It’s in the eye of the beholder

Michael the Builder. Mick the Handyman. Same person, different story. Once, Warren Buffet (the richest man in the world until he started giving his money away) was asked how to live a good life. He said you should literally write your own obituary, setting down how you would like to be remembered, then reverse engineer it, living your life accordingly. A big idea.

Ultimately though, we have no say in how we’ll be remembered.

Michael/Mick, age 64, was found stabbed to death in his home last week, his lonely remains discovered several days later. “Known to his neighbours as Mick the Handyman,” said news reports.

Michael the Builder, I muttered, because I know he preferred it because he told me so.

We first met Michael when he moved across the road from my mother-in-law eight years ago.

He would drop in immediately if she needed help, opening jars, fixing the alarm, replacing a washer on a tap. Handyman? He was handy, yes.

Michael also did building work at our house. We found him unfailingly reliable, honest, hard-working, and a great contact to have.

I shared his number with friends when they needed anything doing, particularly female ones, because he was never patronising or creepy, remaining a southern-style gentleman, his accent tinged with Alabama because he’d lived in the US for many years. He’d married, divorced, and had two children there.

Now his own son has been charged with his murder. This is the 30-something son who’d come from the US to live with him, the son he told me was troubled, the son he was trying to get off his backside and launched into life. Once, he brought him to our house to help with painting. Only once.

This is the son whose Facebook account, we now discover, listed his father’s previous failings: the meth addiction, the years in stateside jail for drug offences, the deportation on his release...

We knew none of this because Michael had reinvented himself. God knows, he was trying. But you don’t get to write your own obituary. Mick the Handyman; Dad, the crackhead jailbird; Michael the Builder, who loved strawberry Cornettos and his cat...

You do get to choose how you remember people though. I left flowers outside his gate, with a note: “Michael – always a gentleman.”