How do we deal with death when we realise, at the end of someone’s life, how little we really understood about them?
My father-in-law died this week after a mercifully short illness.
He was, in many ways, a difficult man but what he could not make out of an old discarded pallet was unlikely to be worth having.
Unlike my own father, when he died I was able to glance around at his legacy all over the house and garden.
The astonishing playhouse he made for the children complete with a complex array of markings on each piece, “So that you can put it back together again if you ever move or need to take it apart,” he once told me.
It was hard to decide whether he was being overly generous in his appraisal of my DIY abilities or teasing me. In all the thirty-plus years I knew him it would always have been hard to tell.
The spice rack, the fence he erected in a day and which he subsequently fell through ten minutes later after finishing an especially large bottle of celebratory cider.
The lawn he laid with me as his navvy, the decking, the picnic table, and benches all varnished in his trademark reddy-brown colour, presumably a job lot of tins hidden somewhere in the over-stuffed garage in which nobody could have seen the back wall since the early 1980s
In his own garden, there is a boat that my mother-in-law, in the advanced stages of her Alzheimers, had remembered being in “dry-dock” there since 1974.
Projects completed and projects unfinished while the only thing I learned about him really was that he could turn his hand to anything in our house but rarely did in his own.
I think it was probably his way of showing a love he was not able to express in other ways.
My father was the same whilst being wildly different.
Unable to put a shelf up or boil an egg my dad expressed his love with lifts in his car and unremitting approval of anything I did, regardless of whether or not it actually had any merit.
Men like these leave bigger holes than we might think they would. There is a sense of something unfinished, unresolved, obscured.
It is not that we doubt their affection so much as frustration that we cannot see what it was that stopped them from speaking it and therefore prevents us from connecting our own love to them in a way that feels satisfactory.
These men become outsiders in their own family, a way of bonding between the rest of us when we laugh or despair about their latest bewildering behaviour.
They are a “glue” of sorts but one to which they do not stick themselves.
My own father died without my knowing he was leaving so, fittingly, the last thing I said to him was “goodbye” as I walked through the door of my parent’s house on a Saturday morning.
In his final hours my father-in-law, never one to waste a penny if he could avoid it was insisting that he didn’t want a funeral and the whole thing should be done with the minimum of fuss.
“I’m quite surprised he hadn’t made his own coffin from an old pallet,” I told my sister as we were walking the dogs which reminded me of one of the most amusing things my wife said to me just after he had all his teeth removed and was refusing to wear dentures.
“I don’t know why he doesn’t fashion himself a set from some wood,” she said. How we laughed at him being the glue again.
“I don’t want people traveling all this way for my funeral,” he said not understanding how some people are willing and able to encounter their feelings at a time of bereavement.
There will be a funeral, of course, and people will come too because, even when there are great parts of someone that we were unable to see or found difficult to understand, there still remain parts that we will miss and cherish.
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