Lockdown Day 17: Wednesday 8th April, 2020

I feel old recalling these times, caressing these long-frond memories with their tentacle temptations, traps and trials.

I wonder what fuels these musings? Guilt? I thought it long-gone, passed with the death of Uncle Jack. Love? We may have loved yet never been in love, but we will always share that moment between us. It exists now only in my mind and will be with me until the day I die. Life? Always. I’ve buried a lot of friends and family over the years, far more than my fair share I reckon in times of burdened reflection. Poor career choice some would say. Or bad luck, poor judgement, dodgy mates. Just life, I would reply, knowing that number will never stop rising till the day I make that journey myself and head off down that undiscovered highway. I follow in the footsteps of all those who have gone before.

For better or worse these people are my family and I am what I am in large part because of them all. Good times, bad times, grey days, great days. Wonderful happenings shared, secrets best kept forever, warm memories to carry with me through all my life. I have learned from them all and perhaps, I can only hope, they have learned some good lessons from me. God rest all their souls.

  Later, as I drift out the door my farewells said, I hear the piper again, ghosting a Piobaireachd through the early evening. I wipe a dry tear from my eye and recall the old Scots toast.

  ‘Wha’s like us? Damn few and they’re aw deid.’

I close the door behind me.

  Grandma died slow and long at the age of ninety-five after a hard life and full, battling all the way from diseased east end slums to the relative nirvana of Glasgow’s west end. She believed in the Lord sparingly, never drank, never smoked and ate simple Scottish fare. She buried her mother, husband, nine siblings, three sons and two daughters, two daughters-in-law and one son-in-law, three grandchildren, one great-grandchild and all her friends. She never knew the fate of her own father.

  My granny also died five years short of the telegram from the Queen, following a brief illness. She smoked liked a lum from the age of eight till the day she died, delighted in her gin and played cards regularly till 3am until the month before her death. She too buried many of her family.

  Uncle Niall and Uncle Iain both died of diabetes. Uncle Niall really died of whisky, but as that’s not a readily accepted clinical condition the certificate stated complications of diabetes. Uncle Iain had both legs sickeningly amputated one after the other because he wouldn’t stop drinking and smoking even in a wheelchair as his arteries kept hardening. Eventually the blood just stopped pumping.

  Cammy the baby died of SIDS two months after Aunt Vivien’s funeral.

  Charlene OD’d.

  Uncle Jim was crushed in a hit and run by a stolen bread van the morning after cousin Jas was stabbed to death in an out of hours dispute in their nightclub. His brother Tam was shot in London.

  Auntie Shelagh died of liver cancer, another earth mother lost to the cloying darkness.

  Auntie Jane died from a massive stroke one beautiful summer’s morning in her garden in Bognor Regis with a smile on her face and a gin and tonic in her hand.

  Mum?
Well, I killed her. But that’s another story.