This morning at 7 o’clock, Chris set sail from our island for the final time. I ran down to the quayside to see him off. Playing on my headphones was Fairport Convention’s ‘A Sailor’s Life’, which seemed fitting to mark the beginning of a limitless journey through the Dream Archipelago, and dovetailed well with Sandy Denny’s ‘Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz’, which was played at our wedding. The committal music Chris chose was the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 in A Major.
We decided not to have a funeral. Neither of us could bear the thought of it, and the imposition it would have placed on people, to travel up to Scotland in the middle of winter, made the decision easier for us to take.
There will instead be a memorial event for Chris at the Glasgow Worldcon in August, a chance for us to come together and celebrate Chris’s life, work and legacy. Much more our kind of thing.