodbyes to a man like no other in our lives.
If Death Is Not The End by Robyn Hitchcock
If death is not the end, I’d like to know what is.
For all eternity we don’t exist,
except for now.
In my gumshoe mac, I shuffled to the clifftop, Stood well back,
and struck a match to light my life;
And as it flared it fell in darkness
Lighting nothing but itself.
I saw my life fall and thought:
Well, kiss my physics!
Time is over, or it’s not,
But this I know:
Life passes through us like the blade
Of bamboo growing through the prisoner pegged down in the glade It pierces your blood, your screaming head –
Life is what happened to the dead.
Forever we do not exist
Except for now.
Life passes through us like a beam
Of charcoal green – a golden gleam,
The opposite of how it seems:
It’s not you that goes through life
Life is the knife that cuts your dream
Around the seam
And leaves you turned on in the stream, laughing with your mouth open,
Until the stream is gone,
Leaving you cracked mud,
Not even there to be absent,
From the heartbeat of a dying fish.
In bed, upstairs, I feel your pulse run with the clock
And reach your hand
And lock us with our fingers
As if we were bumping above the Pole.
Yet I know by dawn
Your hand will be dry bone
I’ll have slept through your goodbye, no matter how long I wake. Life winds on,
Through Cheri and Karl who can no longer smell chocolate,
Or see with wonder wind inflate the sail,
Or answer mail
Life flies on
Through Katy who was Catherine but is bound for Kate
Who looks over her shoulder at the demon Azmodeus,
And sees the Daily Mail
(I clutch my purse. I had it just now.)
Life slices through
The frozen butter in the Alpine wreck.
(I found your photo upside down
I never kissed a girl so long,
So long, so lovely or so wrong) Life is what kills you in the end And I can cry
But you won’t be there to be sorry You were made of life
For ever we did not exist
We woke and for a second kissed.
Bob and Jake. Mallorca 1985
Our Love Caroline & Jake
Bob Edwards 1945-2016 