Tuesday

Lesley had a trip over to Dad’s village today to let the friend who was organising the catering see the venue for the event we are struggling to find an alternative name for. ‘Wake’ seems so harsh and gloomy but anything else seems too much like a party. Neither Lesley nor her sister want anything too sombre but they don’t want levity either.

That left me and The Dog to sort out a suitable route for our walk on our own. Being taken into the village centre and then back out round the lake in the nature reserve was no surprise. The sunshine was welcome. So was seeing the Blackthorn hedges in full bloom.

The Dog has had a few hard walks over the past week or so. We all need to get our daily steps in to shed a bit of weight. It’s meant that The Dog spends the rest of the day sound asleep. We had two deliveries yesterday. Normally, when an Amazon van pulls up outside our house The Dog is barking loudly and throwing herself at the front door before the driver has got out. Yesterday, she didn’t even wake up when he knocked on the door. Today, Lesley managed to get inside the house before The Dog woke up. That never happens. Each time The Dog fails to react to someone at the door or a meal being put out we’ve asked each other “Is The Dog broken?”

This new ultra-calm edition of The Dog is taking some getting used to. I can’t help but worry that there’s something physically wrong with her.

The ongoing discussion between Lesley and her sister about the order of service for Dad’s funeral reached a conclusion this afternoon with a quite unexpected result. I don’t know why but I felt I should give Lesley’s sister the benefit of the doubt and say she was being genuine when I heard her say

“Well if you feel that strongly about it let’s do it your way.”

I hope for Lesley’s sake that that wasn’t a setup for a tantrum down the line.

We had another run through of the text of Dad’s eulogy that Lesley was going to read at the service. She can get through it without a wobble now. I had a final tinker and sent it off to the lady who will be officiating so she can take over if Lesley falters on the day.

If you’re intending to read at a family member’s funeral, and everyone I’ve spoken to about it has said that it isn’t a good idea, but if you do intend to go ahead and do it I can’t recommend strongly enough reading it aloud a lot to get the emotion out of your system. Otherwise, you won’t cope on the day.

So it was job done. But it did trigger a memory of a comment her sister had made that Lesley told me about after reading the text to her the first time.

“It’s good, but it isn’t about the Dad that I knew.” she’d said.

And, to an extent, that was true. I’d wanted to give a picture of the background that he’d come from and his entire life from cradle to grave when I wrote it. More than half of what I’d written had happened before she was born and nearly all of it was about a time well before she’d wanted anything to do with him or where he’d come from.

I do have to admit that I had a similar struggle with the text that Lesley’s sister intended to read too though. My struggle was due to my inability to recognise much reality in the relationship with her Dad that she described. She was a teenager when I first met her. She was still at school. I saw how she behaved towards her mum and dad. I heard what she said and I heard what they said about her when she wasn’t around. I know how long that went on for too. I’m also aware of how selective her memory is and that was the cause of the spat that resulted in her not wanting to speak to me for the past twenty-odd years.

I have to admit that I wasn’t aware of the blissful devotion and closeness that I heard being described. I thought it was all bollocks. If anything, Dad’s acquiescence to everything she said wasn’t down to love. He was terrified of her.

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. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. April 2025.