views from the dark side of the newsdesk
Tattie-Bogle n.
1. an object, usually in the shape of a man, made out of sticks and old clothes to scare birds away from crops
2. a person or thing that apears frightening but is not actually harmful
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Guardian Obit 15 Jul 2012
The Guardian has published an obituary for Dad.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/jul/12/ford-vincent-obituary
Messages 12 July 2012
Mum has received more than 40 cards of sympathy and condolence. Here are just a few of the messages.
He was the kindest most generous man I have ever had the pleasure to meet. No job was ever too small and I will never forget the help he gave me over the years.
He proved to be a wonderful friend over the years.
Ford was unique. There will never be another like him. Thank God I knew him so well.
We have so many brilliant memories of Vince – a lovely, kind and funny man.
What a great man he was and what a true friend.
You should be very proud of the way you looked after Ford.
He was such a lovely man – so very kind and always willing to help anyone. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word.
Sincere memories of a dear, dear friend.
Vince was a great man.
He will be missed by so many people he has helped.
He was a very caring, kind man who always helped anyone.
He was such a lovely man.
Such a great character.
Tuesday July 10th 10 Jul 2012
Yesterday I drove out to Cinderford to track down one of Dad’s first apprentices. John Dixey learned to be a plumber in the late ’50s and stayed in touch until a few years ago.
Dixey, as he was always called, was a bit of a ducker-and-diver, a chancer, a Jack-the-Lad. He’d lived at the same address for about 30 years but when I phoned the number was unobtainable. So I drove out there.
There were, in fact, three houses numbered 120 – A, B and C. There was no answer from A but a young women answered at B. She told me Dixey had moved from 120A in March and now lived in Ross-on-Wye – another 20 miles away. She had his address and telephone number.
Mum called him last night and he was devastated to learn Dad had died. Dixey said Dad had taught him so much and was always generous in sharing his knowledge. Dixey is now 68 and retired. I realised just how long Dad had lived if his APPRENTICES were now retiring.
He was going on holiday to Devon on Monday but he’s postponing his departure to come to the funeral. That’s how much Dad meant to one of his earliest apprentices.
Another former apprentice who will be coming is Ray Michelin. Ray served his time in the early ’80s. He’s American – his English mother brought him back to England after she divorced when he was 12. I worked with him one Summer and he had an American accent. When I spoke to him last week you’d have thought he was a Gloucestershire native.
It’s great that at least two men who learned plumbing from Dad will be there on Monday, one himself now retired.
The Cornish flag we are going to drape over his coffin arrived today, and it will look so impressive, but we are having trouble finding the wild flowers to go on top. Gorse, heather and thrift were suggested by Mum. Thrift only grows on sea-cliffs and is plentiful around Cornwall. But there’s none around here. Even if I went to Cornwall it would be dead by the funeral.
You have no trouble finding neatly arranged mass-grown flowers, but no one deals in wild flowers. It’s not always legal to go and pick them yourself anyway. So it’s actually easier to get an old bi-plane to come below the legal minimum altitude for a fly-past than to find wild flowers for a coffin. I didn’t think it would be the floral tribute which would beat me.
Mum has had nearly 40 cards and we’ve had about a dozen. I still have no idea how many will come. The notice was in the newspaper last night so that could bring more people. I want this to be a big gathering for people to show how Dad touched their lives.
But even if we don’t get the numbers, the readings, the music and the eulogy will show how a man could be great in a small way.
Monday July 9th 9 Jul 2012
We went to see Dad in the Chapel of Rest this morning. It’s nearly a week since he died and this would be the last time we ever saw him. Mum and I went in and he was dressed in his favourite clothes; a burgundy shirt I bought him for his birthday a few years ago and a quilted green gilet. He wore grey trousers, the last pair he ever went out in before he was too ill to leave the house. His favourite hat was in his hands.
He had obviously been in the cold store because his skin was icey and clammy. The fat in his face had melted away in his last week and his cheek bones and jaw were clearly defined. The skin was blue white and his finger nails had turned purple. They say your hair and finger nails continue to grow for a while after you die.
Mum placed the letters she had written to him in the 1950s, before they were married, in the coffin. I placed a small lead-dressing mallet in his hands. It seemed appropriate that he should have one of the tools of his trade.
Mum cried and stroked his head and kissed him. I put my arm around her as she told him she loved him and said goodbye. She asked me to leave her alone with him so I went back to the waiting room.
She came out after about five minutes and I went into the Chapel on my own. I talked to him for about five minutes. I am not going to reveal what I said, other than my last words to him were ‘I love you, Dad, goodbye.’
Mum came back in. She needed to see him one last time. I found it hard to leave him as well. Last week I knew we would see him again but this really was the LAST time. It was so hard to leave the room.
I really, really miss him. It’s perverse that we feel the strongest love when it isn’t reciprocated. I still don’t believe all that guff that he’s ‘looking down on us’, that he ‘knows’, that he’s in a ‘happier place.’ He is dead and his soul died with him. Now he is a broken machine.
Where he DOES still live is in my memories. I spoke to him in the Chapel because I wanted to shape my memories and fix them in my mind. He is unaware now, but I am aware of him still. On Monday his body will exist no more and his face, his personality, his history, his talents – will all be downloaded into the imperfect database of my mind.
It’s hard being an Atheist sometimes. It seems so much easier to hang on to a belief that his soul still exists and that he is in a better place – that none of us die, really. But I really can’t believe that. To me it seems a cop-out, a self-delusion. We are the sum of what we are in life and no more. Christians have a crisis of faith sometimes. Atheists have a crisis of Godlessness.
To give in and ‘believe’ would seem a betrayal of his beliefs. Atheism isn’t non-belief; it is a belief in something else. I do get annoyed when we are called ‘non-believers.’ It’s patronising.
People of faith who read this might say, ‘Ah, there you are; you are feeling God reaching out to you, how ever much you try to deny Him.’ No I’m not. This is an internal dialogue in which I am challenging and testing my beliefs and making room in my head for Dad.
To abandon Atheism would be an apostasy of the shallowest kind.
Saturday July 8th 8 Jul 2012
I’m feeling cheated at the moment. Since Dad died last week I have been organising the funeral, sorting out the paperwork and arranging the post-service gathering. I haven’t had time to reflect and ‘miss’ him. By the time the funeral is out of the way, the moment will have passed; I will have lost the immediacy of those feelings.
The best way I can describe is like if a baby is taken away from its mother, for some medical reason, she finds it hard to bond when it is returned later. I am feeling resentful that I haven’t had the time to absorb my emotions. Silly, I know; all those things have to be done but they’ve got in the way.
I have registered his death and arranged for all the various agencies to be notified – pensions, NHS, Inland Revenue, Social Services. We are so entwined in society that it’s a lot of work to disentangle someone when they die. The person might cease to exist but the State needs some convincing. I bought 10 death certificates; at least that many agencies will need proof on paper that he’s dead.
We go through life collecting qualifications and certificates – from swimming a length of the pool to cycle proficiency to O Levels and GSCEs to a driving licence to a passport to a bus pass to death. We need a certificate to prove we’ve ‘passed’ dying.
Tomorrow we’re going to the Chapel of Rest to see him. I am going to place one of his lead-dressing tools in the coffin and Mum is putting in the letters she wrote to him. I don’t know what feelings that will inspire; I’m not scared or nervous.
Selfishly, I want all this done so I can take time out to work on my grieving.
The Day After 5 Jul 2012
I got to bed at about 3am. I went to the spare room so as not to disturb Gerry. Millie, our cat, jumped up next to me and I lay there stroking her tummy. She purred and kneaded the duvet as I stared at the ceiling while my mind tumbled.
I got up at 6am after a fitful and shallow sleep. I made breakfast in a daze. Not a daze of grief, more a numb confusion. As I drove back to Gloucester someone called me. I pulled up outside the house and said, ‘I’ve got to go I’ve just got to my parent’s……I mean Mum’s.’
Inside, Dad looked more peaceful. Remarkably, the gaping mouth we couldn’t shut had closed itself over night. His skin had lost its fine lines and was smoother. He had even regained some colour. His skin was cold and clammy and his hands were stiff; the fingers wouldn’t bend when I held them.
He had been a powerfully man with muscles developed on the building sites. Now he looked like a concentration camp victim. Every bone was visible, as if wet silk had been draped over a skeleton.
The carers had arrived at 7am and washed him and removed all his tubes. They had laid him straight in the bed and pulled the duvet up to his chest.
I kissed him on the forehead and said I loved him and goodbye. I know, as an atheist, I don’t believe he is there anymore; there is no soul beyond death. I don’t care; it made me feel good to say it. We are all inconsistent but I long ago gave up tying myself in knots trying reconcile conflicting ideas. I just do. So I spoke to a body, so what? He was my Dad.
Mum stroked his face and said goodbye. The undertakers, Graham and Nathan, arrived just after 9. We went into another room while they lifted him on to a gurney and wheeled him out to their black van. They were very kind and empathetic.
It was then that Mum broke down and sobbed. He would never return to the house he had lived in since 1960. I sat next to her on the sofa with my arms around her. She said she wished she could have one last conversation with him. We both did.
When we are alive our presence remains in a home even when we aren’t in the house. It is our space, the place we fill. When Dad was taken away, his presence went as well.
That was the moment Mum became a widow.
July 3rd 2012 4 Jul 2012
I held Dad’s hand after he died and told him I love him. There were too many years when I didn’t hold his hand or say I loved him.
Dad died at 10 past 10 last night 4 Jul 2012
Dad died at 10 past 10 last night. I wasn’t there but Mum was holding his hand. I had been at his bedside until about 8pm but then I was just too tired to stay and came home.
His breath came in deep rasping gasps as if breathing was no longer a reflex but a conscious effort. His skin was cold and clammy and the colour of lard. Those deltas of veins and arteries standing in relief on his arms and hands had shrunk to a fine lace-work across his skin.
This happens as the body husbands its dwindling resources to defend the heart. Blood flow retreats from the extremities to make a last stand in the chest. So the chest remains warm while the rest of the body cools.
After a week of slow decline, the end came quickly. He took three quick and deep breaths and never exhaled.
When I got there about half-an-hour later he was cold. His eyes were half-open and his mouth gaped. I closed his eyes but his jaw wouldn’t shut so it remained frozen in its final draw.
I kissed him on the forehead and stroked his thinning hair and said, ‘I love you.’ I don’t care that I believe there is no soul living beyond death, I wanted….needed to say it anyway. I sat by his bed and held his dead hand.
It was 6 weeks after his 90th birthday – which had been his target.
While I stroked his hand, Mum remembered that she hadn’t put the food out for the hedgehogs. She bustled around, made some tea and sat next to him again. Then she lay across him and cried.
The doctor arrived just after Midnight. She seemed awkward and unsure what to say. I thought doctors knew how to deal with these things. She listened to his chest and shone a light in his eyes and said quietly, ‘Yes, you’re right.’ A trite reply popped into my head but I kept it to myself.
She removed his catheter, shook Mum’s hand and expressed her sympathy before leaving.
I called the 24-hour number for the undertaker for them to come and collect him in the morning. Mum started fretting that he was only wearing a pyjama top and I said I’d make sure they put some trousers on him. Then she asked how they could do that if rigor mortis had set in? Her default position of seeing a problem in everything was kicking in.
I reassured her that the funeral director would do nothing to detract from his dignity.
It’s now 1.30 in the morning and this Blog seems flat. It doesn’t convey how I’m really feeling. Probably because I don’t know. I’m glad he’s dead but I wanted him to be immortal.
That’s my Dad; cold and clammy, lard-grey with a gaping mouth and trouserless.
What I see is a man I didn’t love enough and didn’t appreciate until the last tenth of his life. I see a man who turned a Messerschmidt propeller into a beautiful Spitfire, he drew wonderful pictures and who could make almost anything.
He made me a go-kart out of old scaffolding and it was the best in the street. He made me a den out of rusting iron sheets, complete with a bay window. He built a swing from a 5-inch drainage pipe and a see-saw-cum-round-about from an old iron railing and a floorboard. Kids came from streets away to drive my go-kart, play on the swing and round-about or sit in the den, marvelling at windows which opened.
When I was diagnosed diabetic he fashioned a carrying case for my insulin and syringes, complete with its own cooling system.
Our back garden became a pet cemetery as his reputation for creating little brick-lined mausoleums for animals spread. He would create an individual chamber for each animal, with a slate slab on top. My parents’ garden is under-mined with scores of cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters and guinea-pigs.
In a thousand years time archaeologists with excavate that garden and find all these animals in burial chambers, complete with collars and toys, and think they were of some importance in our society.
He’d build you a racing car or a mausoleum for your cat (and for free). He did ALL THAT STUFF. AND still I thought he was an irritating old fart for most of his life.
He knew I thought that and just carried on loving me anyway.
THAT was my Dad.
Tuesday July 3rd 3 Jul 2012
I have been thinking about the words and phrases we use to describe dying. I share Dad’s atheism and to us, ‘dead’ and ‘died’ describe the event perfectly.
In fact, when the time comes and I have to tell people, I am tempted to say ‘Dad ceased to exist, this morning’.
Yet I find myself slipping into those euphemisms – passing away, passing on, passed over. He won’t have ‘passed’ anywhere. He will have stopped living. Or as Terry Pratchett put it, ‘He died from not being alive any more.’
I find myself using these watered-down phrases to protect the sensibilities of people who have a more po-faced view of death than me and Dad. Especially those with a religious faith. I get annoyed with myself when I use them; I feel I am bottling out of my own, and Dad’s beliefs.
Neither of us believe the soul lives on after death. We are the matter of the planet and our atoms will be used to make other things – but we will not be aware of it, or a conscious ‘part’ of that new thing.
I am, though, rather taken by a German tradition. When someone dies they open a window to let the soul out. I might still do that as a sort of symbolic gesture.
Anyway, if you are a soul at last liberated from the physical body and free to roam in an eternity of time and space you’d be pretty hacked off to find you were shut in the room and with no voice to say, ‘Can someone open the fucking door.’
Dad is virtually comatosed now. That brings to mind another cliche about dying peacefully in sleep. Do we know that? Do we know how much pain he is in or whether his morphine-soaked brain is creating nightmares and terrors? Do some people even die violently in their sleep? Perhaps they are dreaming that they’re in the hack and slay of a Medieval battle which brings on a heart attack.
It’s yet another comforter for the living to convince ourselves that death isn’t that bad. An ‘ideal’ death, for some ,would be for the patient to utter a few profound or witty words, close their eyes and sleep for a bit before dying whilst dreaming of skipping through golden meadows. With a smile on their face.
It’s not like that.
Instead we mumble inanities, wet ourselves, twitch with pain, gasp for breaths which won’t come and then cease to exist, leaving the living to clean up.
Am I being too cynical or brutal? I am just trying to hold on to mine and Dad’s matter-of-fact attitude to dying without retreating into the false comfort of euphemisms and cliches.
I am reminded of a joke; I hope I die peacefully in my sleep like my Dad. Not screaming like the passengers on his bus.
He is totally unresponsive now. Lying with his mouth gaping and drawing in shallow, rasping breaths. The nurses have spread Vaseline around his dry lips and put pads on his growing bed sores. And yet he still lives.
In one of the Gulliver’s Travels stories (There are, in fact, four journeys but popular culture and Hollywood only ever re-tell the story of the Lilliputians) he lands on an island of immortals. But these immortals don’t remain forever young and virile. They age and they age and they age – but they never die. Eventually they just become drooling, infirm idiots trapped within dessicated husks of bodies. They spend an eternity in incontinent dementia.
That’s what it feels like as I watch Dad; he is just decaying without dying.
Where is God in that?
(Almost) Final Words 2 Jul 2012
Watching someone die engages all the senses. As I sit at his bedside I tune into the shallow breathing. The nurse says that when the time comes it will slow down and then speed up. Then there will be a sudden intake of breath, but that won’t be the end. People often think the breathing has stopped but he will hold it for a while before exhaling. This will happen a few times before he finally slips away.
Every two minutes I hear a short metallic whir as the driver pumps more diamorphine into him.
Dad smells of wet dog. I don’t know what that is, whether the body emits an odour similar to a Labrador just in from the rain or it’s the smell of the medicine or the dressings. Even though he can no longer swallow and his mouth is dry, his breath has no smell.
He hasn’t eaten for a week now and his skin is draped over his body as if the air is slowly being let out of him. His skin temperature changes; sometimes his hands and cheeks are cold and sometimes luke-warm. But never as warm as someone vital and well.
His pulse is constant. That’s the strange thing; I would expect it to be erratic but it remains constant. It is weaker, though, as if the heart isn’t so much slowing down as simply pumping with less and less vigour.
Apparently the hearing is the last sense to go so I always talk to him, even though he probably doesn’t understand what I’m saying. I remember the one time when I was in a short coma; I could hear voices but they seemed to be speaking a foreign language. I had lost the ability to understand words but I could hear the sounds and knew people were around me.
It’s a week today since I had my last meaningful conversation with Dad. He has probably already said his last words, mumbled and misunderstood by those of us in the room.
We place a lot of store by final words, hoping for something profound, insightful or at least dryly humourous. According to cockpit voice recorders the most frequent last words before the crash are ‘Oh shit.’
A lingering death doesn’t come up with much better. Apparently Freddie Mercury’s were, ‘I want to pee-pee.’ The last thing Dad said which I understood was, ‘I want to go with you’ when I left. He has said other things since and we suspect he was complaining of pain or discomfort or they were simply disconnected thoughts.
The last words which stick in my mind and which I will take as his final ones were, ‘I want to go home,’ when he said he wanted to return to Cornwall.
I wonder how often final words are refined and edited by witnesses to the death – or even simply made up. We want them to mean something, to signify some nobility or dignity at the very end. In fact the dying are usually mumbling that it hurts or they want to go to the toilet or asking what’s for tea.
Last words are for us, the living, to help us feel better – that death is a dignified end and that people die peacefully and fully aware. That’s why I have ‘chosen’ Dad’s final words for him. ‘I want to go home.’