I have attended two funerals in the last three days. Both were for longstanding friends, David and Maureen. We were all born in the same street within a month or so of midsummer day 1937. Cancer took both of them away.

The church was full for both funerals, our old retired vicar came back specially to take the services and the music was lovely. Reverend Strong (what a great name for a vicar) reminded us of the time last Christmas when Maureen or Mo, as we called her, struggled into church to play the organ. He had suggested that she let someone else do the job but, as she replied, she had been our organist for fifty years and she wasn’t going to give up yet.

‘Reverend Davies paid for my organ lessons,’ she had reminded him. ‘I can’t let him down.’

Reverend Strong reminded us that old Reverend Davies died in 1969 and, as Mo had received her instruction in 1954 and had played for most of the services in the church until she married and moved away as well as for the last ten years, he reckoned she had repaid her debt many times over.

As we filed out of the church to stand around the grave for David’s burial I thought back just a few days to when I had been asked to go and see him laid out in his coffin. To say goodbye, I was told. I did the same for Mo and still don’t know if I was wise to do so. My last memories of them both are now of cold dead bodies not the lively people I knew. They look like waxwork models in my mind now, not real flesh and blood friends.

We grew up together, our parents were good friends and even though we moved to other places as we grew older we stayed in touch. I remember we and the rest of our gang built dens, campfires and rafts in the countryside around our town. We played cowboys and indians, doctors and nurses and postman’s knock. I suppose Mo and the other girls probably did girls stuff as well and we boys played football or cricket depending on the season. School time passed in a blur of shared homework, finding ever more devious methods of avoiding school rules and some serious study when we each decided to get to university after all.

I became a pharmacist, David qualified as an architect and Mo became a dentist then married a soldier. While I stayed within eighty miles of home both of them travelled the world. I received postcards and letters from ever more exotic places then, in more recent years, we learned to email. We swopped stories about our children and sorted the world out as best we could given our complete lack of influence on anything other than our own families. 

David, with his wife, and Mo and her husband all moved back home when they retired and we were able to get together for a good gossip more often. Then they became ill. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy took over their lives for long periods over several years until, within days of each other, their battles were lost.

I still don’t know what to think about death. What happens next? Do we just decompose, disappear as if we never existed or does something of us live on? I find it difficult if not impossible to imagine heaven or hell, the cartoon angels on puffy white clouds look ridiculous to me. Is it really possible for everyone who ever died, for whatever reason; accident, disease, old age, murdered and murderer, to reappear together in a paradise or wherever?  Does resurrection happen? 

The vicar spoke of my friends in the present tense. They are, he said several times, not were. I know that in a sense something of us lives on in our children, genetically speaking. I am what I am physically because of my ancestors, and my parents gave me their thoughts and characters to share as well. My children will be what I am to some extent combined with other new influences. 

I think other people such as partners, friends and work colleagues also added to my being. Their ways are part of mine, their thoughts and feelings have become something of me. My two late friends are also a part of me and a part of everyone they ever met. They will live on. I think Reverend Strong was right; they are, not were.