John Heron Project

(One of several given at Mike’s memorial service, 27th February, 2007.)

We all have different memories of Michael - I knew him as Mike; it was how he introduced himself to me, how he’d sign his e-mails, how he announced himself on the phone. Other people remember him as a godparent, a housemate, a boyfriend, a fellow campaigner, a colleague, a student. I got to know him first as a regular in the university chaplaincy, where I worked as a volunteer for a time, and then as a friend.

He did so much. There are so many stories we have about him.

Mike used to eat at our house, along with a load of other students. Mike was one of our regulars. So he came back from his trip to Africa, and he gave us this picture he’d got from Egypt, all painted on papyrus, of the Last Supper, Jesus and his friends gathered together around the table. He didn’t make a fuss about it, and it took a bit for me to get what he was saying, about what he thought our home, the community we developed, meant to him. That was Mike. He made these gestures, and he was completely unsentimental about them. He had the ability to make you feel valued and included and important, without ever getting soppy on you.

He gave me a lot of stuff. He came round one day with a bag of CDs. Good ones. He had too much stuff, he said, and he wanted to lighten the load. And he was just them away. Did I want any, he said. I wasn’t the only one who did pretty well out of Mike’s record collection that day. But it defines what I knew of Mike: he loved music, but unlike so many of us, he refused to let the things he owned own him.

But although he travelled light, he lived wholly in this world. He wasn’t one of these people who hold high ideals without ever acting on them. He might have got a first-class degree through studying the theory of international development, but he made very sure there was a point to his knowledge. He got his hands dirty. He got involved. There are people here who worked alongside him in many contexts who know this better than I. Mike, like so many of us, knew where his conscience was leading him, but unlike so very many of us, he followed.

I want to say so much more about him. He was generous in every possible way, with his possessions, his time and his conversation. He was angry at the injustices in the world, but never let himself fall into despair, and never let himself be anything less than constructive in the way he used that anger. He was matter-of-fact and smart and funny and full of life. He treated those causes in which he invested himself with the seriousness they deserved, but if he ever made the mistake of taking himself seriously, I never saw that. It’s customary not to speak ill of the dead, and when people die, particularly people who are young, their friends and loved ones praise them to the skies, and it’s easy to be cynical and think that maybe the person who is gone wasn’t really that great. Mike wasn’t perfect. He knew that. But he really was that good, and he has left his friends with a gap in their lives.

I really want to say something wise and worthwhile and powerful and unlike anything else you’ve already heard, something that will console all those people who have lost him right now; I want to make it all better. I cannot, any more than I could bring him back.

It falls to me to say this: Mike Blakey was my friend. He was my friend, and he is dead, and I, like so many others, will miss him. We who loved him must carry on living without him, honouring him and his memory however we can. When the newspapers have stopped talking about him, it’s the only truth there is.

That is all.