“Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.”
Baz Luhrmann.
Mum and l visited dad yesterday, seven years since he was planted high on the hill in Philipshill cemetery (to keep his feet dry).
Then we swung past the hairdressers to get Sharon and headed to House For An Art Lover, for lunch and Saturday’s first bottle of Malbec.
Wee Jean loved farmer Hugh and was the best thing that ever happened to him. She chose him, tamed him and gave him purpose. Her gold inscription on his black stone is “when we fell in love it was forever”.
Mum believed in dad, backed him always and tied his ties; wrote his letters, gave him counsel and did the numbers; made him laugh, found his soul and held it for over 60 years.
Mum visited him every day the three years he was away a place for the terminally forgetful, taking limitless patience and paradise slice and matching socks.
Jean Wardrop is clever and articulate and sharp as ever at eighty-five. A true matriarch. In another life she would have been MD of Alisa Industrial Services, rather than a figure in the background.
On our way to the cemetery l take us past our first family home, a council semi in Eaglesham, and we do life’s colouring in.
Old favourites come up, of course- her mum died in childbirth, dear aunt Mary brought her up, she never wanted to move to the farmhouse in Ayrshire, the cat and dog slept in the same bed, dad’s dementia started long before he was diagnosed- but l always hear something new: a house they nearly bought, a job she took when they were skint, a kindness done for a relative.
One day soon the post lunch Malbec back in her wee Giffnock bungalow, with biscuits and cheese and gooseberry pie, will be our last. As will the privilege of driving her to mass on Sundays (not today though, on account of the long lunch).
The stoics encourage us to embrace such negative visualisation as a way to prepare for the inevitable… but also to live today!
Live! Today! 😎☀️❤️.
Because…
Amor fati, memento mori.
At the cemetery a couple in late middle age were sat on a wet bench, as they have done for 15 years. Charlie’s grandparents got 10 years with their darling boy.
They may be only fifty; they may, in fact, be his parents.
A decade… ffs. Four lairs up the hill, the numbers confirm dad got eight decades.
Enjoy today, you ain’t getting it back. Maybe give your mum a hug, or call her if she’s far away.
Mums like such things.
Dads and hugs… well that’s another story.
Everyone owes their parents something and some of us owe them everything…
Russell Wardrop
CEO