A  HAPPY DEATH

 

Dear Flowey,

It must have been a happy relief for you when your George finally departed.  I know it was for me when my Cecil went his own way.  All those years pottering on his allotment, doing the pools, casting the flyrod, acting the fool … and what was it all for?  Anyways, if you believe in Heaven, Flowey, pet, as I do, George and Cecil will be there now, happy as anybody can be, mixing with all those angels and saints and minor sinners.  Only big sinners are kept out.  So we'll be OK when the big day comes, I guess.

 

How many weeks is it now?  I must come over and see you, Flowey, and make sure you’ve taken off those widow’s weeds.  Life’s too short for moping.  When my Cecil finally waved goodbye, I was back in harness the very next day, I can tell you.  All this is not to say that I don’t send you due condolences … but merely to bring a new slant to your sorrow and mourning.  George wouldn’t have wanted it. 

All my love, Agnes.

 

***

 

Dear Agnes,

Thanks for you letter, strange though it was.  You end by saying “George wouldn’t have wanted it.”  Well, whether he does or doesn’t, I never paid a blind bit of notice to his wishes when he was alive so I’m damn well not going to start now he’s dead!  I intend to remain in dutiful mourning for a whole year and I have bought thousands of yards of black lace.  All this business of ‘life must go on’ and ‘George would not want you to be sad for long’ and ‘He’s off happy in heaven now, so you must create your own heaven here on earth’ … I really feel are bunkum.  I must reap what I sowed and I’m set to cry buckets of tears in honour of the man I killed.

 

            Killed?  I hear you ask.  Yes, let’s not beat about the bush -  George’s death was at my own hand, or it may just have well have been.  I did nothing to make his last days comfortable.  I merely thought it was him swinging the lead as he ever did all those years.  Off work with a twinge in his back.  Tootling down to the doctors simply for latest panacea.  Making my life a misery with his phantom births of this that and the other.  So when he complained of a headache, I simply poo-poohed it, Agnes, I really did … and when he took to his bed with a fever, I didn’t even bother to call the doctor.  I simply said: "George, I m sick and tired of your malingering ways, your skiving lily-livered aches and pains.”  He just stared up at me with that cowed look of his, pleading for something I would not even begin to understand.

 

            I did not even believe him when he went blue with cold and as rigid as a plank.

 

            So, yes, Agnes, I killed him with unkindness.  And I must take my due punishment.  I shall let those widow’s weeds grow all over my garden, simply to remind me of what I did or, more importantly, of what I did not do.

 

            As to your Cecil, I always thought the circumstances of his death were not as clear-cut as you pretended in your letters to me.  As to that happy death releasing him from the pain and suffering of his own body, I reckon, Agnes, it was more the pain and suffering that <I>you</I> embodied for him that he was so desperately trying to escape … and, finally, you unlocked the prison door as soon as he could suffer no more at your hands when every pain under the sun you could have dished out was used up and he flew off with broken wings to whatever place houses crushed spirits such as your Cecil’s.

 

            And so, Agnes, let us leave it at that.  I see where my crime lay.  <I>You</I> have yet to do so.   Flowey.

 

***

 

Dear Flowey,

I am beside myself.  How could you commit such words to paper, let alone think them?  Cecil’s last words to me were “I love you” and he smiled up at me as the last breath passed his lips.  How dare you imply otherwise?  We had a happy marriage.  It is merely jealousy that stirs you to write in such a vein.  Simply because you and George were riven with such misunderstandings and cruelties does not allow you to shuffle them off upon the memories of other folk like me and Cecil. 

 

            Yes, remain in those widow’s weeds for the rest of eternity, for all I care.  I shall come and see those nettles in your garden, for death will have no sting for me.  A happy death is one uncluttered by guilt or recrimination.  And I shall eventually be welcomed by my Cecil with open arms.  He shall congratulate me on not mourning his memory for long.  Being occupied and back in the swing of life -- the only cure for that shadow death often casts upon your sunny plots.  I even gave Cecil a helping hand in his last moments to ease his passage.  Speed and activity represent the optimum way forward.  Never look backward.

 

            I shall even forgive you for your words.  Mourn on, dear lady, if that’s what drives you.

 

            Love, Agnes.

 

***

 

Dear Agnes,

Your latest letter reached me on the same day that your Cecil arrived here.  I thought you told me he had died and he was waiting for you in Heaven  with open arms.  Well, it was <I>my</I> arms that he wanted, evidently, and with George gone, we can at last face the world with our love.  You may have married Cecil, Agnes … you may indeed have some ritual of blotting him out of your mind by fabricating his death and the way you gave him that last push…

 

            Well, he has indeed reached his Heaven.  Me.

 

            He has persuaded me, too, to ditch my widow’s weeds.  My George, he said, would have wanted it that way.  Well, George is probably happily flyfishing in the silver pools of Heaven or acting the goat as God’s own jester or devising methods of gambling that even angels and saints can join in without God’s omniscence making it too easy for them. 

 

Love Flowey.

 

***

 

Dear Flowey,

Needless to say, someone darkened my door today.  I cannot say that I am pleased.  I never liked men who do the pools.

 

Still, one has to cultivate one’s earthly garden, as a famous writer once said.  And at least he brought his hoe hoe hoe.

 

Yours Agnes.

 

PS: Your George looks quite well, you’ll be pleased to hear.