"To live fully, one must be free from fear. And the only true freedom is the freedom of the mind."
Tizian Terzani ~ The End is My Beginning
Blackpool, Lancashire from S. Shore end on a (rare) lovely day
My father is not very good at dying.
He has been trying apparently for about eighteen months now and has failed more times than my eldest daughter has failed her driving test. Which is saying something. Admittedly, Wicklow Town is a notoriously difficult place to pass a test and it appears that the Fylde Coast of Lancashire in the North West of England with its North Atlantic climate and annual rainfall on a level that only people who live in Seattle can probably appreciate is a difficult place to die.
Apparently.
My grandfather moved to the Fylde in North West of Lancashire from Derbyshire in the 1930s for health reasons I am told having suffered from a dicky heart along with some respiratory issues, for which the sea air provided relief. His heart did for him in 1976 at the tender age of 67. I only have vague memories of him, a tall stern Victorian man who built and ran a successful business, a tech entrepreneur of the 1950s and 1960s but with a perpetual tie and heavy tweed or twill suits and occasionally a monocle instead of the half-moon gold rimmed glasses that I remember him wearing. He also treated my father like a bag carrier and runner so I guess he must have been something of a tyrant.
His only son, my father, who followed in his footsteps in the business until he sold it in a friendly takeover in 1986, is two months away from his ninetieth birthday and his heart has passed it sell-by date by a couple of months now. He is in extra time and my mother has sounded the deep tone of the ram’s horn trumpet to gather the clan at the bedside of the dying chieftain about four times over the last one and a half years with an urgent summons to come and take our leave before it is too late. Which of course we, as dutiful children and grandchildren, did as soon as flights could be arranged, holidays cancelled or dog-sitters found to travel from our various homesteads hurrying back to the source for the emotional and often distressing task of holding hands with a weakening, shrunken bed-ridden figure who bore some passing resemblance to my father.
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