The story of a Road Trip to give the late Mrs F a perfect send off after her unexpected departure from this world and what I wanted to do to give her the perfect send off.
At what point do I start? Try the beginning, Fubar….
How It Came To Be
This is the story of a formative life experience and a final Grand Gesture and tribute to someone who gave me the happiest seven years of my adult life. Someone who took me from being a broken divorcee to someone who started to find himself and to learn to be the man that I am now. Someone who transformed my life, for the better and who taught me what love really was.
Without too much chapter and verse (because that’s not what this article is about) I first met the late Mrs F in late 2004 in Piccadilly Circus outside Tower Records and through a not particularly protracted route, our relationship deepened and we were married in St Lucia in March 2007; we’d both come from broken first marriages, (the less said of those, the better) and we were both go-getters who realised that if there was anything in life we wanted, be it things, experiences, etc that it was down to us to go and get them ourselves, it was down to us to make it happen.
Apart from occasional minibreaks with my first wife, I hadn’t considered things like foreign travel or fine dining or the such like, but coincidental with us both being in good careers at that point in our lives, we adopted the attitude of “Today Is Our Rainy Day” and that life was there to be enjoyed while you had it and the means to do so. We had good jobs, a good income between us and we did indeed try and live life to the full in the time we had together.
We started doing lots of foreign travel; city breaks in Brussels, Bologna, Bath, Barcelona, NYC, and other places, plus she introduced me to the Caribbean in the form of Antigua, St Lucia, the British Virgin Islands and also Cuba. I was introduced to Cuban cigars, re-introduced to Oysters, Bollinger and other delights, music festivals in Hyde Park and other landmarks… but that’s a whole other story.
So… when she left this world in late September 2011 following End Stage Liver Disease and a hospital borne C-Diff infection, as a lot of puffins may be able to relate to, I was initially distracted and preoccupied with the funeral arrangements and bringing everyone together to give her the best send off that I could do.
From when she passed on the 24th September 2011, to the funeral on Oct 7th 2011, a lot of that time was caught up in formalities and the time passed me by in a process driven blur.
Once the funeral was done though, normal life elbows its way back in to your every day existence and if you had a shared purpose and journey to undertake as a married couple and then that suddenly stops…you have to find something else.
As those who have been widowed amongst us will already know, being left to your own devices, especially in that first 12 months, can be a dangerous thing.
I did try and go back to work after the funeral in the second week of October 2011, and this was a disaster. I kept seeing reminders of her everywhere, whether it was being stuck in traffic behind a wagon that was from the same provider that was supposed to deliver meals on wheels to her (long story) to the slightest most innocuous little thing (like standing outside the house smoking a cigarette seeing the neighbours opposite in their kitchen.. the man happily cooking away and the woman, just walking into the room and doing nothing more intimate than just putting her hand in the middle of his back… I would have given up everything in the world to have just had those moments back, just for a second), things kept on setting me off and I kept breaking, in public and in the workplace which was not good.
As an IT Contractor at the time, for a Major Energy company, I had to speak to my hiring manager and withdraw from the contract as I was not in any fit state to continue and needed to go and get my head together. He was a very gracious, compassionate and old fashioned God-fearing Texan, one of the best bosses I’ve ever worked for; firm and fair and compassionate and he has been a friend ever since.
So… in the middle of October 2011, I found myself free and unencumbered by work, thinking about what I was going to do next.
One thing that I did find myself focusing on was the things that you sometime say to each other as a couple, that you never expect to be held to, particularly the more existential things around life and death, such as “if I die before you, I want you to promise me that you will try and find love again” or “if you go before me, what are your wishes? Do you want to be buried, cremated, ashes scattered, if so, where do you want your resting place to be?” Just dumb stuff that you say to each other. I don’t think me and the late Mrs F were the only ones who spoke about those things.
A lot of us will often just answer these questions with platitudes never expecting them to be held to them. But if you have said something to someone you love as deeply as breathing itself, it then becomes a promise that has to be delivered, particularly when yours was the last voice they ever heard and your hand was the last they ever held.
One such one with Mrs F when it became clear that her condition was becoming increasingly precarious and that we had to get her affairs in order, was where do you want your resting place to be. All I got from her with her usual impish grin was “just take me somewhere hot”. Great, I said, that narrows it down a bit.“ You’ll figure it out” she said.
This left a lot of alternatives as to where to go, once the time came. And the majority of them ended up being ruled out for a number of reasons.
- Dubai, while we both loved our short time we spent there, was ruled out because taking an urn of ashes through passport control into an Islamic nation, no matter how westernised, would be somewhat problematic.
- The Virgin Islands or St Lucia…. while appropriate, as the place of our marriage, St Lucia would have been appropriate, but problematic to get to and quite possibly prohibitively expensive to administer and to deliver. Plus it would have meant scattering the ashes at sea and we didnt really have that much of a connection with the sea.
- Cuba, ditto. As much as we loved it and it may have been suitable, again, administratively and organising visas and the such like led me away from that alternative.
What was left that could otherwise be considered hot, but also appropriate?
The only other place which we both loved and we loved it so much that we would happily have renewed our vows there, was a tiny little chapel in a tiny town on the northern edge of Lake Garda, a place called Limone Sul Garda.
We had holidayed there in 2008 and fell in love with the place and the staggering view from the piazza outside this tiny chapel, the Chiesa San Rocco, a place of very simple and moving elegance, which had been there since the 1500s.
Limone it was to be. While not hot all year round, it was warm enough in the summers, it was beautiful, we both had a deep affection for the place and it was not too far away.
But how to make it happen? How could I make this final promise real?
Living in Aylesbury at the time and not having the benefit of AI, google was my friend for a while and I was initially steered in the direction of the Italian Embassy in London. One day, I made my way to Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, to visit to find out what I would need to do to make this final tribute a reality. I took a copy of the will, the death certificate and some notes so that I could make a case to who, I did not know. I was shown to a room somewhere from where I remember which was several floors up in the building, but to cut a long story short, it transpired that it wasn’t an Embassy or Consulate matter, this was something that I needed to talk to the local council in Limone about.
I found a general enquiries email address for the council in Limone, explained in an email to them what I was hoping to do, when I was hoping to do it (on what would have been our 5th wedding anniversary) and I sought their permission for a way forward.
And then nothing happened for a few weeks, until early-November, when I had an unexpected phone call in heavily Italian accented English at about 8AM in the morning from the local council in Limone, telling me that it was not a problem, that I should arrive in Limone at least a day or two in advance and go to the council building in the town and someone would be there to help and to make the chapel available for me to be able to scatter her ashes close to the chapel, but not in it and not on the piazza.
That was good enough for me. The Italian Job was a go. I now had the why and the wherefore. What I needed now was the How.
© text & images Fubar2 2025
