I had another mini-meltdown yesterday. When I have them, they’re always at weekends, but then they always have been. They are the times when everyone else seems to have someone to see, somewhere to go, and I’m left alone nursing a chicken leg (with peas, of course) for my Sunday lunch.
Last week, Thanksgiving didn’t help. As I was cramming the leftovers of a 12lb turkey for one (don’t ask; I have no idea) into my freezer, I got very weepy about so many things – people starving in the world, the homeless who I normally serve in my friend’s bar on Thanksgiving and who had missed out this year, invitations I never got (again – I know it’s small in the the grand scale of things) – and then I came all over all emotional about the leftovers we leave behind when we die.
I believe not in the kind of everlasting life where we will see each other again (to be honest, I think I’ll be done with you all by the time I go), but in the kind that leaves behind the love, the laughter, the good deeds et al, that carries on in others: the impact we have made on them, and that lives on, through them. The true cycle of everlasting.
But then there are the “things”: the material leftovers we have collected and which, ultimately, don’t mean a thing.
When my mum died last year, my brother Nigel and sister-in-law Kim had the arduous task of clearing Mum’s house. So many clothes, so many ornaments, so much stuff. Leftovers.
Then I remembered when my dad died in January 1990, standing in the kitchen in the house they moved to when I was 18, for another change in my father’s job. The living room was full of people who had arrived to commiserate, and I was feeling guilty for taking out my notebook and making a copy of the list of the objects that had been returned from the hospital. His leftovers, a pitiful summary, lying in a plastic bag on the kitchen unit.
SMALL ITEMS OF VALUABLE PROPERTY
£1.25 – cash
1 watch
Glasses + case
PROPERTY TO BE KEPT SECURELY IN GENERAL ADMINISTRATION
OFFICE
toilet requisites
1 track suit
1 vest
1 pants
1 pair slippers
5 hankies
1 book
tin of Biscuits
cards
1 towel
1 dressing gown
The material remains of my father’s life.
The smallness of the list was heartbreaking. Already, the record of my father’s last weeks had filled several small, black notebooks: his last Christmas, his final trip into ward 18 at Frenchay Hospital, the last time I saw him when, with an attempt at a normal smile, he told me that he loved me.
When I left the lounge to collect more sandwiches for the people starting to arrive at the house, I came upon the stash like a reformed thief, facing temptation and knowing there was a limited time to choose between the paths of good and evil. I had to write it down before my presence was missed, before someone caught me already trying to make sense of things: trying to build, from this tiny remainder of life, something to hold on to.
The valuable items were next to the list, but there was only one item from the PROPERTY TO BE KEPT SECURELY IN GENERAL ADMINISTRATION OFFICE list: the biscuits and container. I questioned why the hospital felt the need for a capital ‘B’ for biscuits; perhaps because it was a large tin of Huntley and Palmer’s Luxury Selection. They were the kind of biscuits we used to take to my father’s Auntie Edna and Auntie Ethel every Christmas. Auntie Edna had been something of a cause celebre in the family. “She’s a Fascist,” I heard people say, in hushed tones. “She supported Mosley.”
Apparently, before she married Uncle Charles, she had a married lover, of whom no one ever spoke. When she finally met Uncle Charles and married him in church, my father’s mother was so disgusted, she refused to go to the wedding. It was all rather rough on Uncle Charles, an exceptionally quiet, unassuming man who grew tomatoes, just like my father’s father had done.
Auntie Edna used to make him rice pudding with sweeteners in it. When Nigel and I went there for tea, I dreaded coming upon the small round pellets hiding among the sultanas, their bitterness masking the sensation of the cream.
Every year, the aunts looked suitably pleased when they were given the biscuits, and Nigel and I were duly rewarded with some money or a trinket from the nostalgia-packed houses. Auntie Edna once gave me a heart-shaped pot from Ilfracombe and two old necklaces. My mother told me that the jewellery would one day be in fashion. Always we wrote and expressed enormous thanks for their generosity, not least because family members assured us that such gestures would guarantee our being kept in the wills. One year, we forgot. We never had another invitation to tea, but being kept out of the will was a small price to pay for never again having to eat the rice pudding.
I took the lid off Dad’s biscuits and was unsurprised to find that the only ones missing were the plain ones. In the most luxurious of luxury selections, Dad would find the plain biscuits; in a desert of chocolate, he would find an oasis of Rich Tea. When we used to go out as a family and stop for an afternoon snack, he would always take the most ordinary cake from the plate, even if he was given first choice. If there were three chocolate cream puffs and a chocolate finger, he would have opted for the finger.
He wasn’t being a martyr; he was just a naturally selfless man. It was simply his nature to help himself to the plainest: everything, even when alone. He preferred bananas to strawberries, carnations to roses, cheese to meat. He was drawn to the ordinary and felt uncomfortable in the presence of anything that hinted of ostentation.
He left my mother totally secure financially, and the papers were neatly stacked in the drawer of the sideboard where he had always told her they would be, even though she put her hands over her ears every time he brought it up. Taking care of his family was everything to him, in life as in death.
And so, I cried when I saw that every chocolate biscuit in the Huntley and Palmer’s Luxury Selection lay untouched. I lifted one from the plastic – a round, rippled, fat biscuit – and my hand shook with the same combination of nervousness and excitement I felt as a child when I reached out to check our dead poodle Emma’s rigor mortis. If copying down the list felt like an infringement of privacy, eating the biscuit was real kleptomania. I took just one bite. The chocolate tasted stale, as if it has already passed on to another place.
Guiltily, I put it back in its compartment and cried for the father who never enjoyed a chocolate biscuit from the Huntley and Palmer’s Luxury Selection.
Today, I cry for his leftovers.
But also, and with gratitude, for the love he left over.