The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. But sometimes it's still nice to go there

My dad died on Halloween and he was cremated on Bonfire Night.  That's the sort of fact that sounds made up, but in my case it was true.  He died in 1974.  I know it's true because I was helping my mum look through some papers yesterday, and I found his death certificate.  I also found the death certificates for my mum's parents.  They were both born before the First World War, and they both died in the 80s.  These were the only grandparents I knew as my dad's parents both died before I was born.  My grandma couldn't bend her legs much because of arthritis and my grandad developed schizophrenia after jumping out a window.  All the time I knew them they were old.  There's a little bit more info about the two of them here

My first wife died on the 12th day of Christmas 1998.  That was 16 years ago today.  She was 34 when she died.  She lived for 2 years and 2 months after being officially told she was terminally ill.  She used to say that she was living with cancer, not dying from it.  I guess we're all dying from something, even if it's just life itself, so that's probably a good attitude.  She spent 70 nights in hospital between 1995 and 1997 and also 23 nights in Butterwick Hospice before she died, but in between that we used to go out as much as possible.  She never let being ill stop her going anywhere, if it was at all possible to go.  I can remember standing in the queue with her at the Showcase Cinema while she was carrying a cardboard sick bowl, and I think she had pyjamas on under her coat, but we went anyway.  She got a wheelchair towards the end of her life too, and we used to go to the coast a lot I remember.

I wanted to sell her car at one point, but she insisted on keeping it for when she got better.  And her last ditch attempt to stay alive involved a journey by mobile home to see a tele-evangelist in Italy.  Even though she couldn't walk at the time, she insisted on taking her driving shoes and being put on the insurance so she could drive on the way back.  There's more about that trip here

I guess I've thought about that time more recently, because I've been once again hanging out in the cancer ward, this time with my mum, and also prior to moving house, I found a lot of old papers and photographs in the loft, including some stuff I wrote about her illness while it was happening.  Somehow re-reading that made me both sad and happy at the same time.

I've been visiting the past a lot lately.  I've been going back to Leeds a lot to see my mum, and on one journey I went to see the 3 houses I lived in between ages 3 and 22.  On another trip I went to see all my old schools.  The rugby pitch I used to play on now has a cycle path through the middle.

On one visit I also went to see the shop which was both where my brother was born (1972) and my dad died (1974).  The thing that struck me most about those places was that they were quiet, and that the birds were singing when I got there.  It felt to me at the time that the past can't hurt me, because wherever it is, and however good or bad it was, it's gone now.  The present is all that's left.  And that will be gone soon too, so I better make the most of it.

Then yesterday I took my mum out for Sunday dinner, to the pub she used to go to with my dad 40 years ago, and which she hasn't been to since.  Inside it still looks like the 70s and they were playing Abba and Neil Sedaka songs, amongst other things.

She reminisced a bit about going there with dad, who she said was always the life and soul of the party, and about friends she used to go there with, who are now also dead.

And all this thinking about the past, and reflecting on loved ones who are now gone, made me think of a quote I'd read somewhere.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” ― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Well, as far as my wife and my dad and my grandparents go, that time is not yet.  I remember them still, and even though sometimes thinking of them makes me sad, it also makes me happy too.  Happy to have known them, and to remember the time I spent with them.

My dad was called Jack, my grandparents were Alan and Lilian, and my wife was called Beverley.  They died in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s respectively.  A part of each of them still lives on in me, and I'm hoping to keep it that way for a very long time.  I'm not in any rush to join them just yet. 

Going back to Lockerbie - 1 year on

It's almost 25 years since the Lockerbie bombing.  Last year during a trip to Moffat with friends I went to Lockerbie to try and find the memorial to the disaster but I didn't find out in advance where it was, and I didn't dare ask anyone where it was once I got there, in case I was intruding on someone's grief, so I never found it.  The full story of that trip of exactly a year ago can be found here.

This year I went back to Moffat and this time I did my research and so on Saturday I actually found the memorial.  As soon as I got off the bus I felt a bit dumb because the first thing I saw was a sign directing me to it, and I wondered how I never found that last year.

The memorial garden and the small visitors centre are situated about 1 mile from the centre of Lockerbie on the A709 to Dumfries.  It took me about 20 minutes to walk there from the bus stop in the town centre.

The memorial is at the far end of Dryfesdale Cemetery, maybe 5 minutes walk from the main road, and there are a lot of single graves you have to walk past before you get to it.  The thing about regular graves is that they are all individual.  Each person has died an individual death, most of the people are relatively old, most cases they've died of natural causes, and the dates of death are all different.

Somehow that makes it all the more jarring when you arrive at the memorial to the Lockerbie bombing because every plaque or tribute has the same date of death on, ie 21st December 1988, and many of the individual plaques are for people who were 20 years old when they died, which is the same age I was when I saw the coverage of the disaster on TV.

There is a small sign at the entrance to the memorial garden that explains that the 270 victims were from 21 different countries, and the range of ages was from 2 months old to 81 years old, and it's not to minimise the deaths of people of other ages, but I identified most with the people my own age, and it was a genuine surprise to me how many of them there were.

I didn't know before I went that 35 of the people who died were university students from Syracuse University in New York, who were returning home from European placements.  All the birth dates were 1967 or 1968, so they would all have been in the same academic year as me.

In the last 25 years, my life has had its disappointments and mistakes and foul-ups, but seeing the graves of so many of my contemporaries made me feel grateful to have had those years from 1988 up to now.  Because choices and opportunities and the freedom to make decisions about your future as a grown up and maybe mess things up along the way, are luxuries those who die young don't have.

At the rear of the memorial garden is the main memorial wall, and this lists all 270 people who died in the bombing and subsequent crash, in alphabetical order.  What I noticed immediately was how many clusters of names there were with the same surname, which meant that whole family groups had died.  I couldn't imagine the devastation of even losing one person, but what of those who lost entire families?  It doesn't bear thinking about.

I don't cry very often, and I didn't cry at Lockerbie on Saturday, but I was reminded of the last time I did, which was at the Gandhi memorial in Delhi.  I think it was probably partly a release of all the tension of getting to India in the first place, but the inscription on the walls there said 'Violence is Suicide', and somehow just reading that brought me to tears and while I was stood at the Lockerbie memorial it came back to me how true that sentiment is.

After I'd read slowly through all of the 270 names I walked back to the Visitors Centre and went inside.  A cheery Scottish lady greeted me.  I told her that I didn't really know why I was here but that I just wanted to come.  She said it's important to the families to know that people still remember.

She herself was a resident of Lockerbie and I asked her if she remembered the night of the crash and she said she did, and she showed me on a map where she lived, and told me that some of the plane fell in her garden, and she was lucky it didn't fall on the house, and I said 'Lucky would have been if none of it had happened', but then I wished I hadn't said it because, if you experience a terrible thing, maybe it's a comfort to think of how it could have been even worse.

She also said that home is where you should feel safe, and yet that was where those Lockerbie residents were when they were killed.  And I thought about that, I thought about the fact that getting on a plane carries a risk, and how you maybe think about that before you get on one, but you don't expect to die in your living room while you're watching TV or getting ready for Christmas, but that happened to those people in Lockerbie, whose homes were destroyed by falling pieces of aircraft.

She said she'd been working in the visitors centre 8 years and she's met many of the relatives of the dead, and I noticed there were lots of seats where people can just sit and contemplate, and there's a memorial book called 'On Eagle's Wings' which was compiled by the mother of one of the victims, and in it there's a page for every person killed, and a pictures of each of them, and amongst other things, it said that the purpose of the book is to remind people that each of the 270 dead is not just a number, not part of a statistic, but someone who was loved, and who is missed every day by the people left behind, and I read as many as I could, and again I was drawn more to the people my own age, but on every page there was a story of personal tragedy that could break your heart.  On every page a story of unbearable loss.

The bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie was timed to go off over the sea, so that the evidence wouldn't be recovered, but because the plane set off late it exploded over land.  And that randomness was one of the most haunting things about the tragedy for me.  The bombers had specifically targeted Pan Am, most of the people on the plane were American and it was Americans they wanted to kill, but the plane coming down over Lockerbie, that was truly random.

I have no connection whatsoever to anyone who was killed at Lockerbie and yet I felt a very powerful urge to go there.  And when I got there I found it unsettling, and moving, and sad, and incomprehensible, and lots of other things that I can't explain in words.

I don't know how the families of the dead carry the burden of their loss, but a thought occurred to me as I left the visitors centre to walk back into the town.  I wondered if the fact that it happened over a town instead of over the sea, at least there was a focal point to their grief.  It gave them somewhere to come to, and the community there embraced them and cared for them, and it pulled together and helped in any and every way it could, and those bonds survive till this day.  Maybe the fact that their loved ones died in a place, rather than being scattered at sea, is a comfort in some way.  I don't know.  Who knows how anyone really feels in a situation like that?

Before I left, I wrote my name in the visitors' book, but I didn't write any comments, because what can you say that makes any sense of any of it?

I still can't define why I went, I don't know what it means to pay your respects, or what remembrance  is, but somehow by going to Lockerbie I wanted to acknowledge that this terrible thing happened, and I wanted to register my own sadness that these things happen at all, a sadness that people can be so far removed from any kind of empathy, that they will willingly murder and destroy and ruin the lives of others, with no thought of the consequences.

After leaving Lockerbie, I caught the bus back to Moffat, and I spent the evening with friends, talking and laughing and sharing a meal, and I was glad that I had that life to go back to.  I was glad to have a community of my own to be part of, who support me and who love me.  And I felt grateful for my life.  For all of it.  The good parts and the bad.  Because not everyone is so lucky.