Funeral of a friend

Beanpole Brian finally popped his size 14's. He'd mapped out various projects for his retirement, instead of which he spent three years in a losing battle with cancer.  Bummer.  It was a good death though, at home where he wanted to be thanks to support from the Macmillan nurses, and with family at the bedside.  The funeral was not one I could dream of missing.  Some of the time my mind was runing on to another funeral I shall have to attend; not for a while, but in very different circumtances.

Brian and I had been ecumenical colleagues for about two weeks, then he started being rude to me, I was rude back and thus our friendship was sealed.  He was a devout, thoughtful servant of the Church and also a disarming twerp, who loved dogs, birds and children, completely at ease with himself and thus able to put others at ease also.  The sort of guy you could not imagine having an enemy in the world, although one would have to make an exception for the Bishop of Asterisk, who really got up Brian's nose, along with most of the noses in his diocese. 

You can "fight" cancer because, by and large, you don't lose your faculties.  You can make decisions about your treatment, brace yourself for the side effects of the chemo, struggle with the pain and determine to keep your composure at least in front of visitors.  Brian, apparently, lost it once during his final months, saying "oh eff, this is it" when given the news of a particular setback, and Brian never effed.  But that was all.  His little grand-daughters visited him in hospital not far from the end, and were enchanted by "Pa's magic bed", which went up and down all by itself!  (Brian had hidden the controls under the bedclothes and pretended to them that he just had to say abracadabra).

Brian died at 69, 18 years younger than my dad is now and his condition is merely incurable, not terminal.  But he won't be having any brave struggles with it.  You can't fight dementia as such, it holds all the cards.  You can of course be helped to find contentment within the condition - that's what good occupational therapy should be about - and take steps to check its advance.  But in the end the disease robs you of all awareness and ability to respond, you sink back into the blur of confusion.  How can you fight it when you no longer have a coherent sense of who you are or what's going on?  Dad won't be playing daft games with his great-grandchildren, should there be any, or even cracking his awful puns.  We'll be lucky if he can say anything or can remember who we are.  Horrible as cancer is, dementia is in this sense worse: it never puts you on your mettle, it takes your mettle away, denies you the chance to be courageous.  What a bloody undignified way to go.