‘I Thought I Could Swim’ by Sue Peebles
Not long after writing a novel about a daughter struggling to come to terms with her father’s decline, my own father died. His death in 2008 (ill and in his eighties - yet such a shocking, premature end) changed everything. I left home at sixteen and had always considered myself to be very independent - but I realised that in my fifties and newly orphaned (my mother had died four years earlier) I was still wearing the Mae West I had been strapped into as a child playing along the shores of lake Michigan - buoyed up all that time, then suddenly the life-saver gone. And I nearly drowned.
Sue in her Mae West life jacket in the early 1960s
I had always 'wanted to write' - a condition much talked about now, but less so then, something one kept to oneself. My father knew of course, in fact, he ‘wanted to write’ too, but he was a rational man, a mathematician who knew the odds, and other things mattered more - roofs over heads, bread on the table, a pension to fund those long trips abroad. But then I do believe, in the loneliness of his widowhood (when my parents met it was love at first sight, for him anyway, and lasted the rest of their lives) he began to re-assess, so when I told him I was leaving my secure, well paid job with the excellent pension to write a book, he smiled - not at my folly, but because he was gladdened by it.
Sue swimming in Italy in 2009 – with no life jacket!
My father and I argued a lot. He was a polemicist and on his deathbed I tried appealing to his taste for debate - one last argument about why he should stay - but he’d lost his appetite for it, and for everything else. He didn’t want the surgery, the colostomy, the ‘package of care’ that might enable him to sit a bit longer in the monstrous chair he had grown so fond of (all leatherette and levers, in a ghastly shade of brown). It wasn’t for him.
Not long before, I had sent him an extract from my novel, seeking his expert advice on the maths, and he’d written back to me explaining why my equations didn’t work. According to my logic, he wrote –
2 = 1, which is obviously absurd. The question is – why? I’ll tell you on Sunday. Love and kicks Dad
But he never did. It is the last letter I have from him, and I treasure it; a small compensation for all those letters my parents wrote when we corresponded in my student days, and which I failed to keep. It may possibly be the last thing he ever wrote (with the exception of his signature when he refused further treatment).
I have the last thing my mother ever wrote too, in the journal she kept to help her remember the things that had only just happened, since they had a tendency to elude her –
Thursday Boxing day 26.12.02
8.56am
8.59am . Breakfast. Porridge Tea Toast and Jam
I often wonder what the 3 minute unrecorded event was – but guess it may simply have been the time it took her to write 8.56am before looking again at her watch. In the same journal, one of my mother’s last entries was something we had both written, in exactitude - but at different times, and with different meaning.
Finished novel. Bed.
How they would have loved that.
The Death of Lomond Friel is published by Vintage on 16 May 2011 and is dedicated to my parents, Gordon and Sarah Melvin.