Friday

The voice beside me when I woke up this morning said

“Would you write the eulogy? You did such a good job for your Mum.”

“Eh? OK. Alright.”

A little while later…

“What do you think of this?”

“Beautiful!”

We took The Dog out for her walk. The first walk with all three of us for a while.  We couldn’t believe how warm it was. A Brimstone butterfly seemed to follow us for most of it. The Dog still took a while to loosen up but she did start trotting and taking the full length of her long line more quickly than she had been doing lately.

We talked about Lesley having to go to the home and clear Dad’s room and about the eulogy.

“You do know she’s going to want to change it don’t you?”

“I’m not going to let her see it.”

“I dare you to tell her it was me that wrote it!”

Lesley’s sister had insisted that they both be involved in packing Dad’s belongings at the home up. She made suggestions on how she could make things easier for Lesley. It was obvious that none of them would. It would be unkind of me to think that she knew she was telling Lesley to things in a way that was more inconvenient. But I couldn’t help myself.

“She says we should choose the music for the funeral. I told her she should just pick what she likes.”

Lesley adopted a whiney voice…

“But we should do it together”

“What she means is that I should pick what I think we should have so that she can tell me how rubbish my choices are.”

Lesley had a rough afternoon ahead of her. We already had Dad’s wheelchair here. She needed to get that to Dad’s house, pick up her sister, go to the home, pack up the rest of his clothes and equipment and get that and her sister back to Dad’s house. We knew that would take a couple of hours. I knew that Lesley’s sister wouldn’t let her off that lightly.

The Dog and I waited, got on with whatever we could and waited some more.

Several hours later, Lesley got home. She looked exhausted.

“Well? How bad was she?”

“Awful. Just horrible. She’s starting to argue about his paintings now.”

Both the nursing homes Dad had been in encouraged us to personalise his room. We thought that putting up some of his watercolours would be a good idea. But when he was asked he got annoyed and said that he didn’t want us ransacking his house. He wanted it left exactly as he’d left it so it didn’t look bare when he went home as unlikely as we knew that would be. The solution was to put up the paintings of his that we had. Lesley’s sister hadn’t seen them before.

“Oh, that’s a nice one. I’d like that one.” she’d said.

“But these are my paintings! He did them for me!”

“So how many have you got? Have you got more than me!?”

To put this in some sort of context, Lesley’s sister already had several paintings done by Dad. In fact it had really hurt both Lesley’s Mum and Dad that they weren’t on show in her home on any of the visits they paid years ago. It had upset them for ages and they’d been reluctant to let her have any more.

And now she wanted one of Lesley’s favourites. For what? Getting even? Spite? Just to cause an argument?

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. The image is not of the home itself. I used AI to generate an image of a typical modern nursing home. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved. Which, for the new home, is probably just as well.