The bathroom sink in my parents’ house is clogged again. I’ve tried plungers.
I’ve tried chemicals. I’ve tried industrial language while limply brandishing a drain auger. Nothing will shift it.
Every other time this has happened, Dad would toddle into the bathroom, work some unseen magic, and the basin would promptly clear. Dads have special powers when it comes to practical matters.
When the maternity doctor hands Mum the baby, a nurse must slip Dad the secret manual revealing the location of stopcocks, instructions on rewiring light switches, and weekly bin collection times.
It has occurred to me more than once in the past month to seek Dad’s advice on the sink, only for my brain to deliver in an instant the cruellest fact-check.
We lost Dad just before Christmas and buried him in the New Year, just after my birthday.
Jim was 79, and although he had sundry health problems his decline was sudden. The night he was admitted to A&E, he was told he could die, then he was moved to a ward and Mum and I spent a week watching his vitals improve.
So much so that a doctor told him he might even get home for Christmas.
Jim Daisley was the kind of father every child should have, writes his son Stephen
Then, everything changed, and Mum and I spent another week watching him slowly fade away. He faced death with tremendous bravery.
When the doctor told him he was dying, he asked Dad how he felt about the news. ‘Terrific,’ he responded. ‘These things happen.
This is life.’ Like the roguish hero of Tam o’Shanter, Dad’s favourite poem and one he could recite from memory, ‘Kings may be blest, but [Jim] was glorious/ O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!’
The doctors and nurses on Ward 17 at University Hospital Monklands took good care of him, and he enjoyed a great rapport with all of them.
When one nurse asked if he wanted any more fluids, Dad piped up: ‘Some Chivas Regal, if you’ve got it.’ Jim Daisley died as he lived: with courage, dignity, and good humour.
Reflecting on her own father’s death, Julia Gillard offered a rebuttal to Dylan Thomas: ‘In the life of a man there is a moment to go gentle into that good night.’ Dad went gentle.
At the end, there was no raging, raging against the dying of the light. He loved life – cherished it – but he had lived a full one, without regrets or recriminations.
After the doctors told him there was nothing more that could be done, Mum asked him if there were any final wishes he wanted to fulfil.
None, he said. If, after almost eight decades, you arrive at your final days in such perfect contentment, you have not only lived a life, you have lived it well.
Dad lived life well and for 40 years he lived it with Mum by his side. Known as Maureen to everyone else, to Dad she was always his ‘lassie’.
In the early days of their marriage, they climbed Munros together and visited every nook and cranny of Scotland in a succession of used cars that were reliable only in the frequency with which they broke down.
If nothing else, it gave them more time to take in the awe-inspiring scenery.
When you’re a child, you don’t think much about the love Mum and Dad share. At that age, it seems natural and inevitable.
Only with age do you come to understand your parents’ bond and the work that goes into it.
The poets would have you believe love is about mountains kissing high heaven and beauty like the night’s cloudless climes and starry skies. But love, the kind that endures, is decidedly unpoetic.
Love is tough, demanding, and often painful. It is common struggles and shared suffering, nerves frayed and patience tested, vigils over hospital beds and eulogies over coffins.
The hurting is how you know it’s real love; the other person is so much a part of you, and you of them, that every blow that lands on them lands on you tenfold. And yet you love.
Till his dying day, Dad loved his lassie fondly and fiercely, and she loved him with the same ardour. Passion can temper with age but for Mum and Dad their commitment to one another remained as intense at the end as it was in the beginning.
When Dad broke his back, he spent three months in the spinal injuries unit at the old Southern General in Glasgow.
Every day he was there – every single one – Mum was there at his bedside. It meant a succession of buses and lonely walks, morning and night, but there is nowhere else she would have been.
So severe was the break that the doctors told him he might never walk again, but with Mum’s encouragement Dad pushed himself, hour by hour, day by day, to lift his head, move his legs, sit up and eventually walk.
And when we got him home, it was Mum who saw to it that he was cared for in every possible way. Dad lived for another decade after that fall and Mum is the reason why.
If she was his lassie, I was always his ‘buddy boy’.
When I was born, he held me in his arms and sang Wild Mountain Thyme. When he was dying, I held him in mine and sang it back to him.
He was a kind, gentle, loving father, a wonderful husband, and the finest man I’ve ever known. If I had one wish, it would be that every child could have a father like Jim Daisley.
Politically, we couldn’t have been more different.
Although never a member of a political party, he was a man of the Bennite Left, a believer in Scottish independence, and he reckoned Nicola Sturgeon was the best thing to come out of Ayrshire since Arran Blonde ale.
Yet he cut out every one of my articles from the Mail and stored them in a folder. I was touched by this display of paternal pride, but he was quick to set me straight.
‘I’m just keeping records for The Party,’ he said with a wry smile, ‘so they can deal with the quislings after freedom comes.’
He was an uncommonly kind person and although modest in means he was endlessly generous. This was a man who, when friends or neighbours needed a car, would hand over the keys to his and walk ten miles to and from work every day.
Who drove elderly neighbours to shops and hospital appointments and people he had just met anywhere they needed to go.
To Dad, no man was a stranger and no possession so precious that he wouldn’t readily give it to someone in need.
Mum and I are reminded daily of the character who has gone missing from our lives.
Taxi drivers and hairdressers and supermarket checkout ladies have broken down as they tried to tell us how fond they were of this lovely gentleman who, despite his own troubles, was always so friendly and upbeat.
Grief is a numb fog with occasional moments of dreadful clarity, a flurry of arrangements and appointments, cold bureaucracy and well-meaning cliches, interrupted now and then by pain and memory.
The only way through it is through it: by mourning Dad, cherishing Mum, and unblocking the bathroom sink.
