Death still has its sting – but family puts even its finality into perspective

IN the countryside around the site of the Battle of Bannockburn there is a wooden bench. There, for the past six years, on the evening of August 14, several generations of my family have gathered. Once assembled, this small crowd walks a looping mile through the birdsong, past fields and streams, waving and hallo-ing at puzzled farmers and bemused cows, before finishing back at the bench. At this point there is a speech, a toast, maybe a poem and a song or two. Then we all go home.

It is a happy-sad occasion. We are there to remember my Uncle Michael, a fine and deeply loved man who was taken from us in his prime, and to whom that bench is dedicated. Michael was the youngest of my mum’s six brothers, the baby of the brood, doted on and indulged as the baby often is.

There was a good reason for this. As a child, and in the days when it was potentially fatal, he suffered from severe asthma. He spent month upon grim month in hospital, struggling to catch his breath, sucking at the air around him, his weak chest rising and falling like frantic bellows. Survival, though it came, was not a given.

The toll was more than physical. Michael fell behind at school. When he left secondary he went to work in a shop, selling cameras. It must have been frustrating – he was a bright guy, as bright as the siblings around him to whom academic disciplines came easily and who would variously go on from a working- class upbringing to become among other things a professor, a headteacher, a successful businessman and an MP.

Burning

Michael sustained the intellectual part of himself by writing pop songs, poems, musicals and short stories. He had an appetite for creation, a fierce desire to learn, that burning urge to know more that marks the autodidact.

But it was never quite enough. Eventually, in early middle age, with three young children, he went to university to study English literature. Those were tough times, a family of five living on just his wife’s salary, but Michael emerged with a First, became a teacher and within a few short years was running the English department of a large school. He had found his stroke. His pupils adored him. So did his colleagues. He had done it.

He was still writing songs, stories and poems. We had similar interests and would talk for hours about the books and writers and music we loved. Closest to me in age, he helped me through some difficult situations – he had always been through worse. Michael was cool.

And then he was diagnosed with cancer, and quite quickly, unfathomably, brutally, at just 51, he was gone.

It felt – still feels – like more than a death: like a betrayal by the universe, a failure on its part to honour the deal. After all that, after the overcoming and the determination and the application and ultimately the victory, he was cheated by the cardsharp of fate.

Many if not most families will have a similar aching gap in them, like a phantom limb; a random felling, a talent not allowed to fulfil itself. It is a challenge to the basic human expectations of decency and fair play, that there is some sense of cosmic justice, that you will eventually get out what you put in.

We all have to cope with this lack and my family’s method is to meet and walk and talk each year, on the anniversary of Michael’s death. Six years on, his friends and colleagues still travel from all over to join us. It’s a proper thing, now. A lovely thing.

As time has passed, this quirky little ceremony has become an opportunity for something more. It’s not easy in big, busy families to get everyone together. Snatched moments, quick visits, gatherings of two or three, are more commonplace. But the walk is a magnet and as the years have passed, it has become an opportunity to observe and document the passage of time.

Each one is a kind of update, a window opened on the changing of the seasons – the elders, with their new hips and old jokes, detectably a bit greyer and slower; the middle (like me), ever plumper and knackered-looking, watching out for cars and kids; and the young, sprouting like fast-growing shrubs, babies who are suddenly taller than you and off to live in student digs; and then, finally, the new babies. The cycle of life.

I’ve come to draw immense value from t the experience. It is one of those rare, unfeigned opportunities to stand and stare, to step outside the pell-mell of the everyday and grab a moment simply to feel, to take stock and order your jumbled emotions. And to understand who you are.

The line of people traipsing round the S Stirling countryside tells the history of m my family, person by person: from the dank, dangerous mines and backbreaking work in steel foundries, to the chalk and blackboard of the classroom, to universities and journalism and Parliament. Each generation urging on the next, both in word and deed, to go further, to roll the dice, to understand that you have the right.

Treasures

This is perfectly expressed by one of Michael’s favourite poems, Seamus Heaney’s Digging.

‘Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests; snug as a gun./ Under my window, a clean rasping sound/ When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:/ My father, digging. I look down… / By God, the old man could handle a spade./ Just like his old man… / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them./ Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it.

We all dig with whatever tools are available to us. And it is surely the beauty and comfort of a family that you are never digging alone. Rather, the air rings to the sound of many spades working in unison, in different patches of ground, unearthing a variety of treasures.

Over decades, over lifespans, these treasures are shared and passed down – memories, experiences, tragedies and triumphs, values and talents, songs and stories and poems. The harder we dig, the deeper we go, the more we are.

My eldest daughter’s birthday falls on the same day as Michael’s passing. We give her the choice but she likes to go on the walk. Life and death, best done together. Michael lives on in me, in her, in our family.