May you be as free as the wind, as soft as sheep’s wool, and straight as an arrow, that you may journey into the heart of God. Amen.
Celtic blessing from Holy Island
THIS is the blessing from the end of my dear dad’s funeral, exactly five years ago this month. Searching for the perfect words to say goodbye, a rector friend offered these from her files of dog-eared treasures. And they were perfect. At the end of a tough, often heartbreaking seven years, which he had borne with extraordinary grace and dignity, what I wanted most for dad was freedom, comfort, and homecoming.
On the morning of the funeral, I stood, overdressed, in a socially distanced coffee queue with lorry drivers and traffic police in an otherwise deserted Gloucester service station, putting in time in order to hit our strictly managed slot at Westerleigh crematorium.
Eight of us — two sisters and their husbands, three nieces — were widely scattered in the light-filled Waterside Chapel. Our brother and his wife, in Italy, and six other nephews and nieces joined over Zoom. The last of my nephews wasn’t there. A front-line nurse in a Bergamo hospital, he was working double shifts at the epicentre of the trauma engulfing the world. Pale and sleep-deprived, he was interviewed on ITV’s News at Ten, his voice playing over footage of black army trucks laden with bodies on the way to makeshift morgues.
I LAST saw dad — Ken — on 14 March 2020. The care-home staff were becoming anxious about visitors and closed their doors two days later, a week before the national lockdown.
Dad had moved into Beech House nearly seven years earlier, shortly after mum’s death. After 60 years of unusually happy marriage, he couldn’t bear to be in the family home without his beloved Isobel. From the day he moved, one of us visited him every single day, except for three days in 2016 when we were all in Italy for my eldest niece’s wedding.
Increasingly lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s, he gradually became frail. Susceptible to falls, he broke a hip, and then fractured a disc. We longed to wrap him in lambswool for comfort and safety, never more than when he was recovering from surgery on his broken hip in a state-of-the-art general hospital in Bristol.
He had a stroke in early December 2019, but, by his birthday two weeks later, he’d rallied a little and beamed at carers bearing cake, balloons, and smiles of genuine affection for one of their favourite residents. But then, as the home closed to visitors, he soon succumbed to Covid. We were disorientated by suddenly not planning our days and weeks around being with dad. We called him every day, but it was heartbreaking to think of him sitting alone in his room, feeling confused and abandoned.
The staff went above and beyond in those weeks, and it’s impossible to imagine what they went through: struggling to look after the vulnerable people in their care; worried for their own families; endlessly torn, stressed, and afraid. For the last three nights of his life, a carer phoned each one of us in turn and held their phone to dad’s ear so that we could say goodnight.
He died in the small hours of 21 April 2020, and, to my eternal sorrow, he was alone. Had we known then what we know now, we would have pummelled the locked doors of Beech House until they let us in to be with him.
Dad was the only child of a distant father, who had himself been orphaned at 14 and seen horrific action in the trenches of the First World War. Despite his long, happy marriage, four children of whom he was inordinately proud, and ten beloved grandchildren, I always sensed a shard of loneliness at his core. That is why it still distresses me so much that we were not with him in his final days; and why the words of this blessing bring such comfort.
Dad was a man of deep and thoughtful faith. His favourite verses were from Matthew 11: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Jesus’s promise echoes in the prayer with which we sent dad home, into the very heart of God: the ultimate and eternal embrace.
Eley McAinsh is a freelance writer and editor, with a background in religious broadcasting.
