Dad, fresh from helping to pilot a boat from Weymouth to Portland.
Dear Readers, it’s five years since my Dad died, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime away, and sometimes like yesterday. I miss them still. Here’s a piece that I wrote for last year’s anniversary. It still seems to sum it up.
Dear Readers, five years ago today (31st March 2020) my father passed away, and I became a middle-aged orphan. Today, I think about how I used to phone my parents every Sunday, and how I sometimes thought of it as a chore – Dad would speak to me for about five minutes, but he never really knew what to say. Then he’d pass the phone onto Mum. If talking had been an Olympic sport she would definitely have got a gold medal, so I was rarely on for less than an hour. Mum had to tell every story verbatim, in real time – it was as if every detail was of equal value, every exchange, even the most humdrum, worthy of attention and retelling. Only later did I understand how diminished her life had become, how small her world, so that every incident grew to have an almost Homeric importance, though if a wooden horse had ever turned up in Milborne St Andrew I imagine that we’d still be on the phone now.
Yet, after they passed away, the time when I would have phoned them gave me a physical pain, every week for months and months. For a while I would ring their number, just to hear Mum’s telephone voice announcing that ‘Neither Sybil or Tom are able to take your call at the moment’. How I yearned to have one of those long, meandering, infuriating calls again. I would have loved to hear a verbatim report of Mum’s argument with the milkman, or to have a blow-by-blow account of the adorable thing that the cat did. I suppose that it’s often not the big things that we miss so much when someone dies, but the day-to-day familiarity of a voice, or a touch, a turn of phrase that no one else has.
Dad, on the other hand, was a very taciturn person. He was, however, easily exasperated by inefficiency and lack of planning, even after he moved into the nursing home because of his dementia. When I went to visit, Dad would often throw up his hands as he recalled some mishap or source of confusion.
“It was chaos, utter chaos!” he’d say, with a roll of the eyes. Sometimes, if the nursing staff were within hearing range, he’d lean in and say, sotto voce
“And that one” (jerk of the head), “he’s the worst”.
I’d turn to see some poor gentleman trying to manoeuvre his walker through a space that was clearly too small, or someone carrying a plate full of cake at a precipitous angle.
Dad was quick to judge other people as idiots, but he was easily conned or bullied, even before his dementia. However, Mum took over the phone calls as Dad’s faculties diminished, and she was more than able for any scammers. One ill-advised chap was trying to persuade Dad to give him his credit card details when Mum snatched the phone and gave the scamster such an earful that he told her she was ‘a very wicked woman’ and put the phone down on her. Clearly her way with words was not always a disadvantage.
And so, as the years go by, I find myself thinking less and less about the last few years and the challenges that they brought, and more about what special people Mum and Dad were, and what a good team they made. They always presented a united front in public, and both of them hated it when they were with couples who were contemptuous of one another, or who spoke to one another with a lack of respect. Of course, things could be different in private – my brother and I used to call them ‘Stadler and Waldorf’ after the couple of old men in The Muppets – but basically they had one another’s backs, and were on the same team, for the best part of sixty-five years.
I once asked Mum what the secret of a life-long relationship was.
“Luck”, she said.
I was surprised. I’d expected ‘unconditional love’ or some such notion.
“When you’ve known one another since you were fourteen years old,” she said, “You’re bound to change over the years. The question is, do you change in ways that your partner can deal with? Can you still love one another? We were lucky, because we did, and we grew old together. But sometimes people can’t, and in that case it’s best that they find someone that they can love, rather than spending the rest of their lives miserable”.
I have no idea what happens after we die. Part of me would love to think of Mum and Dad still being together in some way, their essence mingling like smoke. But what I do know is that they were so much part of one another that Dad was always looking for Mum, in some way or another, until his dying day, even though he didn’t really understand that she had died. And now his searching is over, and if nothing else, he has some peace, even though I miss both my parents more than I can say. My heart is heavy today, but I am full of memories, and of gratitude for what they gave me, and who they were.
Mum and Dad in 2016
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So, I’d never been to Wisley before, but I would definitely go back, I’m sure there’s something new to see in every season. It could not have been a more perfect day. So thanks to J, especially for helping me to retrieve my camera, and for being such a perfect guide.
