Yet another shocking hangover greeted me this morning. Dr Jim and I enjoyed scrambled eggs, then went for a nice, gentle walk down Beech Rd, past Chorlton Ees and along the Mersey to Chorlton Water Park. I chose to wear my trainers for the walk, even though I’d worn my walking boots for the night out. How stupid! Avoiding puddles because of the wrong shoes isn’t really in keeping with the spirit of a country walk.
The Southern Cemetery is vast, with different areas reserved for different faiths. We looked at grand Victorian constructions, like the grave of John Rylands and his wife, and we looked at headstones smaller than a cereal packet, simply labelled with a name. We saw Polish graves, Turkish graves, graves of soliders, pilots, and sailors. We pieced together family stories. The graves in the Jewish section almost without exception listed not only who was resting beneath them, but also who had survived to mourn each grave’s occupant. One husband and his wife were separated in death by ten years. The wife, the first to die, was “deeply mourned by her husband, son, daughters and friends.” The husband was “deeply mourned by his son, daughters, daughter-in-law, sons-in-law, grandchildren and many friends.” In that ten years without her, he had seen all of his children marry, and had known at least two grandchildren. But without the wife he cared for so dearly. Bittersweet. So it goes.
Another grave seemed to tell an interesting tale. It was the last resting place of one man and his two wives. He was born in 1898, and died in 1955. The first wife was born in 1902, and died in the early 1970s. The second wife was born in 1936, and died in the mid-1990s. He lived to the age of fifty-seven, the first wife to around seventy, and the second wife to around sixty. He was four years older than his first wife, and thirty-eight years older than his second wide. His second wife was only nineteen years old when he died. How long had they been married at this point? Three years? Perhaps even less. How did the first wife feel about the second? What was the relationship between these women like, who were separated by thirty years, but bound together by one man so strongly that they were both buried with him? Did his first wife wipe away the tears of his second on the day that he died? Did they spend time together, even as the second wife grew into a woman, and the first grew into an older woman? Did the second wife help to bury the first, throwing a second handful of dirt into the grave her husband occupied, fifteen years after the first, the very grave that she would go on to rest in herself?
After the football in the Famous Trevor Arms, I went to the Cornerhouse to meet Liz and to drop Jim off at the station. I was glad to see him and Liz cross paths again. They got on so well last time he was here. That feels like a very long time ago now. So much has happened since then, I thought, looking at them both. It was brilliant to spend the whole weekend with this old friend. And I was looking forward to ending my weekend with Liz.
We had a lovely evening. We ate at Pearl City, then watch The Wrestler at the Cornerhouse, which was sad, funny, sad, uplifting, sad and heart-breaking at moments throughout. Afterward Liz drove us home.
