The Loss of a Father’s Father — Time to Step Up…

The week the father is cremated in Cannes — ending an era and almost the family line — and a day after collecting the ashes in an urn the size of an oil drum and just as heavy (he was a big man), the woman wakes up in a tree house to fresh morning sunlight and birdsong in the forest. The man sleeps still — exhausted from putting his father to rest. He, also, is a tall man. His narrow feet hang over the edge of the too short sofa bed — vulnerable as twigs under ramblers’ boots. She watches as his sleight frame rises and falls imperceptibly under the sheet — and knows he is healing. Yesterday, as they fled the infernal heat dome over the coast, Bob Seeger playing loud, she had felt his son-skin shed. By the time they flew into their rented nest in the trees — she saw the man re-emerge — testing his wings. They set out to walk upwards towards a summit. Come down to an appetite to eat, be, question, laugh — go with the flow — verbs that have been missing for the last few, endless weeks whilst watching the father decline — whilst wading through the syrup of the Mediterranean coast in summer — where doing anything except lying comatose, hardly breathing, under a ceiling fan becomes too much of an effort to do — so you don’t. The younger her would have jumped on the younger him now — eager to explore him again — alive to the rising sap and thrusting geology around their tenuous shelter and perched, made love in the green idyll — loudly communing with the birds, the deer, wild boar — foxes, crickets, spiders and geckos — shrieking in the climax of this, the only present. Alive! <a href="https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/the-loss-of-a-fathers-father-time-to-step-up-17e72991fc5">Learn More</a>