It's been ten months, nearer eleven, since my father died and all this time his ashes have been sitting on a shelf in the undertaker's cupboard while my mother decided what she wanted to do with them.
My mother and I do not have an easy relationship: we don't 'do' feelings, for example, never have. This week, sherang up and announced that she and her large and weirdly-behaved dog were coming to see us. Oh the deep joy that filled our hearts.
After I had invited her to stay in our house (she suggested a hotel...) and the kids frantically tried to think of escape plans, she rang again and said she was going to collect the ashes and scatter them herself at a place in the Scottish Borders where she and my father had spent time together in their youth. She wondered if I would mind...
I think she should do whatever she wants with them and told her so. I wonder if I should have asked to be there too, but that seems intrusive. They were an intensely private couple (not a happy pair) so it makes sense for her to do it alone. I can't decide if I'm being tremendously altruistic or just copping out of an uncomfortable experience. If I were in charge of the ashes (as in, if she were no longer alive) I would organise some kind of little ceremony with readings and things that my father would have liked.
He was a very bookish man, and latterly became a rampant atheist, which fitted in nicely with all his other assorted bigotry and prejudices. His funeral was organised by my mother, as quickly as possible, and with a 'random' minister of the Church of Scotland (upon which father had decidedly turned his back years ago) and what was worse, a minister from EDINBURGH, father's most hated city. (God knows why. He hated innumerable towns, people, foods, countries, races, religions, authors -- mostly the female ones --, politicians, music, feminists. It was hard to keep up with all the 'forbidden' topics of conversation. Most of all, he detested my mother's parents (long since deceased) because they had failed to show him due reverence and hospitality in 1956. Or 1957, I can't remember as I wasn't yet born. But It Really Mattered.
He treated my mother like a punching bag: though not a hand was raised to her. Ems has written on here at length about domestic violence: that was my experience of life with my parents from early childhood until he was so doped up on morphine in the hospice that he could no longer speak. He was a cleverand highly-educated man, but with a very cruel side, and a vicious tongue. My mother put up with him, colluded with him, allowed him to treat her appallingly, and at various times defended him to me if I attempted to criticise or side with her against him. They seemed to feed off each other: miserable together, never apart.
She is bereft without him. I think she feels her life is over. I had wondered if perhaps she would discover a new lease of life, but that hasn't happened. Not yet, anyway.
I should add that his verbal and emotional abuse towards her seemed to escalate after he took early retirement: his 'power' and authority in his workplace was gone and he didn't have a captive audience for his 'wisdom' and opinions.
Intellectually, I want to feel sorry for my mother, and have frequent contact with her by phone, but on an emotional level, I don't like her as a person. She wasn't warm and loving towards me as a child, or as a young adult when I lived at home. I think, with the nenefit of my magnificent powers of 20-20 hindsight, that she resented me and was jealous of me because I deflected her husband's attention from her. She was very free with her hands and feet: lots of hitting, nipping, the occasional kicking... a lovely lady. Father once knocked me down so my head was cut open: she took me to the doctor and said I had fallen. I was about six or seven, and can remember being indignant that she was lying. There were bloodstains inside the red, tartan hood of my school coat. That was useful as another girl had the same coat and we could tell them apart!!!!!
Rambling on a bit now. Father's ashes? Weird sense of loyalty to his memory? What's that about? Ghastly people but blood relatives. As an only child with no other blood relatives I feel a sense of resposibility and duty towards my parents, but more than that? I don't think there's much else there. My children have some good memories of their grandparents. I think they made better grandparents than parents.
They belong in another world from mine and I would prefer if they stayed there.
