1 June
His clothes, or some of them, fit me now better than they ever did. Not the coats, jackets or trousers (shoulders, arms and legs on a different scale) but oddly, a variety of the shirts, at least half of which were bought in my size (XL) as opposed to his (L, and towards the end, a diminishing M). Dozens of shirts, brand new, unwrapped. His feet seem to have enlarged as he aged. An eight and a half in my childhood, as I recall, a 10 now. Nothing stays the same.
In his last days he was concerned that a kilogramme of silver amalgam, waste from dental fillings he’d collected before his retirement, should be valued and sold. It turns out the mercury content now makes the package hazardous, so it has moved only from his garage to mine. I will get around to dealing with it. I know a scrap metal merchant who may be interested. A beautifully designed Italian dentist’s drill handpiece is the object of his I most treasure, its stainless steel worn by years of use, but retaining a space-age 60s beauty..
His ties. There are perhaps 50 of them. Glasgow University, the RAF Association. Glorious Paisley-patterned silk, strange lemony stripes. It’s doubtful I’ll ever wear them but the Brook Taverner and “Saville Row” shirts, the silk ones he had made in Hong Kong...well. They’re in my wardrobe anyway. So many, though. And those heartbreaking size differentials. He was so thin by the end. There was nothing of him. Nothing fitted.
There’s a copper kettle I remember from my childhood. It sat by the fire in our Troon house, gleaming and glorious. Once I was paid to polish it with Duraglit or Brasso. Now it is black, oxidised, and I am becoming obsessed with cleaning it. Vinegar and salt, the internet says, or tomato sauce. I can see the lettering on the handle: Smith and Wellstood, Bonnybridge. The Winnings, my granny’s people, came from there, or nearby Denny, where dad’s wealthy Uncle Robert ran an empire of shops, cigarette factories, fruit and vegetable businesses. “During the war he slept,” dad told me in his final week, “with a gun under his pillow.” So much more to ask him about Robert and the past. So much more.
Father’s Day, Glasgow. 20 June
It will be Father’s Day for a few more hours. The sun is deepening the red tenement cliffs and glittering off TV aerials.
We never did Father’s day in our house, not really. Mother’s Day, sometimes. Frankly, we were lax on all feast days and celebrations, other than bonfire night (explosions! Throwing fireworks at teachers!) and Christmas (presents!). Birthdays? Mine was on Hogmanay and tended to get submerged into Christmas. These days, with five weans and eight grandchildren, Facebook and I struggle to keep up.
I married into a family where dates and remembrance matter greatly, where family backgrounds are researched and the memory of forced emigration (from Ireland) still resonates painfully. Birthdays, even anniversaries are a matter of tremendous import. All the commercialised festivals too: Mothering Sunday, which at least has medieval religious antecedents. And Father’s Day, first celebrated in Spokane, Washington, USA in 1910.
My mother died when she was 49 and I was 24. She would have been 90 this year. I think about her every day.
Today was my first fatherless father’s day. Not that dad ever expected me to mark it. Not that I expect my own children and grandchildren to do so on my behalf. And yet today I gazed gratefully at the balloons and the cards, ate the lovingly-supplied cakes and curries, drank the beer and the coffee. Grinned at grandchildren and took the greatest pleasure in those smiles being returned.
Love. Gratitude. Memories. The future.
5 August, Shetland
Sometimes it’s like walking in fog, like you’re suffering from sunstroke, you’re burnt and sore and sick and everything’s kind of familiar, but blurred, hidden, obscured. All your sensitivities are turned up past maximum to a screeching, distorted peak, yet your reactions are odd. The thing you know caused all this, the loss, you dealt with all the practicalities of that, you’re coping with it now. Most of the time. Except the memories keep appearing with crystalline, painful clarity. The fog lifts and brilliant shafts of the past hit you like projector beams. Images, events, voices. There are videos buried in the vault of your mind you had no idea still existed.
It's all kinds of memories, too, not specifically of that one lost person. It's everything: an injury at school rugby. A dog, long lost. A hateful teacher. Crawling around a dry sewage system underground on a building site. Bad golf. The smell of a newly varnished sailing dinghy on its first immersion in salt water.
There’s anger too, and it’s a fury other people bear the brunt of, unfairly. Also, why are you so tired, so sleepy at the wrong times of day? And these dreams...not of death, but of other kinds of loss, other people. Other deaths, people you didn’t know well, assume gargantuan space in your head. You dream of old jobs, former colleagues, places you’ll never see again, things you won’t ever do another time. It's like a massive internal clearing, a refiling of data.
And it’s not as if you weren’t there at the end. Closure there was, or should have been. You were in the room. You heard that last ragged breath, took the rings from cold fingers. Helped make arrangements, walked family through the dogged processes of bereavement, spoke at the funeral. You were composed, reassuring, calm and needed no additional medication. You were absolutely fine.
He had a good innings. People say that. Cricket. He loved cricket all his life, played for a senior club when cricket was a popular working man’s sport in central Lanarkshire. Gave it up for God.
He wanted to die. He was in pain and wanted it to stop. He was in his own house and with his beloved wife. And you were there too. Yes, yes yes, yes, yes. But now you’re home and the old routines are like clothes rubbing on inflamed skin, or shoes with sand in them. And the fog thickens and swirls and suddenly thins to nothing.
It doesn’t matter what age you are when your last parents dies, one old pal said, you’re always an orphan. Someone else disagreed. Now the baton has been passed, and you’re the one carrying it. Eventually you’ll pass it on too. Still another friend talks of the loss of someone who knew all the old stories.
Language. It’s language, words, and a lack of them. A lack of someone to tell, or not to tell. Someone to be infuriated with, angry at, but who knew you from before the beginning. An absence. A silence. That voice will not be heard again, chiding, congratulating, laughing, complaining, rejoicing.
Earlier, there was a real fog, sea mist, haar. Common at this time of year. It shuffled in from the sea and then, as the evening cooled, suddenly the air clarified and everything was pin-sharp and yet dimming in the blue half-light of a northern summer. Night and day blur into one, the simmer dim, the midnight sun.
And we’re already months on from his death, time accelerating away, everybody and everything in motion, inexorably moving towards new life, and new deaths. Can’t go on. Will go on.
So we do. We sleep, we dream, we remember, we sleep. One morning you wake up and the fog has lifted. It will be back, though, because that’s the weather, this is the season.
Fall. 20 September
Late September, and the year is turning, even here in Shetland, where trees cluster in carefully-tended clumps. Like in our garden. Autumn is making itself felt, falling leaf by leaf. The gales come blustering in, bring migrant birds and their acolytes, the twitchers. Cameras with lenses in shades of khaki and cream, so you know just how expensive they are.
Dad’s cameras. There were, literally, dozens. At first I was confused. Why did he have Sony lenses and Canon bodies, when I knew he was a lifelong Pentax fan? What was he doing with all those expensive cases, Billings bags, four tripods? And the same with the hifi gear, stuff I knew he would never buy. Ridiculously high-end speakers, valve power amps that he’d never even plugged in?
Then I remembered a conversation last year: “All of my friends are dead,” he said. Which, by the attendance at his funeral, wasn’t quite true. “They leave me things, the fellows from the camera club.” And I realised, these were dead men’s cameras, dead men’s audio equipment.
But I feel things changing in myself. A bit. How long has it been? He died at the end of May. It’s almost October. A summer, this plague summer, has passed, somehow. A bad, infectious winter awaits. But there's energy in me now, and new certainties. What I think about faith no longer has to be filtered through dad’s expectations and fears for my eternal soul; I don’t have to wonder what he thinks of what I publish, the pieces he never sought out but was always shown by someone. Except for that time I sent him a new novel and he returned it with a note so brutally dismissive I could do nothing but laugh.
I shaved off my beard. “You’re the image of your father” was too constant a refrain. I felt refreshed, a new man, clean-cut and alas, multi-chinned. But no matter the razor or the badger brush, I kept nicking myself, reminding me why I’d grown it in the first place. Then I looked at my thumb, and I was in that bathroom at Pollokshaws Road in Glasgow, perhaps four or five years old, picking up one of dad’s Gillette safety razors, running my finger along the blade...the first time I watched my own blood fountain redly out.
And I grew that beard originally to look...grown up. Now I’m grown old, and I’ve stopped shaving again. Because if I look like dad, well. That’s fine. Because I look like myself, more like myself.
We were never that close. Mutual uncertainty, mystification, puzzlement and wondering. But we were alike. The same. And this will never stop, this remembering, this grieving. Today I bit into a Thornton’s dark chocolate ginger, the favourite sweet of both dad and mum, and I was madeleined back to Troon, to confectionery shops smelling of paraffin and caramel. Tasting that grown-up sweetie for the first time, bitter and burning, and hating it. But persevering. Learning to love.
And this could go on, couldn’t it? More words, more memories. More ambushes by objects that carry memorial power, like that for-sale advert displaying a pristine Daimler V8 from the 1960s. Suddenly I was perched in a tobacco-reeking leather seat as dad took a second-hand one for a test drive. No space for three growing weans in the back, though. Instead it was a Ford, or maybe a Vauxhall. That A&D Fraser Daimler was only a dream, really.
His clothes. In the end, some of those jackets fitted me but I just couldn’t wear them. They went to the charity shop. Shoes. Actually, it’s my own I have trouble with, not the pair of his virtually unworn trainers I kept. Am wearing now. For some reason, they’re slightly too big. Maybe I’ll grow into them.
No, it’s the smart leather slip-ons I wore a week before he died. Bought new from Tesco. I can see dad’s admiring glance, hear his voice.
“Good shoes,” he says. “They’ll do for my funeral.”
Thanks for sharing, that is quite a read.
Thanks for sharing Tom it has been almost 7 years since I lost my Dad and this brought it right back to the forefront. We are of an age and you can imagine the names I got called in primary school having revealed my father was a ladies shoe designer. He did a talk at the youth club when I was about twelve and I saw the effect he had on young women/teenagers but being a teenager myself was programmed to rebel. I went my own way and it was only years later when we worked together in the family fashion shoe business that I fully appreciated his true genius. Sadly the company folded as a direct result of the miners strike and we went back to a less amiable relationship where we met and talked less often. To this day I still have a guilt trip about not being able to buy a house to replace the one my parents lost as a result of the business collapse (I know as a parent you never want your children to feel the need to look after you but I can't shake that particular demon). I have his kilts which I will never be able to wear but can't bear to part with the last vestiges of his life after the shoe trade. Going back a further generation I have in my shed a pair of wooden step ladders made by my father's dad (made out of fish boxes of all things) Too fragile to think about using too precious to destroy. Keep well friend and take care of you and yours