What’s Left Behind?

Thankfully it was only really a couple of weeks my auld da lay there in the hospice. Must have seemed a lifetime to him.

“Turned his face to the wall.” Was how my mum put it and she was right. To my da there’d be nae point to this type of existence at all. Ill, turned as yella as Homer Simpson, surrounded by strangers (for all his activism my da was a shy man) there was nothing in this for him. Even his family visiting, me, my ma, my brother, well, ye wurnae even sure he wanted us there. For him to engage with us at all would be to be faced fully with the fact that he was leaving us, and he couldn’t handle that. So, metaphorically speaking, he died pretty much alone even though me and Alan each held a hand  on that stormy summer night in June 2006 with the thunder roaring in the skies and the lightning crackling. A sort of Wagnerian ending for this dramatic, sensitive man.

It seemed to come out of nowhere, my immediate grief. Once he’d taken that last laboured breath I just fell apart like a wee lassie. For weeks we aw knew it was the end for him efter he’d refused the chemo but somehow the fact he was actually gone hit me like a train. Maybe we were kidding ourselves that, somehow, he’d survive even this. We were aw so used to my da and his illnesses that there was some sort of unreality at play. My da had something of the Munchausen about him. He had an emotional need to be ailing in some way. It was likely a need to garner the attention he’d so craved as a child but didn’t get. Or maybe it was a trait he had learned and/or inherited from his mother. She was the same. Aye something wrong with her: her way of gaining control of those around her.

She was a strange, shrewd ould duck.

A week from now there will be my dad’s funeral. All my life I seem to have been dreading his demise and now it had finally happened. I loved and admired him so much as a child and became almost superstitious about his continuing presence on the earth (OCD they’d call it these days). I had to close doors three times, touch every third railing, say things out loud three times. That kind of thing and always ‘three’s’. ‘Fours’ were a definite no-no. Six was OK cos it was a multiple of three, but I’d have to add another three to make it nine which was of course three times three. It got very complicated but if a voice in my head tormented me with ‘you didn’t touch that third railing properly’ then, even I had to walk all the way back and be late for school, it had to be done because the consequences would be the death of my father. 

I think it was really this wee boy in me that was crying at my father’s bedside.

Somehow, ye just couldn’t associate my da with something as conventional as a funeral. All his life he’d spurned convention even at a cost to himself and, by extension, his family. For many years he appeared to be actively downwardly mobile as he sought to shed his relatively posh background of a semi-detached with a garden in Garrowhill, a good part of Glasgow that his parents had aspired to. This would have made him the posh boy at his school in neighbouring Shettleston, a not-so-good part of the city.

I see a picture of him as a youngster, and he looks a well-scrubbed, timid-looking wee boy in his school uniform. A wee boy going through a private hell. A wee boy that dreads every school day.

My da’s cancer was borne from the years of stress and tension. He had his own personal knife-edge that he lived on, and it was this that fed his disease. That perpetual sore stomach through his adult life finally revealed itself in what killed him. Even on his death-bed on the final day his toes are ninety degrees and tensed against his final fall.

Some of the jobs he took on were jobs that no one else, quite frankly, would touch with a bargepole. Builder of a Homeless Families Unit in Springburn that had been run almost like a prison, or, at best some sort of poorhouse, he was the guy that was tasked to transform it into something more humanitarian. The first social worker assigned to a housing department in London, maybe in England, they hadn’t even an office ready for him when he started so much was he ‘stepping on their toes'. As a retired man in Kilmarnock (on medical grounds) he pissed the Labour council off so much with all his activism and volunteer schemes that someone threatened to report him to the medical authorities as being ‘fit for work’. They were really saying don’t embarrass us with all your socialism, we’re the socialists around here.

A furniture scheme in Kilmarnock long before they proliferated.  For each according to his need from each who's just about to fling out a perfectly good sofa. An advocacy centre in the town. Wasn’t it he that approached the local Marks and Sparks asking for left-over food for the needy and they told him to sod off? Now it is common practice. A man ahead of his time just practising his socialist ideals.

My da’s idea of ‘Men’s Groups’ differed fundamentally from the expensively chino’d living in Byers Rd in one important dynamic. They meant ‘Men’s Groups’ for those like themselves who’d read the Robert Bly book and were ready to venture up The Campsie’s and pretend to be primal while my father wanted to venture into the very worst estates and sort out men who wanted to stop bevvying and hitting their wives. The be-chino’s crowd weren’t too keen on his idea and let him know as they showed him the way out of their ‘Wally’ closes.

What's left behind is simply to be inspired by such a man and his life and a fascination about the mystery of human beings and their contradictions and dualities.