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Death Notes: 2024-10-29

10-29.gmi

My dad called this evening. Family information around the death disseminated across the Atlantic then across Canada by phone call, more personal than our usual way of keeping in touch (email and WhatsApp).

Still no word on a funeral date. Everything around my cousin's death, slow. The coroner services are as backlogged as everything else, and it'll still be weeks until a cause of death is confirmed. His partner wants a Unitarian service, and a burial. In our family of atheists, agnostics, and lapsed Anglicans, I doubt there will be any objections. Already I'm thinking of next year, our potential trip out. Along with everything else, a stop in Liverpool to visit his grave.

The hardest part of this has been seeing my dad knocked sideways like the rest of us. I'm not used to seeing him upset, which in his stoical way comes as sudden silence. After the nuts and bolts of death and the corresponding planning, he started talking about how in 1972, he was involved in a bad car accident, rear-ended at 60 kph while stopped. A bad concussion lead to time off work, and he went back to England to visit his family. My cousin at the time was a baby. Seven, maybe eight months old. My dad was just passing through, wasn't able to see him - the baby was sleeping, naps non-negotiable.

So the first time he saw him was six years later, when my parents went to England for their honeymoon. After a long flight from Toronto, and a harrowing drive courtesy of my granddad, they crashed at my aunt's house and woke up to see a young boy in a spaceman helmet laughing and jumping on their bed.

At this point mutual silence on the line.

My cousin was the oldest of all of us - a teenager when I was a toddler, an adult when I was a teenager. And now he's gone.

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