Chapter 29: part 2

I’d asked everyone to bring their favourite photographs and write down their favourite memories of Jenny so that we could set up a display as a focus for the day.

Jill told me it was important for the children to have their own pictures of Jenny, as well as clothes and mementos that they could keep.

I’d already known that I was building an archive when Jenny’s health had started to deteriorate the autumn before (was it really only nine months ago?).

Now all the guests brought marvellous recollections with them, and the college, its green lawns and the tree-studded gardens were as serene as ever.

It really did feel like the right place for this occasion. Jenny had belonged here, and so had we both.

Emily and William behaved brilliantly – a real credit to Jenny and to me, I thought – and I was the proudest father alive that day.

But if you’ve ever got married, then you’ll know that feeling of being the focus of attention, when everyone has come to see you and yet you’ve very little time to speak to them each in turn.

The day flashed past, but late in the afternoon I found some time to wander through the gardens with Rémi, a Swiss student I’d worked closely with in Spain.

A natural-born optimist with an unlikely mop of dark curly hair, Rémi always had a smile and two jokes on his lips.

He hadn’t always been the favourite of the professors, but I’d appreciated his good humour from the first time we’d met, and he’d been a great friend to Jenny as well.

And standing there by the lake, trying to say a day’s worth of catching up in just a few minutes, in many ways that brought the memories of England and Switzerland all together.

Rémi was thoughtful and reflective, and I could see that he was deeply saddened, too, but it was as easy a conversation as we had always had. He loved us both, and nothing would change that.

For a few minutes, we talked together then, about the years in England, before and after Berne, about the children, and about Jenny’s illness and her death.

And embraced within that sweep across the years, encompassed in that one moment, in that one place, was all the time that Jenny and I had shared.

They say that’s what grief is all about.

You have to bring the past into the present, to put it all together, before you can begin to accept it.

But however much that might bring a different perspective, I’d challenge anyone to make any real sense of it, all the same.

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