Headline, March06, 2014

"' C [H] RYSANTHEMU​MS "'

With a most respectful and mourned dedication to the honourable judge, and all the young lawyers who were killed in the Islamabad Courts, attack:

Death lurks everywhere, yet we choose to ignore to. Herewith then, one sad, true and a special work for the entire world:

What do our most  dearly departed  teach us with their passing?!

I'VE DONE some pretty strange in my life, but this afternoon may just take the biscuit,    -when I had the  head-splittingly odd experience of carrying my father around his garden,  in a carrier bag.

My newly portable father,  -so troublesome in life, so strangely heavy in death.

Of course,  we all know that everyone has got to  die  some time or another, but most of the time we ignore it, as all around us people snuff it left, right and centre.

Can you imagine how many people die in the world each year? Imagine how many people died in Pakistan today?

Death is everywhere around us, we all know that   -but just to preserve our sanity, we choose to ignore it.

My dad, though, is a different matter. My dad, who now fits into a Sanisbury's bag, is gone...........and I would be a grievously unreflective mofo  indeed if that fact didn't make me pause for a thought.

I'm not talking about grief here, because I went through that several months ago when I watched him dying on a bed in his house, whacked out of his head on morphine.

Of course, I miss him. I miss the man he was, a bit. But a lot more, I miss the man he could have been.

Now, my dad was not the working-class hero of Parsons' life and books. My dad was a middle-class antihero. He was neither brave nor heroic, nor a role model. He was not a great man. He was, like many people's parents,  a bit of an arse.

Bad tempered, overworked, with not just feet of clay but a whole torso, neck and head of the stuff. He was a bugger to live with, and his faults and wrongdoings include things that I would never dream of sharing with you..

But he was my father, the only one I'm ever going to have, and he is now scattered beneath the rose bushes, after I carried him around the garden this afternoon, marvelling at the sheer weight and volume of a cremated man, and thinking:

""Who'd have thought that a human's ashes could be so heavy?""

And this has to make you think. For starters, I'm not alone on this. Suddenly people's parents seem to be dropping like flies around me. I remember thinking  in the week after he died, as I cycled through the crowds in central London:

That all women are mad and that men had made mugs of themselves running around trying to catch their tails.

That the old system was bad but we have exchanged it for something equally imperfect: a world where men internalise guilt, where women want to be party animals all their lives, then suddenly find.........

A world where we have become  infantilised   just like the women, so we are still playing video games and watching   internet porn   at an age when our parents were starting to slow down and look forward to becoming grandparents.

Yes, yes, the modern world is   eight million  times better than the world of our forebears,  where women were pregnant aged 14  and men died down the pit aged  32.

And yet we need to watch out because it would be a shame to lose the wisdom of generation and end up unfulfilled, like a bunch of old men and women watching  MTV  in an old people's home.

This is a point and moment about having your cake and eating it too, and how than can cause indigestion. About how women want to have all the benefits that men have.

Yet still insist on having the door opened for them as they enter a restaurant, and feel miffed if you don't pay the  bill.

About how old gender roles are sexy, about how we shouldn't listen to too much rubbish about   men being useless   when the boys who brought you  war and  missiles and destruction also brought you  Democracy and  Freedom.

Maybe,  just maybe, all this has been sounding a warning note that you should watch out,  boys,  and not give up too much ground,  because we are not as they make out and they  are   madder than we will ever know:  

Such are the affairs of life, living, death and heart..........................!

But you know what? After carrying my father around in a carrier bag this afternoon, I realise    "" that we only have one chance ""   and that  we should grab love where,    wherever, whenever, however,  we find  it.

 

That tomorrow we could all be  !!  chip wrappings  !!  Or heavy, heavy ashes> 

"'Every single person I am looking at will experience the same thing as I am now. The only way to not go through your parents death is to die before them.

 And the only way to never lose someone you love is to never love anyone.'" 

With respectful, loving and caring dedication to all the parents of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' Free Gift And Honour "'

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless