Why can’t I sleep any more? Why do I keep waking up at 4.30 and then after the inevitable pee, am unable to settle back to sleep? Is it something that comes with age? Is it my prostatic hyperplasia waking me (I have now started to take the tablets again) or is there something else? Pressure on the urinary tract may well wake me, but once relieved, can hardly keep me awake. There must be something else.
It may be because I feel alone and a little scared. Within the last 4 months I have lost both my parents. They were wonderful, remarkable people and I was fortunate to have had them for so long. Dad was 96 when he died this January and Mum was 90 when she passed away last week. They had lived together, albeit with care visits up to four times a day supplemented by me, in their own house, a little bungalow, until their deterioration took them on different paths to hospital and inevitably care homes. In retrospect, it was always impossible to conceive of either one of them without the other and my hope now is that wherever they are, they are together.
It feels strange, aged 62 ½ to find myself, an only child, without parents. It is as though I have been in an extended period of adolescence, with that certainty always there, shielding me from absolute responsibility and now that has gone.
Both parents were born in times very different to the present day. My dad, one year before The Great War, towards the end of that period of calm and certainty soon to be cruelly shattered across Europe. They both grew up in large, poor working class families with many elder brothers and sisters and for years prior to their deaths, had been the only surviving members of their families. They met during the Second World War, in Coventry, both working for Armstrong Siddley on war work. My mother had moved up from South Wales to the Midlands following her elder sister and looking for work and a way out of the domestic slavery which was the lot of young women in the valleys. Whether it was their joint experience of growing up in difficult circumstances in large families, or the precarious position they found themselves in after the war, I don’t know, but they only had one child: yours truly.
The one thing they both took from their separate but similar upbringings, was a resolution to better themselves through work and sobriety. I don’t mean they were social climbers, but they were both determined to live differently and to create a better life for themselves and I, than they had known as children. Theirs was the generation of make do and mend, of thrift and a lack of ostentation which saw them through the late forties and fifties until the explosion of the 1960s which must have seemed very strange to them indeed. It was the decade when I, a classic baby boomer, came of age.
Almost constant work in the factories of Coventry for my dad meant a gradual rise in living standards and a succession of houses, always owned, with some help from the Building Society until the last family home we all lived in was bought with no mortgage at all. We looked after my mother’s father, my granddad, until his death in 1968 and so as an only child, I was used to the stability of older people around me which cemented that total self-confidence that male only children seem to have yet which now I wonder about.
As I prepare for my mother’s funeral, with that of my dad still very fresh in my mind, I am more than ever convinced of one or two things. Firstly that the only thing that really matters in life is love and love is most unconditionally expressed through the family, between its members and generations. Secondly, that life after death is a metaphor for the enduring power of love, for the memory of one’s parents and grandparents that stays in the heart. I only hope that in my own stumbling, imperfect way, I can eventually be even half as good in that respect as my mum and dad.
It may be because I feel alone and a little scared. Within the last 4 months I have lost both my parents. They were wonderful, remarkable people and I was fortunate to have had them for so long. Dad was 96 when he died this January and Mum was 90 when she passed away last week. They had lived together, albeit with care visits up to four times a day supplemented by me, in their own house, a little bungalow, until their deterioration took them on different paths to hospital and inevitably care homes. In retrospect, it was always impossible to conceive of either one of them without the other and my hope now is that wherever they are, they are together.
It feels strange, aged 62 ½ to find myself, an only child, without parents. It is as though I have been in an extended period of adolescence, with that certainty always there, shielding me from absolute responsibility and now that has gone.
Both parents were born in times very different to the present day. My dad, one year before The Great War, towards the end of that period of calm and certainty soon to be cruelly shattered across Europe. They both grew up in large, poor working class families with many elder brothers and sisters and for years prior to their deaths, had been the only surviving members of their families. They met during the Second World War, in Coventry, both working for Armstrong Siddley on war work. My mother had moved up from South Wales to the Midlands following her elder sister and looking for work and a way out of the domestic slavery which was the lot of young women in the valleys. Whether it was their joint experience of growing up in difficult circumstances in large families, or the precarious position they found themselves in after the war, I don’t know, but they only had one child: yours truly.
The one thing they both took from their separate but similar upbringings, was a resolution to better themselves through work and sobriety. I don’t mean they were social climbers, but they were both determined to live differently and to create a better life for themselves and I, than they had known as children. Theirs was the generation of make do and mend, of thrift and a lack of ostentation which saw them through the late forties and fifties until the explosion of the 1960s which must have seemed very strange to them indeed. It was the decade when I, a classic baby boomer, came of age.
Almost constant work in the factories of Coventry for my dad meant a gradual rise in living standards and a succession of houses, always owned, with some help from the Building Society until the last family home we all lived in was bought with no mortgage at all. We looked after my mother’s father, my granddad, until his death in 1968 and so as an only child, I was used to the stability of older people around me which cemented that total self-confidence that male only children seem to have yet which now I wonder about.
As I prepare for my mother’s funeral, with that of my dad still very fresh in my mind, I am more than ever convinced of one or two things. Firstly that the only thing that really matters in life is love and love is most unconditionally expressed through the family, between its members and generations. Secondly, that life after death is a metaphor for the enduring power of love, for the memory of one’s parents and grandparents that stays in the heart. I only hope that in my own stumbling, imperfect way, I can eventually be even half as good in that respect as my mum and dad.
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