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Dad
11 December 2004
My father died today.
He’s been in hospital for the last couple of weeks, but the last time I spoke to him, I think we both thought he was getting better. I was going to go over to see him next week, once all my commitments here were done with. It is in the nature of death, of course, that it creates a lost future in a moment: those good visits that we never make, those final conversations we never have. I hate it, that we last spoke on the phone rather than in the flesh. I dislike phones at the best of times, which this was not; no goodbye ever is sufficient to be the last goodbye, but ours was almost perfunctory.
I’m not going to post a eulogy here, nor even an obituary. But let the record show that Donald Stuart Brenchley was a good man, a quiet man, since his retirement I think a happy man, and he probably deserved better of his children.
© Chaz Brenchley 2004
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.