The Loss of a Father’s Father — Time to Step Up…
A healing story
The week the father is cremated in Cannes — ending an era and almost the family line — and a day after collecting the ashes in an urn the size of an oil drum and just as heavy (he was a big man), the woman wakes up in a tree house to fresh morning sunlight and birdsong in the forest.
The man sleeps still — exhausted from putting his father to rest. He, also, is a tall man. His narrow feet hang over the edge of the too short sofa bed — vulnerable as twigs under ramblers’ boots.
She watches as his sleight frame rises and falls imperceptibly under the sheet — and knows he is healing.
Yesterday, as they fled the infernal heat dome over the coast, Bob Seeger playing loud, she had felt his son-skin shed. By the time they flew into their rented nest in the trees — she saw the man re-emerge — testing his wings.
They set out to walk upwards towards a summit. Come down to an appetite to eat, be, question, laugh — go with the flow — verbs that have been missing for the last few, endless weeks whilst watching the father decline — whilst wading through the syrup of the Mediterranean coast in summer — where doing anything except lying comatose, hardly breathing, under a ceiling fan becomes too much of an effort to do — so you don’t.
