GEORGE REMEMBERED

When he died, I could not believe it. I knelt at his feet and put my hand on him, and my whole body was wracked and shaken with sorrow. They had given us rose petals and finally my shoulders could stop shaking long enough for me to sprinkle them on him, and I could back away to the sympathetic embraces of the living. He now lay deathly still in his saffron and purple robes, his face pained white with the red dot on his forehead. We sat shivah, a small group of his friends and family in the room, now weeping, now laughing. Some reminiscence would start, something inappropriate he would want to share and then the realization that he would not be sharing it, that he was indeed gone, and sorrow would flood over us.

‘Come on, everybody, Dad wouldn’t want this,’ Dhani would remind us, and we would play music, the chants he loved, recorded in Friar Park, or a few of the last tracks that would constitute the basis of his final album. […] My heart felt like it was stabbed as he told me clearly he was dying. Even then I refused to believe it. Not him. Not George. George couldn’t die. I needed him too much. He was my cornerstone. A Friar Park visit always an option. George didn’t die. It wasn’t possible.

Eric Idle on George Harrison’s passing, The Greedy Bastard Diary