REFLECTIONS: Memento Mori

I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I can remember the worst day of my life as if it were yesterday. I doubt I will ever forget the feeling I had as I walked into the basement after arriving home from some school visit to find my wife Inger and the kids waiting for me just inside the door. “Your sister wants you to call her. It’s urgent.” I knew at once that something serious had happened.

I was living in Sweden at the time. My brother had moved to Canada but our sister, Chris, had stayed in our home town with her husband. She and Bill had two kids, just as we had, a girl first and then a boy. In fact, she and Inger had been pregnant at the same time both times so our kids were almost the same age. Gillian, their daughter, had left home and was training to become an airline pilot in Oxford.

I finally got through. In those days international calls were not as simple as they are today. She must have been waiting for my call because she answered immediately with, “Michael. Please come. Mum’s dead.” That’s all she said. Within minutes I was on my way back to the airport. The only remaining flight to London was due to leave within an hour. It was full but I was able to wangle a place on the jump seat up front in the cockpit with the pilots. It’s amazing how helpful people can be when there is really no help to be given. It felt like the end of my world; nothing helped.

I rented a car at Heathrow and drove to Oxford to pick up Gillian, who had completely gone to pieces, before heading north. Our brother was almost on his way too on the overnight flight from Toronto. It’s amazing how death brings people together.

The next few days were a blur of activity. The death industry runs well; it is a well-oiled operation that functions according to strict rules and regulations all over the world, or so I would imagine. There was a problem with the death certificate as mum had died so suddenly outside her home after returning from the shop. Dad had dropped her off and then gone off to the pub for his lunchtime beer, so she died alone on her own doorstep. Dad never got over it. For the next seven years he just waited to die so that they could be together again. Faith is a remarkable thing sometimes.

We wanted him to move into a more manageable house than the one he had shared with mum, the one I had bought for them with my first royalty cheque many years earlier, but he stubbornly refused. Our mum’s name was Edna, and he wanted to stay close to her. We had no choice but to respect his wishes. Our brother lived in Canada as I mentioned, while I was all over the world. Our sister had stayed at home and, as is so often the case, the stay-at-home one was the one to shoulder most of the burden. We quickly realized how totally dependent our father had been on our mother. She was the one who ran the house, who paid the bills, organised the economy. She took all the decisions and once she was gone, dad was totally lost. Up until that point I had seen only two dead people, my paternal grandparents. My mother’s parents had died much earlier. Dad wanted to say goodbye to mum so I took him to the funeral parlour so that he could kiss her one last time. It was a beautiful moment but, for me, mum was no longer there. The corpse that lay in the coffin seemed to have nothing in common with our mum. She had died of a bleeding in the brain so they had opened her skull during the post mortem. They had done their best to repair the damage and she looked so peaceful, but they had combed her hair the wrong way, so I knew it wasn’t mum.

On the day of the funeral, we kids had spent most of the morning making sure that the house was ready for the many mourners who were expected to spend time with us after the funeral. Mum wanted to be cremated and the crematorium was not very far from their home. A good fifteen minutes before the hearse carrying mum’s body was due to arrive from the funeral parlour, the street was filling with cars full of friends, neighbours and relatives waiting to escort her to the chapel. Chris and I were rushing round the house making sure that everything was in order for the reception. It’s amazing how many last-minute things there are to do when something is so final as a funeral. For the first time in my life I understood what ‘final’ meant. Death is final. There is no turning back, no time to address regrets. It is over.

As I was coming down the stairs I met my sister going up. I asked her where she was going; it was time to leave. “I just want to check the upstairs toilet,” she replied. “Mum would die if people came to visit and found the toilet dirty.” For a brief moment we stared at each other and then collapsed in laughter. She was right: Mum would have died if people had found her toilet not to be clean. Memento mori: in the midst of life, we are in death. Remember we must all die some time.