2024ix19, Thursday: Wonder.
A truth in life is that the older you get, the more endings and fewer beginnings there are.
You don’t lose beginnings altogether. Heaven forbid. There is always the space to to encounter something or someone fresh, unknown, inspiring or just piquing your interest.
But inevitably, people and things start coming to a close. Funerals outnumber baptisms. Divorces supplant weddings. There start to be things that are harder… or, woe betide, impossible. With grace, or otherwise, one comes to accept it.
And yet. The endings still hit hard.
One such in particular.
At the end of last month, on 29 August, we lost a friend and colleague. Chris Meiring joined our chambers as a pupil in 2021, shone through pupillage, and - to absolutely no-one’s surprise - was enthusiastically voted in as tenant in 2022. I didn’t know Chris particularly closely, but we had a point of communion in the fact that - like me - he’d had a past life (he'd been a medical doctor) before discovering that this weird world of the Bar was where he should be. And everything I did know of him, I liked and respected.
I knew he’d been ill. He’d always been upfront about the aggressive cancer with which he was diagnosed just after he accepted tenancy. Equally, I knew that - and also like me - he was a person of faith. Deep, quiet and sincere faith, which fed him and informed and infused his actions without ever being worn on his sleeve. Just the kind I most esteem. “Decency” may seem like an archaic word; but it fitted Chris. A scholar, and a gentleman.
Increasingly through 2023 and 2024, Chris had to spend longer periods away from work. When he could work, he was superb, finding a firm foothold in business crime and building what would - should! - have been a stellar practice in sanctions.
In the summer of 2024, he and his wife had their second son. A blessing.
And then, in a working-out for which one could be forgiven for shouting at an apparently uncaring universe, with one boy not much more than two and another only eight weeks old, Chris died.
As I said, I knew him as a good colleague-friend; but not a close personal one. So why did his death hit me hard?
Partly this. A family left so suddenly. A career he adored cut short. The world a little poorer and plainer.
More that it came just at the time I was realising that it’s a decade next week since I lost my dad. Whom I miss hugely - and who would have adored watching me become a barrister, every minute of it.
Mostly, I think, because watching a person of faith slip away - his words (and please read them in this moving tribute to Chris from his friend and Chambers room-mate Saul Margo) showing just what faith can mean - remind me immediately and viscerally of when I and my siblings sat with our mother for days on end, as she neared her own departure in 2022. She made it clear to us all that she had hope and faith as to what happened next. She didn’t know. Not intellectually. But that’s the point. Faith manages. Hope endures. And as I read Chris’s words, and reflected on his parting, I was back there, beside a bed in Winchester hospice, listening to my mum’s breathing get ragged. And waiting for it to stop.
So. Endings. Can’t avoid them. How does one cope?
Faith helps. Mine is shaky, betimes. But somehow it hangs on. As does a conviction that the impression people leave on others, on the world, lingers far outside the bounds of their own physical existence. That as long as their echoes can be heard, their ripples felt, they’re never quite gone from us.
But also something else. Another bone-deep article of faith - if one that, for me (and this isn’t in any way a prerequisite), feeds on my belief that this isn’t everything; that there’s a Something, a Someone, infinitely greater than I can ever comprehend, and yet infinitely caring for exactly who and what I am. A faith sitting alongside my certainty that true joy in life is found in an appreciation of small wonders: the ones that are everywhere, if you let yourself encounter them.
It’s best given voice in a phrase from a novel which - heard on an audiobook in the car yesterday morning - catalysed this piece, brewing as it has done since Chris’s death. It’s in Lies Sleeping (irony in that title, perhaps) by Ben Aaronovitch. “Here’s a comforting thought for you,” one of the main characters says to another when confronted with something marvellous. “However long you may live, the world will never lose its ability to surprise you with its beauty.”
I love that scientific endeavour constantly deepens and expands our understanding and love of this universe we inhabit. I love, as much, that through philosophy and religion our appreciation of who we are on the inside never stops evolving too. But still more than any of these, I hold fast to the conviction that there will always be something more, both for me personally and for us as a species. A surprise. Something uncharted. A new world over the horizon.
Yes, there’s an undiscovered country. Chris is there; as I hope, and have faith. So are my parents.
But I’ve got more discoveries to make before I join them. More things to be astonished by. To wonder at. So do we all. Look for them. And life, as long or short as it turns out to be, will be immeasurably the richer.
