Andrew Kay: Search for an ending

It’s been one hell of a year so far. I know that I put on a cheery face most of the time – but some things knock that smile off my face and leave me feeling low.

There have been so many changes, too many to list and some too personal to write about here. But for the most part my mood has been affected by the sadness generated by the death of my father.

It happened at the end of 2012 and yet the impact of that loss carries on. I recently went back to my parents’ home in Somerset and spent a week with Mum. She’s doing well really, despite the loss, but there are moments of genuine grief that are hard to deal with, hard to explain and impossible to sweep away. Not that I would ever sweep away the man, not that I ever could. He lives on not only in our memories but also in the huge volume of beautiful work in stone and wood that he left behind in churches, cathedrals and secular buildings across the UK.

It’s the grief that stings and the fact that the manner of his death, in a West Country hospital, gave rise to the need for an inquest. At the time of his death we were warned that there was a backlog of work in the Coroner’s Office and that it would be at least six to eight months before the inquest would take place. Well, it’s nine months now and there is not even a date set.

Now, I know full well that no inquest will bring him back, even if they find that something was amiss in his treatment. I know that any outcome will merely be for their benefit, in signing off the affair and trying to apportion any blame – should there be an element of blame – to an appropriate corner.

I don’t see any need to apportion any blame, he was a very sick man, and toward the end I, for one, had come to terms with the fact that slipping quietly away would for him have been a great and dignified release.

But that was not what happened, and when I saw him last, the day before he died, he was barely lucid. He did recognise me from time to time as I sat with him and he drifted in and out of consciousness – I would never dare to call that state sleep. At times he would wake and those twinkling eyes would light up as he saw it was me. At others he would ramble about tanks of mackerel over his bed and how inappropriate it was for a hospital to have fish flying around all over the place. It had a bizarre element of humour that he would once have enjoyed – but not at that point, it was distressing for him and for me.

I hope the inquest, when it happens, will offer my family some kind of ending. I hate the word closure, an easy piece of cover-all jargon to appease the bereaved. For now Mum finds sleep hard and her long waking hours are haunted by the lack of a real ending and that tangible piece of bureaucracy that is a death certificate, yes, we do not have one of those even.

“I take out his Hohner Larry Adler 12 professional Chromatic harmonica when I am alone and play it – no better or worse than he did”

And when she finds that peace that she so needs then maybe, just maybe, I will be able to do the same. For now though I still sit and look at his beautiful set of wood carving chisels that I have kept, each individually wrapped in cloth and oiled to keep them clean. I take out his Hohner Larry Adler 12 professional Chromatic harmonica when I am alone and play it – no better or worse than he did, and I hold his father’s rather ordinary rolled gold pocket watch in my hand, feeling the soft, worn contours that are always warm to the touch.

Whatever else life throws at me this year will be nothing compared to all this. I cannot be sure that any inquest will take away the heartache and loss that my mother feels, and it’s no surprise after 63 years together. What we all hope for is that we will have an ending to the questioning and a chance to live with his memory.

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