Remembering

You’ve got to be ruthless everyone says.

Even as I am agreeing, I know it’s not going to happen.

I watch in bewilderment at funerals, as others control their emotions, occasionally dabbing the corners of their eyes. As they stand up and deliver eulogies. And then there is me. Tears streaming down my face. Nose running. I’m not a pretty cryer, if indeed there is such a thing. I’ll still be tearful long into the evening wake, embarrassed at my own emotions.

So here I am, in my parents bungalow, overwhelmed by the task at hand. I feel the weight of memories resting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear as I walk through the rooms. They tell me of so many happy times. A loving marriage. 3 children. All of us here now, mourning the loss of things taken for granted for so many years.

They tell me about plans made, plans lost to a cruel reality. A stroke, a man damaged beyond repair, a man unable to speak, to walk, whose strong heart kept beating for 13 more years. A wife who visited him every day of those 13 years. A wife who was robbed firstly of her husband and now of her memory.

So we will remember for her.

I stand holding Scrabble, the game that went with us on all our family holidays, looking at the notepad where dad has written our scores, a neat column for each of us. I can hear the clack of the tiles, I can see us huddled round the caravan table, me the youngest of the five, sharing a hand with mum.

Be ruthless. Switch off. Dad was a practical man, a Yorkshire man. He’d want us to do what was necessary. He’d hate my self indulgent wallowing.

I walk through the garage to the skip on the front drive. We’ve taken the easy option, all 3 of us and cleared the garage. The old paint and buckets were relatively easy to deal with. Although even there, we’ve faltered, finding one of Dad’s old pipes. He moved from smoking cigarettes to a pipe in my teenage years. The tobacco probably killed him in the end and yet it was so much part of him, the pipe remains by itself, sitting on a shelf in the newly empty garage. None of us could face putting it in the skip.

“A brew?” I suggest. We drink it in the front room, sitting opposite the portrait of my sister, painted in 1982. Ignoring the display cabinet full of ornaments of a financial and emotional value we are struggling to assess.

We laugh at the stories surrounding the portrait. My brother’s 2 friends both besotted with his glamorous older sister. The first writing a story with the lead character bearing a remarkable resemblance to her. The second bettering that, engaging his uncle to paint her portrait.

Mum loved the portrait. My sister concludes she can’t throw it out. It will she thinks, be put in her loft, for her daughter to eventually deal with in a mirror image of our situation. Not ruthless either.

I try to look with fresh eyes at the ornaments. They’ve been there in the background all my life. There will be stories attached to each of them. But not all the stories have been shared. Or perhaps they have and I didn’t listen.

I take out a set of coloured wine glasses. Used once a year every Christmas Day. My sister thinks our uncle, a captain of a ship, brought them back from Venice. I decide they are beautiful and can come home with me. The ornaments will wait for another day. We don’t have to do this all at once.

We are running out of steam. It’s time to call it a day. We’ve promised ourselves pizza in front of the log burner back at my house. A cosy ordinary family evening.

Mum and dad can’t join us anymore. I don’t believe in ghosts. But they will be with us. They always are. They made us, they gave us our history, they’ve given us our future. For that and many many other things, we whisper our thanks.