Don’t anyone dare tell me that my Dad ‘had a good innings’
◆ Why is a loved one dying at 94 somehow less grief worthy than a death at 24, wonders Kate Copstick
April is the cruellest month,” according to TS Eliot. Let’s face it, Eliot is no Dr Seuss when it comes to comforting quotes, but for once I find myself nodding in agreement. April 7, 1973, my Mum died. Suddenly. Out of the blue. April 7, 2023, my Dad died. He was – indeed, is – the love of my life and it seems utterly wrong that the world has survived a year without him.
The way the digital generations say “pix or it didn’t happen” is how I have always felt about everything… “call Dad and tell him all about it, or it didn't happen”.
Grief and loss do strange things to your critical faculties. They make you want to believe in God and heaven (and nothing could make me believe in God) or at least an afterlife where we all meet up again and Mum sings 'Songs My Mother Taught Me' and Dad gets on the piano and entertains the spirit world with My Very Good Friend The Milkman. In that scenario, Fats Waller would be there to applaud. As, indeed, would Dvorak.
You comfort yourself with the science that says energy cannot be destroyed, it can only change its form, so that passing shower of rain was almost certainly Dad. But, ultimately, you are not comforted. Ever again.
Of course, if you are not me, and many of you are not, April 7 is National Beer Day, International Beaver Day, or, ironically, World Health Day. Because that is the way of death, it is at once everything and nothing.
I remember when Mum died feeling so powerfully that there should be a black patch in the sky, a hole in the wind, something to show the world that she was missing. But the world just closes up around death. Most of it doesn’t even know a death has happened.
It is a strange (and, I found, enraging) experience, to find that everything goes on as normal – shops sell stuff, buses run, schools teach, pubs pull pints – when, to those who have lost, nothing is normal.
Even on our way to the funeral, looking out of the car window, everything was normal, nothing had changed. Except us.
We, our lives, our futures, were fundamentally changed that day in April 1973. I held my father in my arms and he cried and it was like seeing the sky melt. None of us was ever the same person again. My father lost his fire, it seemed.
The Japanese have a wonderful tradition called Kintsugi, in which something broken is pieced back together and the fragments fixed with gold paste, the idea being that the piece can never be the same again, after the breakage, but the damage can make the item more beautiful, that scars should be worn with pride. Unlike the Japanese to be that fanciful, but they have a point. Although emotional fault-lines don't fix quite as quickly as gold paste.
Sometimes the something that was broken, when put back together again, is not really the same thing at all. There’s a big part of me which thinks that is the way it should be. It is fitting that we are changed. Not quite death as a form of rebirth, but... something close.
In the days following Dad's death, I think if one more person had said “ah well, he had a good innings” I would have been moved to violence. Obviously the human being has a finite lifespan, and Dad was 94. But the accepted opinion that dying at 94 is somehow less grief-worthy than dying at 24 irritates me.
With all that my father's generation have done – fought a World War, rebuilt a country, worked and voted for a welfare state, the NHS, nationalised the coal and electricity industries, gave the world the Boomers and babysat the Millennials – they are insufficiently revered, possibly because they still value a capacity to get over yourself and get on with things.
But, with their generation more than any since, we should say “we shall not see their like again”. With them, their stories and their experiences, their spirit is going. Dad had amazing stories. Always a new one, right to the end. Extraordinary what a British officer could buy with Capstan Full Strength in post-war Italy, apparently.
Dad was lucky, in that his relationship with and marriage to my stepmother Audrey was such a lifeenhancing one. It helped, I think, to remake him.
Indeed, one of his wonderful, and regular, expressions of happiness was saying “I am going down to the bottom of the garden and I am going to shout as loudly as I can ‘I am lucky’”, at which point he would raise his arms and his gaze and punch the sky.
Dad did old age very well. All the Copsticks did. He mellowed. With Audrey, I think, he developed an appetite for reading, and poetry. He read history and philosophy and we never did, with our combined brainpower, get to the bottom of why Schumacher's Small is Beautiful is not required reading for everyone who wants to do pretty much anything in business or economics.
One of his favourite poems was Roger Mcgough’s Let Me Die a Young Man’s Death, which he used to read out loud.
I’m not sure he wanted that… although the poem’s 104-year-old with the mistress who cuts him up and throws away every piece but one always, always, made him laugh.
My Dad died an old man's death, in his bed, cared for by a family who loved him and who still talk about him pretty much every day, and miss him every day.
I only wish I could call him and tell him I'm writing about him in The Scotsman. He would be, as he used to say, “overcome with emulsion”.
Well, if I am wrong and you are up there Dad, I hope you like it.