GOODBYE REG

TO MY RECENTLY DECEASED BROTHER-IN-LAW

Reg - I thought I should drop you a note and let you know what’s been happening during the last week. You missed it.

Last Friday, Yo and I got a call from Nok. She said you’d just died. We drove round at once and she was there with the ambulance men, waiting for us to turn up before they bundled your body off to the hospital cold-room. Since then it’s been nonstop bureaucracy.

Because you’d died at home and were a foreigner your body had to be sent to the national autopsy centre in Bangkok. Before Nok could get it released, she had to obtain a letter from the British consulate. On Saturday I rang the Foreign Office in London and found a surprisingly efficient information service operating round the clock. On reflection, I could see why - I worked out, around the world there must be a couple of thousand other British expats dying each week, each one triggering a similar phone call.

Even though they were helpful, it was still a couple of days before Nok managed to get the letter she needed to get your body released from the autopsy centre and sent back to Pattaya, where she was arranging the funeral. By then, as far as the Foreign Office were concerned, you were no longer Reg Shaw, just a designated case number.

Nok’s had a miserable week of it but has stood the pressure well. Yesterday was finally the funeral. A small affair by local Buddhist standards - just a couple of hours, whereas the tradition round here is at least three days. It was pleasingly simple. The monk’s chanted, we climbed stairs to your coffin and threw flowers into a bowl beside it, then sat and chattered while your body was rolled away for cremation.  Simple but impersonal, any emotion we might have wanted to show overwhelmed by the formality of the procedure, so much so that I hardly had time to think through the fifty years we’d known each other, both as brothers-in-law and friends. Dinners, lunches, family events, conversations, shared opinions (and often opposing ones); and during the 17 years since you’ve been living with Nok in Thailand, the same again but from rather a different perspective, with many a good night out on the town.

Today was the second tranche. We drove to the naval port of Sattahip, where there are three long piers, each with five or six boats from the Royal Thai Navy making hourly trips out to sea to commit ashes to the deep, with newly bereaved families turning up by the minute. It’s a local industry,

The event was almost fun. Nok’s brother-in-law arrived with your urn in a cardboard box (Singha beer, once home to 24 bottles - you would have approved).  and there was a largish boat, big enough for 30 although we were only 7.

At the front, a small altar was quickly constructed for the urn, hung with an exceptionally nice picture of you in a Panama hat taken about ten years ago, surrounded by flowers. Yesterday’s priests were replaced by sailors from the Royal Thai Navy, three of them, better looking than the monks and more sympathetic in manner, and as we headed out to sea they conducted a short service.

When the boat stopped, it started rolling. Nok walked cautiously aft carrying the urn, now in a floatable kratong, and handed it to a sailor perched on the bottom step, a few inches above the choppy water.

He laid it on the surface and pushed it away from the boat. And there you were – ninety-two years of reasonably well-fulfilled life reduced to a little blob on a vast empty sea. Till you were sunk by a belligerent wave.

In as much as there was any real connection between that sorry little pot of ashes and all the good times we’d had together, I felt horribly insensitive doing nothing to save you as you sank to the bottom of the ocean. It felt bleak and lonely. But maybe that was a good thing, it gave everyone a moment of reflection.

Anyway, it was a heartfelt goodbye, I can assure you of that. Though personally I’d rather have dug a hole in the garden and put you beneath a nice jacaranda tree, then sat underneath with a glass of wine.

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