Found she who must be obeyed in the bedroom this morning, extracting black clothing from the wardrobe and looking a little weepy. She had just found out that her grandpa had passed away in the night.
I met him once or twice and he was a stoic old chap. This morning the wife told me he had never been seriously ill in his life, but he had certainly had medical attention at one point because he was missing an arm. This didn’t seem to stop him going about his business and being independent. Last night he went to sleep and didn’t wake up, which is the way all of us would like to go (although I do have a fantasy about driving into a motorway bridge at 200 mph in a Ferrari, with Jennifer Love Hewitt having just attended to a primal urge in an imaginative manner, nano-seconds before we hit the concrete).
Apparently, when you do have to die, it is good to do it in the early morning. Something to do with not taking anything from the household as you pass on. That and the fact he had died peacefully, made the wife decide that she should not grieve too much, but of course she needed to go home for the funeral.
I have been to Thai funerals. They go on for days and there is a lot of sitting around at temples. There is also a surprising amount of good-humoured chat, snack eating and telephone conversations; even funerals are treated with a degree of light-heartedness in Thailand. She wants to go tomorrow, and she wants me to go too; but I reckon I will only be a grumpy hindrance sitting in the corner, so I have declined. But I will of course be making a contribution to the funeral expenses.
R.I.P. Grandpa