After the funeral I bought a packet of cigarettes and went down to the promenade.  It was a bleak day, typical mid-September weather as I found a dry spot on a bench and looked out onto the beach, lighting my first cigarette in 6 months.  I’d turned my mobile off, the beach was deserted, and the silence was like a dream.  The first drag was unsatisfying and empty, my own fault for buying menthols rather than the regular.  The clouds were low, it took no time at all for them to hide the horizon and approach like fog.

By the third cigarette it started to rain: that light drizzle that’s so fine you don’t even know it’s raining until you’re soaked.  I stood up lighting the fourth cigarette and thought about mouth cancer and lung cancer and how pale he looked in the coffin, even next to the white lilies I had placed all around him.
My lighter started spluttering and sparking at me, the gas evidently not coming up quick enough to catch.  I burnt my thumb, cursed, and watched as three seagulls flew over head; probably thinking I’d have food, perhaps dropping a bag of chips on the floor for them to scavenge in the autumn chill.
The drizzle got heavier and I thought about standing at the front of the church and preaching about him and how he was such a good father and good husband and how I wish my mother was there and how he requested to be buried next to her.  I didn’t mention the tube in his throat.  I didn’t mention that he couldn’t speak, so how the hell did I know what he wanted.  Maybe he wanted carnations, maybe he wanted roses, but I chose those fucking white lilies that seemed so appropriate.  That seemed so unoriginal and stale as people dutifully commented on how beautiful the arrangements were and how my father would’ve loved them.  I didn’t know that.  They didn’t know that.  Common courtesy makes sycophants of us all.

I get home and turn on my phone, expecting a hundred missed calls asking me how I am, how was the funeral etc. etc.  And find nothing.  I found a similar situation with the home answer machine.
I sat down next to the phone willing it to ring.  Even wanting it to be someone I didn’t like, talking to someone, anyone, would have helped.  Unfortunately I’m one of those who’s too stubborn to phone and ask for help myself.  It took me a while to realise no one was going to phone any time soon.
It’s incredible how worthy sitting and staring feels at times like these.

By the tenth cigarette someone did ring.  My best friend.  I turned the phone off because she should’ve rung sooner.  Anyone should’ve rung sooner.  Here I was sitting in an empty apartment filling it up with cigarette smoke and not even an absent relative rang to see how the funeral was.  I didn’t need alone time.  I don’t need alone time.  I needed to talk.  I still need to talk.  But she didn’t ring soon enough did she. 

She saw me at the funeral.  She saw my speech and saw my hands tremble whenever I shook them with someone.  It was all shaking hands.  No one put their arms around each other.  There were no tears.  It’s not like this wasn’t expected.  When my father had been lying in a hospice bed unconscious for the past 5 months with a hole in his neck for oxygen and a tube down his throat for liquidised food, everyone shed their tears then and forgot about him for the rest of the time.  Especially me.  Me and my fortnightly visits, work and a social life preying hard on my time, sitting in a room that smelt like piss and antiseptic wasn’t at the top of my priorities.

I decided if she rang twice more I’d pick up.  If she thinks I just need space she can sod off.  That’s all she ever gives me, space, and a bottle of wine. 
She didn’t call again, just a pathetic message asking me to ring her when I was ready.  Minimal effort, that’s all I have to look forward to with her.

When my mother died she was the same.  A week after the funeral I finally rang her, and she made me go over to hers for a bottle of wine.  I didn’t mention the hole in my mother’s neck either, or how she used to smoke a cigarette through it as a party trick.  I lit another one of my disappointing menthols.  What’s the point of smoking a cigarette if it fools you into thinking you’re smoking a mint.

Cigarette fifteen came and went with half a bottle of whiskey as I remembered how empty his eyes were the last time I visited him, 3 weeks before he died.  What used to be green had faded to a damp grey and I touched his hand and felt sick at how I had to see him like this.  To see what created me wither away like a plant, to shrivel into nothing like a fallen leaf in the autumn sun.  His skin was like paper, delicate and unnervingly cool.  He didn’t register my touch so I removed my hand and left the room, 10 minutes after entering.  I’m not ashamed that that’s the last time I saw him.
I lit the last cigarette and picked up the phone receiver.  Put it down.  Picked it up.  Put it down.  And for the first time that day a tear welled up and slid down my cheek as I thought about the irony of it all.  The holes in both their necks.  The cancer in both their lungs.  How rotten and black their insides were, how every breath was agony for them.  I stubbed out my last cigarette.  And went down to the shop for another packet.  Not menthols, this time.