Know who will bury you alive
When your casket is mounted and wheeled into the church, your family and friends seated in the pews will turn to welcome you for that final farewell. There will be men who were closest to you wheeling your casket. A friend, a brother, a cousin, a son or nephew and then people will see one guy and wonder … who the hell is this one?
Here’s the thing about life as a man. You probably have an idea who will be in the hospital ward when you place the bucket on that corner flag and kick it into play.
Or who will post a photo of you on their Facebook or WhatsApp to mourn your passing while writing off the twenty pin they’ve owed you for nearly a year.
But not all of us have the certainty of who is in our circle. Because city man is so preoccupied by the rat race, who’s topping the premier league, the university student that’s reviving his libido, raising a family, juggling baby mamas … he rarely looks surgically at who is around him.
People know more about us than we care to admit. It’s your wife or girlfriend. They see our friends for who they really are because of the impact they have on us.
They know the one that’s a permanent fixture when you have money, up for a good time, helping you separate yourself from your cash on platters, cold beers and hot women.
Show her your friends and she’ll know who will bury you alive or when you die.
She knows the one that greets her with a hug that lingers a little too long for her liking. The one that will show up at your house more frequently than usual now that you’re permanently offline and he can reveal some truths, real and imagined, about you.
It’s your own family and real friends that can tell who’s successfully distracted you from your goals while they feast and thrive on your resources, network and ideas.
The ones that will elbow anyone out of the way to print your RIP t-shirts but were nowhere to be seen when your child was in hospital for weeks and you had the bills covered but only needed someone to sit with you on those cold, iron blue seats in the reception of the soulless hospital.
You will have people that did you bad on a business deal or opportunity push their name forward as a business partner to eulogize your brilliance and vision. They will make a public show of taking care of your family.
And as they wheel your casket to the front of the church, take a right turn to station it in front of the altar, your true friends will have been brutally sidelined from centre stage of a life they witnessed up close for its highs and lows.
And that’s when it will hit home to the people you’ve left behind. That’s when it will be so damn obvious that you went too much with the flow of friendship and not the glow of brotherhood.
