Last week I went to the funeral of a friend who died too young. Charlie’s wife and family had performed heroically, putting together a service that did justice to a remarkable person, and printing a beautiful booklet that included photographs, designs, drawings and paintings, showing what a talented artist, architect and master-builder he was. The custom on these occasions is, and has been for millennia, to deliver eulogies and elegies, praising and lamenting the dead person. Over them hangs the unwritten injunction, de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Both eulogies and elegies were moving and heartfelt. But I don’t know whether I was alone in feeling that they were somehow premature; out of necessity and with no fault attached, too neat a way of tying up loose ends. On such occasions there is a built-in tendency to try to sum up the achievements and life of the departed; perhaps this is easier with someone who has lived the full allotted span, with children and grandchildren and a sense of a life completed.

What Charlie’s death has left for me is – is at least for now – nothing like that; a series of ends untied, a jigsaw with missing pieces, questions unanswered, deep mystery and enigma. The last time I saw him, although I knew he was seriously ill, he looked in a strange way radiant and better than he had for years; in no way like a person preparing to die, more like one determined to live, in a new and better way. By a cruel irony, it was not the serious illness, for which he was having gruelling but apparently successful treatment, but an unexpected heart attack that killed him.

In the days after his death and around the time of funeral, I had several conversations about him with friends. We pieced together memories and shared a sense of puzzlement as well as sadness about his death. His exceptional kindness and generosity and helpfulness were generally recalled. It was puzzling that such a talented, free-spirited, hard-working, thoughtful and spiritually aware person should have been cut down in his prime.

Not all the memories were rose-tinted though. My strongest memory was of going out to Spain to help him with a building project; handed a pickaxe and charged with breaking up heavy compacted clay to clear out the drains in an abandoned garage, I lasted about 40 minutes before downing tools and heading off to the nearest café. I simply couldn’t cope with the physical demands of working on a building site. I marvelled at Charlie’s physical toughness but also wondered why he had to put himself, and occasionally others, through such back-breaking or even heart-breaking toil. It surely wouldn’t have cost that much to hire a small digging machine.

The Spanish building project was in a way typical of him. It was a Quixotic work of restoration or restitution of something that few others would have thought worth bothering with. The old garage was neither beautiful nor convenient, but something about it obviously appealed to Charlie’s love of saving things, and rising to a near-impossible challenge. The same spirit led him to restore and keep going a series of 1970s Saab cars; he would take their engines to bits and reassemble them with infinite patience.

The parallels with Don Quixote go quite deep. Charlie saw something in the garage, and in the Saabs, which others didn’t. An ordinary wench became a beautiful damsel, worth taking infinite pains to rescue. You might say he was tilting at windmills, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Charlie differed sharply from Don Quixote in being no impractical dreamer but an immensely practical and handy man – in a way Quixote and Sancho Panza rolled into one. He certainly got on famously with the other Sanchos in the workaday southern Spanish town he chose for his second home.

Despite my complete failure as a builder, I do have happy memories of the building site trip. A shared love of Spain brought us closer together in the last few years than we had ever been earlier. I remember a series of enjoyable lunches in the breaks (very long breaks in my case) between building work, tortillas and salads washed down with Valdepeñas, looking across to the ancient fortress hill of Álora, covered in yellow flowers in warm January sun, with a shepherd leading his flock around the hillside.

Charlie took not just his Spanish building but his Spanish language seriously, and completed an A-level in a year (he got an A grade). We enjoyed sending each other cuttings from local Spanish newspapers, partly for the quaint news stories (“Dog stands guard for a week in front of dead master’s house”) and partly for linguistic purposes.

None of this solves the mystery or diminishes the enigma of Charlie’s early death. Some Tibetan Buddhists believe that an individual’s soul remains in an intermediate state (bardo) for the newly deceased, for 49 days after death. Even if this period of seven weeks is not necessarily to be taken literally, it might allow not just the newly dead person but those mourning her or him the time and space for unanswerable questions to begin to settle.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres