On a young man’s departure

Not the best start into 2017. On Monday I learnt from we ex-workmates from The Employer our colleague Krzysiek had passed away aged 31 on New Year’s Eve, thus eventually losing a half-year battle against cancer.

I first met Krzysiek in early 2011 when I joined The Employer as a full-time analyst. He had worked there for some three years and despite being only 25 had been promoted twice by then. As a definitely talented up-and-coming relationship manager, he was entrusted taking charge of the most promising prospective accounts.

He has not let down senior managers who had put a lot of faith and trust in his skills. In 2012 thanks to his determination, patience and negotiation skills he won the biggest deals in the history of The Employer. I was proud to participate in this success as I handled those clients on analytical coverage side. Though our styles or work differed and personally we were not on the same wavelength, we were always able to overcome different approaches to many issues and teamed up to pursue common goals. Our professional ties loosened up in late 2013 when The Employer decided to give up on the biggest accounts and part of business winding-down strategy. Since mid-2014 when I left The Employer we talked twice or maybe three times when we ran across each other in town.

Around the end of summer holidays I was told Krzysiek had been fighting brutal cancer for a few weeks and that the disease was ruthlessly spreading across his body. He went on a sick leave in September and was admitted to a hospice in November.

Farewell mass was administered on Wednesday in Warsaw and urn with Krzysiek’s ashes was buried on Thursday in his hometown. The very farewell, including priest’s sermon was touching and poignant. I counted around 300 people inside the church, including family, neighbours and friends from his hometown, schoolmates, fellow football fans, workmates and even CFOs of companies he had had relationships with.

Oddly enough, several people with whom he had worked until his last days in the office, did not turn up at the church. Sadly, no one from my team did not participate in the farewell as well, though they had worked with Krzysiek longer than me.

This sad event was a heart-rending reminder how fragile human life is. A year ago Krzysiek was a healthy young man with future wide open ahead of him. I would depart from the truth if I told Krzysiek had been my friend, he had been my workmate, yet his departure is a milestone in my life, as this is the first decease of somebody of my age I knew well. Until last days, in my narrow perception death would strike only people far older than me.

Besides my previous workplace is falling apart. The Employer, taken over by its competitor last year, is now seeing its workforce decimated. Several people with who I worked and whom I owe a lot have been laid off or are likely to be given the sack by the end of January.

But as it turns out again, every cloud has a silver lining. Had it not been for the farewell, I would not have met several people I had not seen for months. The sad gathering proved to be an occasion to renew old comradeships. Yesterday, despite the middle of the long weekend, we met up, not to foster memory of Krzysiek but to talk over what was going on in our lives.

With such starting point, I suppose things I poised to get only better.

A secular funeral

Attended such ceremony for the first time on Wednesday. In Poland it is customary to stage traditional church funerals even if the deceased were not deeply religious and ceremonies held not in a church and not administered by a priest are still a rarity. This time the deceased, my friend’s father, was a type of a hard-line atheist and had expressed a wish to have a secular funeral.

While a typical Polish funeral consists of a mass in a church and a burial ritual, a secular funeral has a sort of “last farewell” instead of a mass. On Wednesday the farewell was divided into two parts. The first one was a commemorative speech, being a brief biography and characteristics of the deceased, the second was a classical music concert.

I liked the form of the ceremony and part of the content, in terms of concert (the deceased was an opera-goer), but was disgusted by the eulogy… Delivering eulogies during funerals has become a widespread tradition in Poland. I heard it in 2009, 2010and in 2011, so if 2012 is drawing to a close I couldn’t miss the doubtful pleasure of listening to another one.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against speaking highly about dead people, but every time I listened to such speeches, I felt these were description of people other than those being buried. In Poland there is a custom that you either speak highly about the dead, or don’t speak at all, everyone accepts it, the best example is how the picture of late president Lech Kaczyński was distorted afterhis tragic death. Few had guts to tell the truth… I generally detest hypocrisy and maybe wouldn’t be so distasted if such eulogies were only biased. Every man has a bright and a dark side, highlighting only the bright one is forgivable, while telling lies about a deceased is overstepping the boundary of decency. Last year my parents made a blunder at our neighbour’s funeral when they broke out laughing having heard the neighbour, who, truth be told, was a despicable layabout and drunkard, in the eulogy was characterised as ‘exceptionally responsible man and caring father and husband’.

Damn it, if there is little good to say about the dead, conform to the principle and don’t speak at all! I can’t stand it!

During a burial ceremony there was also a moment when I didn’t know how to behave. I stood surrounded probably by former colleagues of the deceased, sturdy men, tall as I, but unlike me, well-built, and while urn was being put into the grave, they all burst into tears and kept on weeping like small children. I felt unnaturally. I saw people crying during funerals many times, but these always were family members or close friends…

Secular funerals are said to grow in popularity in Poland, as Polish society is turning less and less religious. I wouldn’t dare to say the same is true about weddings. Virtually all weddings I attended during last two years were church ones, I’m attending a secular one next month and this will be the odd one. It has to be underlined, however, if someone gets married in a church, if doesn’t mean they are religious. It’s all about the setting. Wedding in a registry office lacks the memorable character the one, traditional, in a church, has. Wedding is in principle a one-in-a-lifetime event which deserves a unique setting, but whether it is justified to spend on it an equivalent of new compact car’s price (alternatively even 10 metres of a new flat might be purchased for that money) to put on a triumph of form over substance is a topic for a separate posting…

And my advice for anyone going to Cmentarz Północny on a business day – set off from home early or check the timetable carefully. I set off from home at 8:45 to turn up for a ceremony starting at 10:30 in time and ended up stuck in a traffic jam beginning at the border or Warsaw, which I detoured through Jeziorki and having covered 25% of the distance within 40% of allotted time on a rainy day (rain snarls up traffic) I decided to forsake my car near underground station and take the public transport. Finding a space to park a car around 9:30 was difficult, yet doable, then I somehow managed to get to my destination by underground (33 minutes ride to the northern end of the line is boring) and from the beautiful Metro Młociny terminus, by 701 bus. Returning home was a bigger nuisance. I had to wait for a bus in a rain for 25 minutes (they run once in half an hour), getting from the cemetery to Ursynów took me an hour and a quarter. Cemeteries, as places visited often by elderly people, should certainly have much better public transport links to city centres…

Truth will out?

This is the second post in row, which waited for some time on my dashboard before being published at last. Something must be amiss with my blogging if I keep editing out some excepts, delete whole paragraphs, rewrite many sentences, wonder whether thoughts I wish to share with you are unsuitable or too controversial.

What you see below is an auto-censored, "soft" version of my sad reflections after a wake I attended yesterday.

Normally my parents and I refuse to take part in such receptions, because there is nothing to celebrate and the boring family gathering ends up with drinking to the deceased's health or people begin to chat joyfully and the atmosphere gets party-like. This time as the deceased had been one of our closer relatives, it would have been simply impolite to turn down the invitation.

The wake was not extraordinary, apart from the presence of a prominent Polish politician, who is a good friend of the deceased's son. All proceeded normally until the moment sons of the deceased delivered a speech.

The old Latin tenet that you should speak highly of the dead or not speak at all, is a good rule and I am all for obeying it. The man who we farewelled yesterday had been a good man. He had loved his wife, sons and grandchildren, he had been nice and helpful to people around, he used to be a dab hand around the house - he could fix a broken down TV, a leaking tap, and, as long as he had been up to it, he had repaired his old Polonez. All this could be said about him and indeed was said. He also had some typical Polish shortcomings; in line with the Latin rule, we will pass over them. However, I still do not understand why he was credited with writing poems, reinterpreting some excerpts of the Bible into Polish patriotic psalms and writing furtively a book about history of Poland from its baptism in 966 to 1939. The big dose of patriotism was said to had been instilled in him by his father, who had died in 1943, when the deceased was 14.

I was totally unaware of his great attainments. He had only completed primary school, after WWII he did not continue his education. All I heard was so implausible that first my jaw dropped open and then I had to bite my tongue just not to burst out laughing. Meanwhile my father at first breathed loudly (what always means he gets the hump) and then hissed. Actually no one, including his own sister, knew anything about his alleged achievements. I cannot disprove the existence of these poems or psalms. Maybe he had had some talents he had kept secret (just as my family do not know about the existence of that blog), if so, I can be proud of him. During his speech, the deceased's son waved a piece of paper containing one hand-written poem. The deceased's sister, a very straightforward person, who incidentally always does or says something before she thinks, immediately grabbed the piece of paper and adjudicated it not to be her brother's handwriting. The counter-argument was that she wore the wrong glasses..

The question how the deceased's father, who until his last days he had been a zealous communist, could he have instilled patriotism in his son leaves in deep bemusement. After WWI his father was, I am shamed to admit it, one of those who wanted Poland to be incorporated into the Soviet Russia... About such things people do not talk, such black sheep are kept as skeletons in cupboards, and their disgraceful deeds sink into oblivion. But what is the point in rewriting the family history? Why? Who needs those lies? The politician who came for a free blowout in an expensive restaurant?

The same happened many years after my maternal grandmother's death. During Warsaw uprising she had spent the whole August and September 1944 hidden in basements and sewers, scared stiff, then with other inhabitans of Warsaw driven out to temporary camp in Pruszkow, she managed to run away and settled down in the countryside. A few years ago my some members of my mother's family began to tell my mother my that grandmother had been a messenger in Warsaw Uprising and saved lives of many children. My grandmother used to talk to my mother about the cruelty of the uprising and described her two-month ordeal in details and openly had admitted she had been too afraid to leave underground shelters and fight. Why should the family history be rewritten?

A similar story happened during the funeral of my mother's friend. Later today my mother recalled the event when the deceased's husband had given a short speech about his late wife. My mother said she had thought he had spoken about someone else, not the woman she had known for thirty five years.

If something is acceptable and praised on a national level, why cannot we do it at home?

Some rules, such as the one cited at the beginning are a foundation of our civilisation, but is it a reason to distort biographies of people who have died, to beautify their image post mortem? The same happens to the people who are still alive. Jadwiga Kaczyńska was many times said to have fought in Warsaw Uprising, when in fact at that time she had been a nurse in Starachowice. In turn, several people attempted to deny that Henryka Krzywonos stopped the tram in Gdańsk in 1980 and thus launched a strike of public service vehicle drivers, after she slated Jarosław Kaczyński for his missteps.

Also late president Lech Kaczynski, ridiculed and deprecated when in office, is glorified after his death. In the near future the biggest test for Poles in that respect will be the death of general Wojciech Jaruzelski, now aged 87. He still remains a very controversial figure. A political clash for how he goes down in history will be inevitable then...