Philip Larkin Was Wrong

Brilliant but wrong, at least in my case. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. I may be in a happy minority but I daily have cause to be grateful for my parents. 

My father was a great man - teacher and intellectual touchstone. I have previously waxed lyrical about him, but I have probably neglected to praise my mother. She now lives with us and is no trouble at all. Although she is wilful about denying it, she is clever and unobtrusively wise. She struggles with the internet (she is ninety-two) so will not read this.

What set me off on this unusually sentimental track was an interview carried in last Saturday's Telegraph. The interviewee was that knowing enfant terrible of punk, John Lydon. He has just turned seventy. He still performs with PIL - I am listening to their music as I clatter the keyboard. Lydon is a widower who lost his wife to demantia, having been her primary carer. He describes the elongated loss in answer to being questioned whether he now suffers from loneliness:

No. I thought I would, I really did, but no I don't feel alone. And in a really weird, strange way, it's a relief. The pressure and tension were overwhelming. You see, with Alzheimer's, there are two victims. There's the patient and then there's the impatient one that has to take care of it all. It's an emotional drain that's impossible to describe.

I like his use of 'impatient' as a half-noun. Mum was Dad's carer and she did it because she loved him and for as long as there was a hint of light from that once bright beacon, she doted on him. From my distance it was painful to watch his gradual retreat from himself. How Mum kept it up tells you all you need to know about love.

The last time I saw Dad alive I read to him from Waugh's Sword of Honour, one of his favourite fictions. It gave him quietude for a decent interval before some imagined demon interrupted his calm. John Lydon says that the release of death is weird. I don't find it so - I know exactly what Lydon means. We miss you Dad, but it is the real you we miss not the denuded man.