An early funeral

Today has been one of the more difficult days of late. The main thing is I attended the funeral of PN. PN was born in the summer of the year 2000 and so only just turned 26. I last saw her about two weeks ago we both went to a party on a Saturday evening at a mutual friend’s home. That party wrapped up about 3 or 4 in the morning and PN asked if I would give her a lift home as I was going her way.

I drove her home and we talked about the party and things going on in her life and some of her recent experiences. I probably got her home around 5:00AM. I remember saying I would be coming back into town to meet up with some other friends for coffee and rather than only seeing each other at parties, which is what we’ve been doing the last few months, it would be lovely to get together with her for the same thing maybe get lunch or a coffee and just catch up properly, have a bit of a conversation.

PN was really very smart, well read and one of those people who could draw inferences from a conversation. She would notice in the way you made observations the things those observations implied about you. There aren’t a lot of people who can do that and it’s one of the things that made her interesting and worthwhile as a friend.

PN was a new friend. I think I met her for the first time less than a year ago. Most likely a philosophy event, which I used to go to a lot of when I lived in London. The day after I dropped PN home she called in to work sick. She wasn’t found for three days but the indication is that she probably passed away on the Monday night. Partly because she wasn’t found for three days it wasn’t possible at the inquest for them to determine conclusively what had happened and so troublingly the cause of death in PN’s case isn’t known.

One mutual friend suggested PN was very depressed but I wouldn’t have said so. Life can be up and down for everybody. Everyone has moments of happiness, moments of unhappiness, times in their life when they feel great and times when they feel things are very difficult. PN had been talking to me recently about an instance of unrequited love she was in the middle of. Finding herself with feelings for another person which weren’t returned and her recent choice to disconnect herself from that person rather than try to continue to be friends with them in some way.

We’d connected over that a little bit over the last few weeks because PN noticed I was feeling a little bit down after my break up with LZ. We talked about our shared experiences of the confusion and difficulty emotional attachment to another person can bring. Members of PN’s family came from Norway, Germany, and I think from Ghana. She was from Ghana originally and it was lovely to see photographs and other artefacts from her childhood and to learn more about her.

An uncle gave the eulogy and talked about how when he visited the UK he had asked her to show him around a little bit. After he gave her a little bit of money to get herself a treat and PN had gone and purchased a book. Explaining that it was meant to be something fun PN had assured him this was exactly why she bought a book with the money.

What I can’t get over just now is the feeling of futility. I was just getting to know PN, her family were just beginning to appreciate her as an adult, and she had only just started her career. She was smart, paid attention to other people and seemed to be in good physical health. It’s just hard to accept.