Legacy

 Yesterday we went to the funeral of a very old friend, the first of our generation to die.  This is not the place to write about the day, that is his story and that of his family.  It may be the place to write about the effect of being brought up once again against the finality of death.  How many times has that happened?  How many funerals have I attended over my own reasonably long life?  And yet the mind skitters away and refuses to engage with the hugeness and the inevitability of death.  When I was younger I, like most people I imagine, simply could not feel in any way that death would apply to me.  Of course I knew it would with my intellect but somehow it was impossible to take seriously as my own future.  I could see the sadness and loss of those who were left behind.  I could mourn my own loss.  I could think about the wife or husband, the children and grandchildren who remained and how their lives might be without the person who had died.  But the life force within me pulsed too strongly, made too much noise, for me to acknowledge my own inevitable death in anything but the most hypothetical way.  "Yes, yes.  Of course.  But for now, what shall we have for lunch?"

Losing my mother made the first impact on the cheery inpenetrability of that life force.  She died very suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack.  She was a small woman, quiet, full of warmth, generous, forgiving, with huge tolerance of others and yet with very high standards of behaviour for herself and her children.  My father was noisier, more extrovert, a man with a short fuse and a talent for story telling.  Yet she was the person whose warmth suffused a room and whose wisdom and kindness made her someone of huge stature.  She died in the air ambulance on the way to hospital.  When my father, my sister and I arrived we were shown into the room where her body lay on a metal table.  She looked very small and very alone.  She was too small.  It was not possible that this figure in the flowered nightie with the freckled forearms and the dimmed auburn hair could ever have held my mother.  The body was everything to do with her and nothing.  She was too big for it.

That was the first time I ever had a real though fleeting sense of my own mortality.  She was gone.  I would be gone.  I think about her a lot, with a profound gratitude that I had her, that she was my mother.  I know what she would have thought about many things.  I see her from time to time in my children.  My daughter has much of the same care for others, generosity of spirit and inner strength.  My son has her unshowy courage, her commitment and ability to laugh at himself.  I see my son and daughter and their children as her legacy, taking forward her adventurousness, her independence, always ready for an adventure, always aware of sadness or fear in others and reaching out a hand.  

One of my granddaughters was born just two weeks before my mother died and was a babe in arms at her funeral.  She reads voraciously as my mother did, she is confident and clear sighted.  When I asked her why she had been made head girl at her primary school she told me cheerfully that she thought it was because she keeps an eye out for the little ones.

I remember Mum talking to me about using the sense that we are only here for a short time to live well and I try to do that.  She is gone.  My father and my brother are gone.  Our lovely friend has gone.  In my turn I will go.  So while we are here let us live well, love well.  That way there will be something that goes on.

Yesterday we walked up the hill and visited the churchyard.  In time I might lie here.  Right now, live well.