The funeral takes place exactly a week into the New Year. Our family, like so many others, has been scarred by divorce. After seventeen years of marriage, I left my first wife, Jane, for Lin. Shortly afterwards, the cousin with whom I’d grown up - Colin - left his own wife - Chris - for Jane. The ex-partners in this awkward quadrille have barely spoken a civil word in thirteen years but now, because of my dad, we all come together again.
Thanks to a thoughtful and caring vicar, the service is memorable. We pay my father our respects. With his Victorian rectitude, and his well-founded horror of the consequences of family break-up, he was deeply affected by the various family traumas, and it’s the sweetest irony that his passing should have begun the healing process.
Mum copes with the funeral incredibly well. The realisation that dad has finally gone seems to have lifted a weight from her shoulders and she’s excited, as well as touched, that so many old friends have reappeared. Indeed, to someone who hasn’t seen her for a while she would seem almost normal: a game, courageous, slightly forgetful 83 year-old back in a whirl of once-familiar faces. At her flat, we nibble sandwiches, remember the old times, and empty a couple of bottles of wine. My ex-wife gives Lin a kiss. Chris and Colin share small-talk. My Auntie Kay, my father’s sister and now sole survivor of her generation, can’t believe her eyes - and neither can our respective kids. Much laughter. And much relief.
That night, Lin and I decide to scatter dad’s ashes on the Garden of Remembrance back at Clacton-on-sea. He’d made no provision for this in his will, which had carried the stern injunction Strictly NO flowers, but it would seem to bring his life full circle. When I mention this plan to Tom, he insists on coming too. My father’s death has affected him more deeply than I’d ever have expected and for the first time it occurs to me that aspects of my father may have survived in my eldest son. Like all of us, he’d found it impossible not to be touched by the sheer weight of my father’s presence and while he’d disagreed with him about more or less everything, he’d be the first to acknowledge his grand-father’s strengths. A fighter, like Tom. And a man for whom happiness was never an easy proposition.
Thirty Four
Two weeks after the funeral, Fran and Evelina from the nursing home come round to dinner. We swop stories about old people, laugh a great deal, and drink far too much red wine. Inevitably, towards the end of the evening, the conversation settles briefly on my dad. Fran was with him on the morning he died. I want to know the details. I want to know exactly what happened. Fran says it was very undramatic, very peaceful. He was sitting in the chair. His head was back against the pillow. One moment he was breathing. Then the breathing stopped. There was no drama, no deathbed terrors, no words of farewell. He’d simply gone.
I remind her about the Polaroid photo she’d taken a couple of days earlier. Had that really been a Christmas present for me? And had he really been trying to summon a smile?
She nods.
“That was the last big effort he made.” She says quietly, “That was his best shot. That was for you, his best boy. After that, I’m afraid, he gave up.”
*****
Estuary n. The widening channel of a river where it
meets the sea, with a mixing of fresh water
and salt water.
Estuary Page 12
