Bit of a bastard death. I don’t mean he’s illegitimate. Birth and Living generally do a pretty good job of parenting the little sod. Nor do I wish to suggest a particularly intense or personal dislike for him. He does what is required of him and on the whole he does it well. Certainly thorough, no stone unturned and all that. But he’s a difficult bugger to deal with, the ultimate unwanted guest, heartily wished elsewhere when he lingers too long, and often even more unwelcome when he just breezes in out of the blue.

The worst of it is, receiving this insistent visitor doesn’t seem to get any easier as time goes by. One would like to break out the best spoons and lay on a bit of a spread. You know, make an occasion of it, glad-handing death like he was an old chum. It would be nice to think that after the first few encounters, one got accustomed to the inevitable reunions, that the trauma and the turmoil abated somewhat. But it doesn’t seem to work like that because every new death is weighted with the emotions of every death that has gone before so that, in the end, even the funeral of a complete stranger can become unbearably poignant.

A friend of ours, Pierre Chartrand, has just died, clobbered in his early seventies by a heart attack that struck without warning. We went to Quebec a few months back to visit him and his wife, Marthe. Pierre was on rattling good form, strapping on his snowshoes and striding out across the snow-capped foothills of the Appalachians in the Cantons de l’Est, lugging armfuls of wood into the living room to keep the fire blazing, gamely playing Blokus with his grandchildren, dashing down to his basement for another good bottle to share with us, happily discussing a projected trip to France, showing us the sights, reveling in the witty lyrics of Richard Desjardins, chatting about books and life and Africa, evoking absent friends, digging out ancient photos to prove who had been where, when and with whom, cheerfully cursing as only a Quebecan can when he lost at cards.

He looked ten years younger than his age and seemed set to carry on living life to the full for a good while to come, with all the undimmed passion and pleasure he had displayed for the preceding seventy odd years. Now he has gone, just like that, without preamble and precious little justice, save for the comforting thought that his was a life well lived. His friends and family would have wished it lived a little longer, but as best I can judge, there was nothing beyond the usual niggles to regret in the being and doing and choosing that we cobble together to make a life.

Pierre was an enthusiastic internaut, contributing to all manner of sites (those of you who read French should check out an entertaining contribution he made to my own page) and pestering his friends with round-robin e-mails recounting jokes of dubious taste, below which he always appended a thought-provoking quote. His last e-mail to me, recommending Anthony McCarten’s Death of a Superhero, ended with the following lines adapted from Norman Maclean:

"After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

That last phrase may sound a note of bitter-sweet remorse in the circumstances, but no matter, because the first two sentences are spot on. Pierre was a great man for stories, a voracious reader and keen historical researcher, who had also so thoroughly perfected the art of picking apart literary reviews that he could recommend books he hadn’t even read, and generally hit upon something that pleased you.

Pierre also told me my favourite joke mocking the French. There aren’t many of them, as it happens. In fact, the only other one I can think of off-hand is the story my friends and I used to tell each other when we were about five years old. Car stops for a French hitchhiker. “Looking for a lift?” says the driver. “Oui, oui,” says the Frenchman. “Not in my car, you don’t,” says the man and drives off. Oh, how we laughed. Those funny French people! Nonetheless, even if I had an extensive repertoire of such gags, this one from Pierre would probably be somewhere near the top of the list.

Three animals, a polar bear, a monkey, and a crocodile discussing where they’re going for their holidays.

Polar bear says, “I’ve got a big fur coat and my wife has got a big fur coat and all my children have got big fur coats. We’re going to the arctic.”

Monkey says, “I’ve got long arms and a prehensile tail, and my wife has got long arms and a prehensile tail, and all my children have got long arms and prehensile tails. We’re going to the jungle.”

Says the crocodile: “I got a big gob and my wife’s got a big gob and all my children have got big gobs. We’re going to France.”

The Quebecans never did forgive the French for abandoning them to the English. Long memories, you see. It’s even the provincial motto, carved onto the parliamentary portal, reappearing as the device on Quebec’s coat of arms, and inscribed on every number plate in the province – “Je me souviens”, I remember. Hopefully, that is a quality that will stand Pierre in good stead now that he has gone.

For those of us who don’t really believe in heavenly hosts, salvation, life everlasting and so forth, our options for making a grab at immortality are limited, and mostly boil down to a very temporary bargain with sempiternity premised, one way or another, on memory and the virtual life to be lived by surviving in the minds of others. Four ways of doing this . . .

We can make fame.

We can make friends.

We can make children.

And we can make some thing, be it a book or a painting or a song or a piece of furniture, some manifestation of ourselves that will outlive us and revive our memory in the hearts of those who contemplate what we created.

Then we’ve just got to hope for the best, that to a greater or lesser degree we will live on for a little longer, our existence lengthened and legitimized by those who remain awhile and carry us around inside themselves.

Pierre did all of the above, save for aiming at the fame game, which suggests a good measure of wisdom on his part, since of the four I suspect fame is at once the most demanding and the most fickle pathway to remembrance.

Writing this blog, I am making a stab at lending Pierre a little more immortality, hoping to hold him here among us with words that honour his memory. It ain’t exactly “Death, where is thy sting?” Death stings all right. But the least we can do is give death a good poke in the eye in return.

So, for Pierre. Long life to you, mate.

To end, another Norman Maclean quote, a corollary to the first, but with a slightly more optimistic twist at the end:

“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding."

We can still love - we can love completely without complete understanding.

For Pierre. Je te souviens.

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