Happy Sad

 

Tim Buckley had an album in 1969, called ‘Happy Sad’. I never really quite understood that confused emotion, until yesterday.

Let me go back. Forty years ago I had a lover. After the lust seeped away, we became friends of many years standing. From her I learned ‘io tiamo” (I love you) and how to cook using oregan (oregano) and basilica (basil). She was as beautiful as her home country actress, Sophia Loren, with a gentle manner, big heart, and fifteen years older than me. Over intervening years we, sadly, lost touch. We lived in very different worlds and, despite always thinking of her, time and physical distance came between us.

Yesterday, her son, who is now retired, sent me a Facebook Messenger communication. I had half expected the news he was to give but, nevertheless, her death a year (and some months) ago pranged my still soft heart.  I felt, and still feel, a little guilty that I was not there for her at the end.

In that internet exchange my lover’s son told of the last few years of his mother’s life, her good and bad fortune and eventually got around to telling me something which only increased my already burgeoning feelings of guilt. That was the sad part of my happy/sad.

I had left England nearly twenty years ago to sojourn in India.  Eventually I grew tired of its mono-racial society and placed my Indian chappal wearing feet firmly on rural Malaysia soil, intent upon seeing Malaysia as my future, and final, home.

While I was sheltering under coconut trees and banana fronds I was being sought. My dear distant friend had never forgotten me either. Before her passing, she had, at one point, included me in her will. Her son and solicitors were trying to track me down and it was only yesterday, after so many months, that her son found me. This is the happy part of the happy/sad.

It is a long story full of sadness and trickery, which I’ll leave for a crime writer to follow, but the will with my name, wrongly spelt, became superseded with another that did not include my name.

I am sad that she has passed, sad too that we had not been in contact for many years, but amazed and happy that, nearing the end, she had thought of me.

If you know me, then you will understand my trials and tribulations of the recent few months. While newer lovers have come and now gone, a friend from my past has brought a happy tear to my eye by demonstrating her undeserved ineradicable bond.  Thank you, my friend rest in peace.