Day 43 of the 100 day project.

The thirteenth of May.  Had he lived, my father would have been eighty four today.  His illness and decline were so important to my experience of the garden that I shall talk a bit about that today.

We gave him a splendid eightieth birthday.  My mother had died quite without warning from a heart attack six months earlier and the village hall had been full of people for her funeral wanting to share their memories of her.  It might sound odd that we had his birthday party in the same place but it felt very right.  Lots of the same people were there and, although my mother's funeral had had its odd surprising moments of joy, the shock of her death was overwhelming and full of pain and it felt good to have some more simple moments of pleasure in that friendly community place.

My sister had pulled all the stops out to get everyone there who my dad wanted to see: all the children, with their husbands and wives, most of the grandchildren, now adult so some with families of their own, meaning there were a couple of little great grandchildren.  My father's sister came and her daughter and that always made dad smile.  There were friends and neighbours both from my parents' recent life in Okehampton but also from Topsham where they had lived for many years and whose community my Dad loved.  There were old workmates from his time as Devon's County Photographer and new friends too.   There was great food, always important in our family.  My father totally loved it.

His life had fallen apart after my mother died.  He lost not only his wife of fifty three years and, he would say, his best friend, but his carer as he declined through motor neurone disease.  By the time of his birthday he had had to leave the assisted living apartment into which they had moved because he was too disabled without my mother's help to manage there and he had moved into a home where he was  not happy.  We found him somewhere else to live which suited him rather better and although his last months were very difficult they also had much happiness in them.  But his birthday, that birthday, was very simply a good day, a day that he loved.  He was delighted to see everyone.  He was moved that so many people had made the effort to come.  He was exhausted by it too but it lives in my memory as a very good day, a day like a card with gold edges, my mother used to call them.

It is strange to be working in the garden and to know he has gone, that they have both gone.  He loved May, partly because it was his birthday month, partly because it was his mother's name and partly because he was a photographer so he loved light and colour and May is the month of singing green and colour erupting all around.  Looking after him, which I shared with my sister who carried so much of the burden because she lived close by, became all consuming after my mother died.  I stopped gardening.  Dad lived five hours away and Ian and I drove the six hundred mile round trip every week.  The garden was an irrelevance, and as it slipped into mess and chaos, an irritation, an embarrassment, a reproach, an annoyance.

Today I planted catmint in the cutting garden and sowed opium poppies.  I thought of my father and of my mother.  My mother would have loved to wander around the garden with me looking at what was growing, admiring the shepherd's hut and the new field shelter/summerhouse/sedd maes!  She would have loved to watch the swallows and to go through photographs of the six new grandchildren who have been born since she died four years ago. 

Today, my lovely much missed mother and father, is for you.