Golden

The heat keeps on, pressing my skin, the continuity is a reminder of where I was just a few days ago. Though time stretches strangely in strange times, makes it seem like I am remembering an epochal, ancient past or a current, fleeting dream.

I was revisiting a place I knew well, my childhood home was not three miles away. A landscape that I love: beech woods, fields and lanes, buildings of red brick and flint. Too many cars but enough space. I could walk once more in the woods, sheltering from the heat and collecting my thoughts. The woods have always been a place to think, to re-order myself. I get the same sense of grounded wonder in a cathedral, a similarly cool and elegantly spanned space. The beech woods and the cathedral create a modicum of awe that sets the tone, then leave us alone, content to let private reverie occupy our attention. With hindsight, I have understood that this, in part, in distant childhood years is what my father was offering me, all three of us, on our baffling day trips to see dams and bridges. Look at the grace of this structure, look how it achieves itself so effortlessly. Look.

Once my thoughts had been reordered on the short walks of this recent visit, I went back to the newer, harder to navigate terrain – smaller and infinitely more vast. A hot room, my dad so thin, the rugged, narrow mountains of his knees rising sharply from his shallow body. The sheer, spare cliffs of his beautiful face. The heat, the heat. The creaking of wooden floors and the electric fan rumbling like thunder edging the unfamiliar horizons. Space stretched too so that the horizons, for some time, were met in this narrow view.

The heavy victorian gothic of the hospice building did not do as a good job as the beech trees of keeping the unusual heat at bay, at least on the sunny side of the building. But it held us all gently, kindly, kept us together and cared for us as we said goodbye to my father over a rapidly changing week this June. Over days that included his birthday, which was also the day he accepted that death was coming, then ordered a gin and tonic for himself, his partner and for me. And only a few days later, Father’s day. The day he died.

After he died, when it was time to leave, I found it hard. I wanted to stay in that dark wooden interior, the gentle embrace of ancient luxury repurposed into a kind of universal love for those suffering at the end of their lives and those suffering at the end of another’s. The care that enclosed me and my siblings, and dad’s partner, had also enclosed him, keeping us all together. It was hard to leave him there, though he had gone.

My dad was an architect, a rock climber, a diver, a sailor, a lover of songs sung with heart. In these later years, for the ever-present joy of sport, he played croquet, one of the most entertainingly vicious games there is – schadenfreude is almost written into the croquet rule book.

He loved with a big and generous heart, if not always with the quickest sense of another’s needs. But he cared deeply and with great, throat-catching emotion about those he loved. He believed in his family. He believed with atheist conviction in the true importance of fairness, liberty and equality. He was a great thrower of parties and a marvellous host.

Sometimes in his time at the hospice he asked us to leave him. It was hard for one of the gifted hosts of the world to be unable to attend to and join his guests. I knew he wanted us with him but it was difficult to rest when his thoughts were on us. So we spent time in the beautiful grounds, in the woods, and in the rooms provided for us – the people visiting a loved one. In that time, my daughter sent me a link to a film she has made as a choreographer and dancer. It is a beautiful piece called Kintsukuroi/Golden Repair. The piece is dedicated at the end to my father, Philip Allison.

That is in itself, a form of golden repair. A way of making the cracks and scars beautiful. To know, from his actions and from evidence of photos and papers on his work table, how much pride he had in his grandchildren, how he looked for ways to support them in their reaching for value, how he sought ways that he could nourish them in their claims to a life of beautiful meaning. And to see that love and respect come back to him. To watch my daughters becoming magnificently themselves with his love and support even as I watch him slide quietly away.

This is a common time, a universal time. We have all said goodbye to someone we love. And we all stumble through helping each other to navigate the sad days and long nights of goodbye. And so many people, in our sadness are pouring their own gold to help make the repairs. Letters and memories, messages from people who loved dad or who care about us. They offer such kindness. I am thankful for all of it.

I would also like to particularly offer my deep gratitude to the Sue Ryder hospice in Nettlebed for their beautiful humanity. I will be trying to think of a way to fundraise and support their work.

I send my love to my brother Joe and my sister Thea. I am so glad we were there together with dad.

And Lilian and Phoebe. Beloved

And Pierre

Kintsukuroi/Golden Repair

Sue Ryder