I am up and listening to music in the kitchen as I have on every Saturday since the dawn of memory, September Saturdays would be my Dad playing Beethoven symphonies played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler on a steam powered record player , I even remember the yellow Deutsche Grammophon logos on the sleeves all the while my sisters where doing sisterly things that involves spirited discussion echoing down the stairs from their room. I was having breakfast and then off out to play Rugby over the fence in the CAI playing fields and Mum was in the kitchen, folding laundry, not much other than the cast of characters, has changed, but in the background today the paperwork of death feels endless, a slow shuffle of signatures and stamps, each page another reminder that lives have slipped quietly into memory. Yet beyond the bureaucracy, there are softer tasks, gentler heartbreaks, today it is the turning out of some of Mum’s things.
Last week Ruth, Val, and I gathered to sort through the bits and pieces of a life well-lived. It is a job of careful hands and careful hearts, as if each item might unravel into memory if we hold it too tightly. Some things will go on to find new use, but not before they stir old stories in us.
There are the blankets, stitched with love by my sisters, once draped across Mum’s knees when she rolled out in her chariot, off on little adventures. There are scarves that, even now, carry a breath of her perfume, as though she had only just set them down. Each discovery pulls at a thread, tangling us in laughter and longing.
It is whimsical, how objects can hum with memory, how a faded fabric can summon a voice, a gesture, a whole afternoon long gone. Today is part of the journey of letting go, but also about leaning into these fragments of presence. The ache is real, but so is the grace of remembering together.
So I am imagining the “Now” round a bend I cannot walk around, my Dad is sitting listening to Beethoven reaching for L3C’s maths homework and is being told gently by Mum that his glasses are not lost, they are on the top of his head and Janet is sitting in the garden reviewing her latest stanzas searching for the perfect metre for a poem. In my head they turn and wave at me as I climb over the fence , my eyes are moist but I am smiling … which is good