Reblogged from countingducks:

I sat in the car with my wife and travelled up to the cemetery where I’d been buried not long before. She didn’t know I was there, of course, I was now the silent passenger, the observer, the helpless carer whose love for her continued on like an afterglow on the planet where we had both lived. My presence would gradually fade as the last embers of my emotion vanished from this place

She seemed to be disoriented and walking up the wrong path. At last she arrived at a grave. “Frank Sutherland, Father to Christopher and Cecelia. 1954-2015”. . . My name was Phillip. Pausing briefly she then knelt and laid the flowers on his grave. I had known him well, a local care free drunk and party man who left a litter of children across the locality and died in a moment of reckless euphoria at the wheel of a borrowed car. On one famous occasion he had run for mayor.

I became aware of a presence and now here he was beside me, cheery as ever, and standing in death by his grave smiling down at my wife. “We first slept together twenty-three years ago.” he said by way of explanation, “Sorry, but, bloody hell, she was a goer and half wasn’t she”. I would have raised my eyebrows if I still had any, but I could still feel surprise.

Continue reading: An Unfortunate Discovery | countingducks