Dead People I Have Known
The first was Uncle Tom who committed suicide when I was nine. I heard my father tell my mother about it when he got home from work. I was skidding Dinky toys across the linoleum square in the parlour, crashing them into one another and making childish imitation noises of tortured metal and exploding fuel tanks. He was dreadfully upset about it, I can remember that much. I told all my pals at school about it the next day until Miss MacDonald shushed and tutted at me and made me feel like I had made a big faux pas even though I didn’t really know what a faux pas was in those days. I had no idea why she had a problem with it. She wasn’t related to Uncle Tom and all the other kids were envious that I had an uncle-with-his-head-in-the-gas-oven. None of their uncles had killed themselves. It was 1957 and, as far as I can remember, not much happened that year except for Uncle Tom’s suicide and we beat St Cuthbert’s six goals to five. Our strip was claret and blue, like Aston Villa’s.
The second was my maternal grandmother, Edie Margaret, when I was 10. That was more of a mystery to me than Uncle Tom’s resignation from the people club. We didn’t visit her, see, because she had fallen out with my father. She told my mother he was a wicked man which, in hindsight, he might well have been but how was I to know that when I was only ten? It was years and years later that I was told she had died of cancer. She was ‘shot through with it’, my mother told everybody. “And she was as deaf as a doorpost,” she said, as if that had been a contributing factor in her demise. I didn’t go to her funeral, nor did my father. Come to think of it, I didn’t go to Uncle Tom’s either.
Both my grandfathers had died before I was born so they don’t count. They might as well have been the foreign unnamed soldier killed in battle centuries ago.
Death left me alone for a long time. Twelve years, to be precise. Which, in truth, isn’t very long at all. Then it was The Biggie. My father died at the age of 57 when I was 22. I have it marked down in my head as The Significant Death beside which all other deaths pale. I was too young to have a dead father, I told people, and I felt he had deserted me. I thought he’d played a lousy trick, bunking off from life.
Oh, I’d forgotten Dan Boyle. He shot himself in the head when I was eighteen and a wage-earning man. I didn’t know him very well. He did it at work one night which meant that I wouldn’t nod to him ever again as I opened the office door and said, “ G’morning Dan.” It saved me from continuing with a meaningless routine. He did it, his note said, because the roof of his house leaked. I can understand that.
Back to the timeline! The next one to go was my paternal grandmother. She didn’t last long after my father died. A matter of weeks. I think I killed her. I had to tell her that her only son was dead. I saw her heart break. I went to my father’s funeral, of course. What do you think I am? But I didn’t go to my grandmother’s. I didn’t want to see the other relatives on my father’s side. We didn’t get on. They weren’t keen on my mother. In those days lots of people didn’t like lots of people and that’s just the way it was. So I didn’t go. It seemed for the best at the time.
Death stood on the sidelines again and left me alone for a number of years. He conducted his business elsewhere. But, when I wasn’t watching, he killed the childhood friends of my still alive mother and my dead father, Jamie and Annie McCrae. Annie went insane with Alzheimer’s and, wanting to save Death from working overtime, she tried to stab Jamie to death one Wednesday afternoon as he softened a Rich Tea Biscuit in his cup of tea while watching Rebecca in black and white on BBC2. She didn’t succeed because she was too crazy to get it right. She stabbed an innocent chair instead. So she was taken to a nursing home where Jamie visited her until she died, crazy as a loon. Jamie faded away some months later. I didn’t go to either funeral. I was working and probably too busy to go. Besides, I had a family of my own by that time and most of my energies were devoted to keeping Death away from me and mine. It’s a full-time job, as you know.
After my father died, but before Jamie and Annie died, I heard on the grapevine that Patrick Wilkinson, an old school-chum, had died of a brain tumour. He left a wife and baby to fend for themselves after he had thrown himself out of window, such was the pain and craziness the tumour was causing him. Like Annie, he took up a knife but no furniture was at risk. Instead he stabbed himself in the head but not enough to excise the tumour. I didn’t go to Patrick’s funeral either. It had taken place long before the grapevine passed news of his death to me. His wife re-married.
Then, strangely, Patrick’s best pal, another school-chum of mine, was said to have died prematurely, whatever that means. I never found out how, when or where. He was musical and a good cartoonist. Shame!
I’m deviating from the timeline now because my recall of detail isn’t as good as it used to be. I am getting old.
There was Garry – died in a road traffic accident; David – cancer; Mick – cancer; Gwyneth – cancer, I think; Aunty Eileen – stroke; Uncle Bert – heart failure; and, not many years ago, my mother, who evaporated into nothingness in a home for decrepit humans. She was older than Methuselah and in line with the popular saying I have to report: It was a blessed release.
Now, I can’t say for certain because I haven’t had contact with anybody from my father’s side for years and years but it seems more than likely that four additional aunts and their spouses have popped their clogs since my father’s untimely death. Maybe some of their offspring have died too? It’s possible. And it’s odds on that a lot of people I have worked with or went to school with have also cashed in their chips while my back was turned. Even I have had a personal brush or two with Death. But I’m still here to tell the tale, just about. And just imagine all the millions and millions of people I don’t know in a personal sense who have died since homo sapiens appeared on the scene. I mean, think about The War To End All Wars, Biafra or Vietnam or The Balkans or Rwanda or, well, just about anywhere you can think of. And those are recent mass die-ings. What about all the major battles, minor skirmishes and personal vendettas through the ages? Not forgetting ‘natural causes’. People die. It’s a fact. We are the cheapest of all disposables on this planet.
Oh, I almost forgot my brother. He’s three years older than me and I haven’t seen or heard of him since mother’s funeral. I wonder if he’s dead now? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was. Not at all, the way he was carrying on.
But here’s the thing. Out of all the people I have known who have died, the only one to have said goodbye was my father. I still haven’t forgiven him for that.
Charlie Taylor lives in Glasgow’s West End, is older than he would like to be, and does very little now by way of work. Instead, he sails whenever he can and at other times can be found in coffee bars, drinking lattes, reading, and writing for his own amusement and occasional publication. He has two grown-up children who, fortunately, live miles away from Glasgow, and a spaniel who, fortunately, doesn’t. He is married to a freelance writer/writing tutor/editor/publisher.
