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. There's a meeting at the village church to discuss practical arrangements for an evensong by candlelight. Perhaps if we turn off the harsh electric lamps that glare down from the ceiling and let softer lights make pools and shadows in the large,old space, perhaps we will feel closer to the people from the past, who have lived and worshipped and died where we live now.  

But we have to get the logistics right. Twenty-first century people, even in villages, are not as comfortable with the dark as our ancestors had to be. We must ensure they can arrive and leave safely and feel comfortable while they are here. 

Our meeting's at 4.30. Already it's after 4.00. I’m in the laundry room and hurrying to unload the washing machine, to take clothes off hangers and put them in the airing cupboard, take out the previously aired clothes and pile them into a basket to carry upstairs. After the meeting I’m driving from Essex to Suffolk to stay on board Peter Duck. Finish the laundry, pack clothes and food. The only thing I haven't done is decide what to write for this blog. Usually I just ask myself what's on my mind, what's been absorbing me. This week has been too bitty and breathless. I've no idea. It'll be 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. The purple suitcase falls over, bursts open, reveals a couple of dull looking files. I don't recognise them. I pick the clothes off the floor and bend impatiently to shut the case. I’ve already clicked the latch before I realise I should at least take a look at the contents. 

The first contains papers relating to a cottage in Woodbridge which my father 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 Barclays Bank, Woodbridge in 1983, 42 years ago. 

The second file holds the letters of condolence which were sent to Mum then. I pick it out of that case and shove it in my dry bag..

Later, when it was dark and quiet in Peter Duck's cabin, I read all the letters. They must have been difficult for some people to write as my parents had just begun divorce proceedings. It was a horrible time. Those who knew Mum best were the bravest in taking this problem head on, acknowledging it, then talking about the love there had been in the past and recognising the trauma felt now. I was touched by a letter from the manage of the bank where Dad died, written on the day it happened. He wrote feelingly of their collective shock: ‘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. How many bank managers today even know their customers, let alone feel friendship or write personal letters of condolence?

I found a letter from a bank customer called Dora. She had been behind Dad when he collapsed, had spotted a retired doctor walking up the street and called to him for 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. I wondered for years what Dad’s last moments had been like. His death had felt like a physical blow. 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. 

Forty years later I had, by chance, met someone else who’d been in the bank that day. He assured me definitively that Dad’s death had been instant. He'd given a massive groan, fallen down and lain still. My informant was certain that Dad was dead before he hit the ground. But how thoughtful of Dora to write her letter then. I wish I could thank her.

Someone made a connection between the rheumatic fever Dad had suffered as a child and the effect that may have had weakening his heart. Sudden death always involves a postmortem but I don't remember what it found. Mum's sister-in-law tackled the issue head on in her letter, assuring Mum that death can come at anytime and it needn't have been connected with the stress of the divorce.

I'd always assumed that it was. Probably I still do. Dad had been staying with me just a few days earlier. 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's lawyer had told her to change the locks on their former home on lawyer’s advice. Ludicrous, unnecessary, insulting advice. I had had to drive over and talk to her about it, then come back and talk to Dad. 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.

My father was a good and loving man. When he had got back to  that cottage in Woodbridge he had written me a letter to say that the arguments were over. Mum could do or have whatever she liked. He wasn't going to fight any more. He would tell the lawyers to stop. Now, reading the letters of condolence that were inside the folder, I discover, from two of the writers, 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 surprise to him as it was to us.

If I had been stunned, Mum was pole-axed. I remember her sitting in a dark room for days till Dad’s body came home. My brothers and I scurried around making arrangements. There was a cremation, grim, utilitarian and forgettable. But also in the file are copies of the service sheets for the memorial I arranged for just a week later. So quick! I think now that was a measure of our shock. I got such comfort then from choosing the music, the typeface, the logo.

I didn’t think Mum had done anything for those first few days except sit and mourn. The file tells me differently. Within a couple of days of  Dad's death she'd written her own letter of condolence to the woman for whom Dad was finally leaving us. All I remember is that 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. She says it has brought ‘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.

'Too late'. The saddest words. 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 Time to pack this file away and go out into the sunshine.