Chris Rawlence - Making it Happen
Later
May 2005. The film was completed months ago. Paul Clark of the Clod Ensemble has written and performed a musical score for the piece that amplifies and complements - in its guitar-plucked abstraction - Emily's abstract evocation of Bernard's experience. The three of us add Paul's score to the audio tracks. Emily and Paul are beautifully precise in the counterpoint of sound and image they seek.
June 2005. Bernard is dying. I visit him and Val on the ward of the hospice. I am struck by his wandering speech. He is finding it hard to fall on the right words and I'm reminded of when my father had his stroke. There's a circling imprecision to his utterances. I require a greater familiarity with his concerns than I actually have to make proper sense of them. But I grasp enough to reassure Bernard that I've understood him. Not being understood is one of the worst aspects of brain tumour and stroke, particularly when you can barely understand yourself. Bernard remembers me and Val is pleased that I've visited.
June 2005. I visit Bernard and Val at home. Bernard is downstairs in one of those hospital beds with sides that make it look like a large cot. There's so much about leaving the world that mirrors coming in to it - the nervous system unravelling instead of knitting itself together, speech disintegrating instead of developing, faculties waning not waxing, big cots not small cots.
July 2005. Bernard died last week. I call Val as she's leaving the house to go to the funeral. A son answers and promises to convey my condolences. We'll miss Bernard in the Tuesday Philosophers Corner at the hospice.
