Stargazing

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.

- RS Thomas

Life is not short exactly, but it’s definitely not long enough. This year brought a death in the family, and an Alzheimer's diagnosis too. It makes you think about what really matters. I think there are three things: to appreciate living; to know love and friendship; and to be able to pass something on.

I can see all three of these things through the children. This year they have been a relief and a help to everyone just by being themselves. As all this has been going on, they are busy: collecting strawberries, learning to write, singing in their tiny birdlike voices, and generally making a mess wherever they go.

For them, the million-petalled flower of being here is all just opening up, a bit more every day. We took them to France for the first time. They felt warm rain, and smelled the rain on parched streets. They splashed in fountains. They appreciate things so intensely.

I can’t remember who wrote that - the world is a beautiful woman that we love, but have forgotten how to see. That’s right for grownups, but for the children it is all new, and it helps the rest of us to appreciate it too.

In her last days my wife’s mother lay under my daughter’s old Peppa Pig duvet, and the children brought her flowers from the garden. She and those who loved her were so stoical through it all, despite everything.

As well as an appreciation of being here, the children also remind me what really matters. My son (aged five) was waiting for his best friend to come at teatime. All day the questions came, more and more frequently: when would he be here?

For the last half-hour he climbed onto a chest of drawers and just stared out of the kitchen window into the dark, he was so excited to see if he had come yet. Absurd five year old behaviour!

The next day I was waiting to see one of my oldest friends in a hotel lobby. I caught myself repeatedly looking up from my phone to the door, more and more often, to see if he had come yet.

CS Lewis said there were four loves: friendship, affection, romantic love and charity. A funeral reminds you for at least a moment of what really matters, and it’s these things.

I have always been afraid of Alzheimer's, and having it happen to someone you love is so strange. Someone told me that you can imagine it like shaking a bookshelf. The topmost and newer memories are more likely to fall out, the deeper memories and emotions less so.

A friend’s father was asked by his wife: do you know who I am? He was lost for a name, but not for an answer: “my old smiler”.

What else matters in the end? The desire to keep something going, and to hand something on. However trivial the tradition.

I make my son a bubble bath using the exact same hand-whisking bubble-producing technique my mother once used to make bubbles for me. We go to the Railway Museum in York, which I liked just as much as he does at the same age. We make jelly together. He squeezes the jelly out of the part-opened packet - like a calf coming out of a cow - and as we chop it up, I try to stop him eating all the little pieces, just like I tried to at his age.

It’s hard to know how much the little one really understands. The way small children suffer is intense, but transitory. At the soft play I watched a toddler and his two big (six year old?) sisters play football. He fell headfirst over the squidgy ball when he tried to kick it. Then he dashed all around - with patches in the shape of bear-faces on his knees - but they just wouldn’t pass him the ball. In the end it was all too much. He came and clutched me tightly by the knees, turned his face up to heaven and wailed unconsolably about the unfairness of it all. A minute later he was happy again.

Do we get to choose what we do hang onto? What the memories of our life will consist of?

Some of what stays with you is just random images and feelings. A Labrador shaking itself dry with the exact same explosive flapping noise as a pheasant taking off. The delicious way the air feels first thing on a sunny morning - exactly as it did when we would visit my Gran in Saltcoats. A pink sunset reflected in a wet brown field, a tropical dusk mirrored in two bright tractor tracks pointing to the horizon. Blossom falling from a thorn tree, leaving a single white petal on each green leaf of each nettle, while some more of the blossom swirls round and round in a stream.

But the things I really remember - the things handed on to me by my parents, all come with an emotion. The egg and toast soldiers my mother fed me, and the little wooden plane by father made me. The five of us in a little red Fiat Panda heading for Glasgow. Being tucked into a bunk bed. Later, scooping up my mother and spinning her round when I got into Oxford.

Which reminds me that I must try harder to pass on what was given to me. As an adult I have met a lot of people who had more money than us, and yet had a much worse start in life. I have come to appreciate that in the ways that actually matter, I grew up rich.

If I get to choose what I remember, I will forget the times our children drove us crazy. I already did.

I’ll remember instead my son watering the flowers: the cornflags in ecclesiastical pink; the lavender wobbling when tickled by the hose. And him riding round and round the garden with stabilisers on, his giant bicycle helmet making him look like a little mushroom that learned to ride a bike.

I will remember lying next to him as he goes to sleep, looking up at the luminous stars his mother put on his bedroom roof. His little breaths lengthening into sleep, and me beside him, stargazing.