Condolence: a file

Friday. End of the working week. Jobs to be fitted in. Always keeping one eye on the clock to make sure everything gets done before Francis and I go to the church to make practical plans for an evensong by candlelight. I like evensong: it's reflective, comparatively timeless, bringing one small specific day to a close but always with the hovering awareness of  old age, time passing and death's larger endings.  

I suggested to our fellow choir members that if we sing this service by candlelight, our village church will remind us of the  other people have lived and loved and worshipped here and died. Perhaps if we turn off the harsh electric lamps that glare down from the ceiling and let a softer light make pools and shadows in its space; if we fill the air with words and music and also small silences, perhaps the people from the past will crowd in too and those of us who are still alive will stretch our senses just a little further, to remember those who are dead. This is a time of year for memory and condolence, mouring together. 

But we have to get the logistics right. At 4.30pm in these winter months, the light is fading fast. By 5.30 when the service is over, it will be gone. Twenty-first century people, even in villages, are not as comfortable with the dark as our ancestors had to be. We must ensure that our worshippers arrive and leave safely and feel comfortable while they are here. 

We don't have a vicar at the moment. James, who will be taking the service, is in the RAF. He’s careful about risk but not afraid of it. This will be his first service in charge. ‘If you’re going to fail, fail fast,’ he says. So we add some softer lighting in the porch and north chancel and over the organ, we position angle poise lamps strategically to make pools of light, evocative in their own way. 

Our meeting's at 4.30. Already it's after 4.00. I’m in our laundry room and hurrying to unload the washing machine, take clothes off hangers and put them in the airing cupboard, take out the previously aired clothes and pile them into a laundry basket to be carried upstairs and sorted. After our meeting at the church, I’m driving down to Suffolk to spend the night on board Peter Duck. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.

I need to hurry. Finish the laundry, pack some clothes and food to take to the boat. But I don’t know what I’m going to write about for my monthly blog. It's due on on Sunday. Remembrance Sunday. 

I’m over hasty taking a double handful of knickers and socks out of the airing cupboard and stuffing them into the basket to carry upstairs. The basket topples over spilling all the clean clothes onto the floor and hitting an unidentified purple suitcase on the way. I brought it down from our bedroom earlier in the week but didn’t bother looking inside. It’s on its way to storage. 

The purple suitcase falls over, bursts open, reveals a couple of dull looking files. I pick the clothes off the floor and bend impatiently to shut the case. I’ve already clicked the latch before I think I should at least take a look at the contents of the files. 

The first is dull, papers relating to a cottage in Woodbridge which Dad had bought when he realised his heart would always be in Suffolk and not Essex. His heart. Not just the emotional essence of who he was, but the vital organ that had failed, causing him to drop dead when queuing in the bank in Woodbridge in 1983, 42 years ago. The second file is thick with the letters of condolence sent to Mum then -- slightly difficult letters they must have been to write as my parents had just started divorce proceedings. I picked up the file and shoved it in my dry bag.

I read them later, after the church meeting, after the journey to Suffolk, when it was dark and quiet in Peter Duck's cabin. The bank manager had written immediately to say how shocked he and his staff had been. ‘Apart from being a customer here, he was a very good friend to a lot of us and he will be sadly missed.’ That was generous, I thought, remembering how often I’d heard Dad fulminating about mistakes and inefficiencies of that same bank. 

A woman called Dora, had been standing behind Dad and wrote to tell us that she had turned, spotted a retired doctor walking up the street and called to him to come and help:

It may be a comfort to all his family to know that only seconds elapsed before help was at hand. My dear brother was found dead after 24 hours alone in his house, we’ve always wondered what his last moments were like and will never know. This anguish has remained with us over the years. I’m hoping my letter will spare you these tormenting thoughts.

I don’t remember Mum sharing this letter with us. I wish she had, because Dora was right, I did often wonder what Dad’s last moments had been like. His death was such a shock. I remember standing by the phone in the hallway of my then mother-in-law’s house when my brother had rung to tell me. A normal sunny afternoon. I stood there holding the receiver, looking out onto the farmyard, feeling completely stunned. That’s the only right word for it. As if my whole reality had shifted.

It was forty years before I happened to meet someone else who’d been in the bank that day. He assured me definitively that Dad’s death had been quick. Forty years later this was still very comforting to hear.

There had been a postmortem. I don’t remember what it said. I couldn’t help thinking that it was the huge stress of the pending divorce and the separation and arguments that had caused it. Dad had been staying with me a few days before. He had sat under the apple tree, wearing his beret and made a sketch of the house. I look across at it now when I’m lying in bed. But then there’d been the most horrible scene because Mum had said she was changing the locks on their former home on lawyer’s advice.

I had had to go over and talk to her about it and come back and talk to Dad and we had had a catastrophic row. I remember sitting with him in the car in the drive and feeling our relationship was gone for ever. Then he had left.

Reading this, you might think that was The End but the most profound relationships of one’s life don’t just stop. When Dad got back to Woodbridge he wrote me a letter to say that they weren’t going to argue any more. He was going to tell his lawyers that Mum could do whatever she liked, have whatever she chose. It was a closely written, loving letter. The arguments were over.

Now, reading the letters of condolence that were inside the folder which fell out of that suitcase, I discover, just from a couple of them that he’d suffered a ‘turn’ when he got back to Suffolk, that he’d felt ‘woozy’, sought heart disease advice, that he’d cancelled a forthcoming sailing trip. So perhaps his death wasn’t quite such a shock to him as it was to us.

If I was stunned, Mum was pole-axed. I remember her just sitting in a dark room for 2-3 days till Dad’s body came home. My brothers and I scurried around making arrangements. In the file are copies of the service sheets for the memorial I arranged for just a week later. I still feel ridiculously pleased by the layout, the typeface and the choice of music.

I didn’t think Mum had done anything for those first few days except sit in darkness and mourn. The file tells me differently. Within a couple of days of  Dad's death (perhaps after his body had ‘come home’?) she'd written her own letter of condolence to the woman for whom Dad was finally leaving us. I remember her name but nothing more. One of Dad’s closest friends accompanied her to the memorial service, and she cried throughout. Her reply to Mum's letter is in the file. It has brought her ‘more comfort than I can tell.’ She continues:

The only thing I can say in self-defence is that I am suffering too and don’t seem to have your moral fibre. Ruddy lawyers don’t help. Anything else would degenerate into self-pity, so I’ll shut up and just say we loved the silly old B. in our different ways. If I had been able to, I would have packed him off back to you and the grandchildren but he was pig-headed and now it’s too late.

It was all so long ago. I hope she met someone else and was happy. 

It's Saturday morning now, I can hear the splash of oars and the rustle of dinghy sails in a light but purposeful breeze. Time to pack this file away and go out into the sunshine.