In Memoriam: for a while anyway.

Phone call from Number Two Daughter this morning, to remind me that it was the anniversary of her father’s death; which of course I had completely forgotten.

She had had the brilliant idea of celebrating  the occasion by sending a text to Mark to tell him what a splendid substitute he had been, which turned out to be the nicest possible way anybody could ever commemorate a death, because it made him very happy and tearful and forget instantly every time she was ever an adolescent nuisance and just think rosily of his parenting days as being gloriously tranquil and happy ones.

She stayed on the phone for a few expensive minutes whilst I walked round the Library Gardens emptying the dog, and we contemplated mortality across the thousands of miles. Lots of things have happened to us all in the many years since he shuffled it all off. He never knew Number One Son-In-Law, or the small determined turbulence that is Ritalin Boy. He never got chance to be proud of, and astounded by his daughters’ various magnificent achievements, nor did he stay awake half the night drinking whisky and groaning about the rest of the things they did. He died, and we carried on without him.

It was a very pleasantly morbid sort of conversation. We reflected satisfactorily on the inevitability of us one-day-we-don’t-know-when being dead as well. We shuddered thrillingly at the awfulness of thinking that Ritalin Boy’s grandchildren probably won’t even know our names or anything about us, apart from maybe the occasional tale distorted and half-forgotten and handed down across the generations, and after a hundred years or so not even that distant echo of us will be still here.

I thought this reflection was quite fortifying, and felt remarkably cheered up when I came off the phone. No matter how importantly cross with you people might seem at the time (think HMRC or traffic wardens), in a hundred years even their families won’t remember their names, never mind that they once used to issue penalty points for a living. It really didn’t seem to matter very much when set against the far more monumental difficulty of being dead: and this was the huge important point that came out of the phone call.

I am not, and nor are you.

I am, in fact, today, warmly, and gloriously and wonderfully alive, which I haven’t been and won’t be for most of the rest of eternity, and which the girls’ father is not already. My hands are warm and pink with life, I can smell the woodsmoke lingering by the stove and the coffee waiting on the desk. I can plunge from the sauna into the ice pool and emerge breathless and tingling and gasping. I have got children to squash in tight hugs and and a solid, kindly, sensible husband. I can do all the loveliest things in life like dancing and eating and sex, and smelling sweet peas and freesias, and laughing and looking hard at everything, and I had better do them all a lot, while I still can.

In short, I came off the phone remembering sharply that this is today. No matter what its difficulties are it is my day, the little bit of the planet’s history when I am here and joining in the fun. In the end I will have to leave the party, and eventually everybody will forget that I was ever there anyway, never mind what I did and said whilst I was at it.

But that isn’t now. Right now I am at the greatest party in the Universe, as far as we know, and certainly the only one to which I have been invited. I am going to enjoy it all.

Even the rain.

Number Two Daughter. Living.