WHEN THE OLD MAN DIED (Part Five :

He did good, me dad, he did OK! As my brother said at his funeral, in a rare moment of filial compassion, “he did good, he did OK, had a long life, eighty-six years’ old, seemed to enjoy himself enough, and he definitely married the woman he loved, cause there was no doubt he loved our mam!” After she went demented he took meticulous care of her. Till he couldn’t even take care of himself. That’s when he lost his will to live. Seems terribly reasonable. He didn’t want to give up, he’d just been given no choice, his only choice left, given a body that had no choice but to grow old and die. We all have to go sometime. Could be any time, the dawn of civilization, the Middle Ages, early twenty-first century, late afternoon or in the dead of night.. Eternity needs only one moment to affirm your temporal novelty’s worn-off, your body’s worn out and it’s time to move on.. genius can grant you just so many wishes before we all blend back into the great cosmic bottle! Which is really flat, no matter how much air and liquid-matter it seems to contain..

It must be crushingly sad, utterly terrifying, absolutely heart-breaking to have to wave bye-bye to yourself forever. Knowing all the things you’re going to miss. England winning the world cup, men landing on Mars, women landing on Venus, getting together weekends to party on Pluto, Iran, Israel and Palestine uniting to re-form the Red Cross nation, peace on earth…All that work you pout in, all that civility you cultivated, all your hopes and dreams.. All the people you bumped into, said hello to, had a good laugh with, shared a great adventure with, wrapped your arms around and felt the heat of not feeling alone in a world so full of lonely people.. Now here you are, alone at the last, lying back on your little National health hospital cot in Ward B2, helplessly at the mercy of your own imagination.. Your life just a flash in the pan, but now your goose is cooked and nobody is coming over for dinner ever again….

NB. I feel like I know my brother even less than I knew my father. Apparently we have nothing in common but our parents. I’ve seen him three or four times in the last thirty years. Though I do still get a Christmas card every year from his wife. I seem to remember I wrote him a few times long ago but got no response. Or maybe I just imagined I did? Either way, I got no response. I do remember turning up at his home in Ilkely one time while transatlantically visiting my parents, but he left after about fifteen minutes cause he had a soccer-game he really didn’t want to miss, didn’t invite me to join him. I cornered him at me dad’s funeral but he obviously would have preferred I hadn’t. After exchanging several awkward platitudes he pretty much shrugged me off and returned to the general company. Sometimes I consider it a loss, sometimes a liberation for both of us. He’s a visual artist but refuses to talk about art. I find his paintings stylishly picturesque but neither challenging nor enlightening. I’m sure he would say the same about my writing. He self-published a novel once, with a Poker motif, involving a son murdering his father. Me dad proudly showed it off to me. I figured with his failing eyesight hopefully he didn’t get beyond the first few pages. It was enough that his son had produced a “real book”. Reality undoubtedly comes properly bound, accredited on the cover and in type-set print, now matter how much anybody had personally paid to be really produced…I’m paying to put myself onto a cloud, now there’s a thought for a sunny day! If he ever reads this, maybe he’ll be peeved enough to respond. You’d think we’d have something to talk about. But maybe we really don’t…

I once suggested to me dad that we’re all living in dream-time. And the less muscle, sweat, blood and material ambition you’re able or willing to exert in this temporal manifest, the more likely it is you will embrace the dream and let go any of the nightmares. He seemed to like that notion and I hope it was with him at the end. I’m pretty sure I picked it up from reading some aboriginal folk-lore, before it was artificially disseminated as the primitive walkabouts of naively unprogressive layabouts!