Despite my best intention of a few weeks ago to get back into blogging with a vengeance, with the goal of one post per week, the best laid plans were yet again derailed.
As some of you know, the last few weeks have been rather rough for yours truly. Why exactly is still a little too raw for my blog - or even for anyone outside my five or six close friends. I might post about it eventually, but at the moment it's too recent. I lost someone close to me back home in Australia - my grandfather - and while I have the clarity of mind to comfort myself with the knowledge that he is in a better place, I'm not quite back to being the usual genuinely bubbly Australis that my friends know me as.
Speaking of my friends, this blog post is for you guys.
After hearing the news, and after having booked the flight back home to Australia to be with my family for his funeral, I set about the task of telling my close friends.
The people who know better than to ask how you are, because the real answer, the answer you don't give to supermarket checkout chicks when they casually ask "Hi, how are you today?" as they're packing up your groceries into green enviro bags at Coles, is obvious to them.
They don't ask because they don't need to ask. They know that you're hurting and that the best possible thing they can do is exactly one thing.
They can just be there for you, in their own unique way.
There's picking you up at 9pm with a six pack of Smirnoffs in the front seat and taking you out to a salsa club so you can both dance your hearts out until the small hours, like you did many times just a few years earlier as uni students.
Or taking you to a soccer game where the three of you celebrate just being together again over a Carlton Draught and a "Four n Twenty".
There's watching deliberately light-hearted DVDs with you on your sofa at the end of a two-week period which saw you cross ten time zones to be with your family in Australia for eleven beyond intense days, culminating in an epic 45hour journey halfway across the world involving two long-haul flights and a nine-hour train journey back home to Europe. And on top of all that, grabbing some of your favourite beers on the way over to your flat.
There's also making work as easy as possible for you by keeping your news from the rest of your colleagues until after you have left, and accepting without question that despite your best efforts, concentration on your job at this point is just as possible as turning back time.
But the best? The best was gently encouraging you to get out into the sunshine of a Sunday in late August and while away the afternoon lying on the warm bricks of Schlossplatz in central Berlin, listening to the Berlin Symphony Orchestra perform a piece which your grandmother later tells you was one of your grandfather's favourites.
I guess the short version of all this is exactly the conclusion I came to in the eulogy I struggled to read at the funeral.
Thank you.
I thanked my grandfather for the twenty-seven years' worth of memories, stories and experiences he left me with.
And I thank you guys for being you guys.
Charlie. La bella amica mia. The fellow members of the Cat Spew Jumper Appreciation Society. Puss in Boots. Capt'n. Thanks. In all four languages. ;)
