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'Thanks for the memories'

David Weaver

gone but not forgotten
‘Thanks for the Memories’
By David Weaver ©

He was my best mate you see. One of those blokes you get along with from the very first meeting, a born comedian with the world as his stage, and we the audience clapping enthusiastically. He was less aggressive than me, and more inclined to put his point of view across without getting upset. Nature’s gentleman, most said, but to me he was just my mate a man to be trusted without a moments hesitation.
Every Saturday we’d have a couple of beers in his shed and put the world to rights whilst half listening to the radio as out football team was massacred by anyone they came up against. Over the years the Carlton Football Club had had its fair share of glory but in later times we suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Shakespeare must have done with the Stratford on Avon Rovers so many years ago. In summer we followed the cricket but Australia’s world dominance made us feel almost sorry for the other teams trying to beat us.
There was one time when we talked of death and made a pact that if either of us ever reached the stage when there was no hope for us the other would make sure there’d be no suffering. That prolonged treatment to keep the patient alive was kept to a minimum with the final gesture of a friend in the purest sense of the word, after receiving the wink and a nod of consent. We both knew it would never happen but we promised each other anyway, shook hands on it, and then continued on with our crusade to laugh a lot and enjoy whatever was thrown at us, for good or evil.
When he became seriously ill we still met each week and I sadly watched him fade away to no more than a skeleton, for cancer does not distinguish good people from bad. We still laughed a lot at our silly jokes like the time he broke his teeth and went down to the local undertaker and asked him for a loan of a set of dentures from one of the many he kept in a drawer previously removed from the towns corpses. Told him he could have them back when the time came to bury him. I laughed at that one but the laughter masked a terrible sadness.
Near the end he reminded me of our pact and said he would understand if I didn’t have the will to carry it out. Reckoned he wouldn’t have been able to do it for me either and not to feel so bad about it.
I went to sit with him in his final hours as he lapsed in and out of consciousness but he couldn’t speak to me. During a more lucid moment his gaze met mine and he nodded his head with just the flicker of a smile at the corner of his sagging mouth, and then he winked.
My best mate’s been dead for three years now because we had a pact, you see, and a nod of his head and the wink of an eye left me with no alternative for after all, that’s what mates are for isn’t it?
 
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