30th July ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ 1 Corinthians 11.12

Yesterday my father would have been 80 years old, or, it was 80 years ago that, as my grandpa said, uncharitably, “the nuns in the delivery-suite dropped Nicky”.

That night, prompted by what I saw in the mirror opposite our bed, I reflected on the birthday boy as I saw him lying there looking back at me.

My father was always called Nicky by those nearest to him – the only exceptions being his beloved nanny and his deranged mother who addressed him always as “Nicholas”. Even as children it was tempting to use that sobriquet as he was always ‘one of us’, not pater or dad.

We knew little of his thoughts and feelings. He was not cold or distant but simply ‘nice’, unassuming, unconfrontational, indefatigable, completely and utterly without guile. He was fascinated by politics, but never expressed political views. He went to church every week, but never spoke of ‘personal faith’.

His pig breeding business went bust when the beasts got swine flu. But despite being the product of public school and Edwardian mores, he donned orange overalls and went down the mine 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for ten years to “pay the school fees”.

He offered no regret or lament. He just did it.

With hindsight he reminded us of Harry Enfield’s ‘Tim nice-but-Dim’. I, however, now, more accurately, imagine that he would have been happiest in a medieval monastery. Routine, church and above all, people. If he had a central theological motif, it would have been koinonia (fellowship).

Yet, as I’ve already said, he never expressed theological views… well, he did once. Shortly, before I was ordained my mother took it upon herself to sew in a name-tape in my new alb. My father’s faith had been inculcated in the school chapel and based on a muscular religion that converted the heathen with a bible in one hand and a cricket bat in the other. At the sight of the alb he said, “that’s a bit high church isn’t it?”

Perhaps ecclesiastical waters ran deep?

The only other occasion where he would become assertive to the point of bombast concerned conversations about his height: “I’m five feet, two AND A QUARTER!” Never has a fraction meant so much!

On that anniversary, looking through the mirror, the parallels affronted me.

That mirror in the bedroom, which was no more than a piece of largely unused furniture, has become a portent. There have been times when I have been shocked at the lifeless figure glazed and surrounded by excitable Victorian carved mahogany. The corpse framed is me.

I know from Ovid that Narcissus met his doom gazing at his reflection, and that in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John Adam’s death begins with life from a reflection not a fruit, but I too find myself in a Rankian world where this functional interior piece is now a harbinger of death.

The feeling is aroused by the knowledge that the dead do not look like themselves.

It is often assumed that those who have died look as though they are peacefully sleeping. They do not. They look different. They look dead. The features change, the cheeks and jaw sink, the nostrils flare and darken. Film and theatre never reflect this, nor can they.

This realisation is reinforced whenever I visit the dead, but this transformation still remains shocking.

In hospitals I am forever grateful that names are written above the beds, thus sparing me the embarrassment of enquiring which patient is the person I have known for ten years. However, on one occasion, having received ‘the call’ I donned the cassock, grabbed the sick visitation stole and oil and ran to the hospital. Into the ward I flew like an Elizabethan Super Hero – ‘is it a bird, is it a plane, no it’s priest-man’. Full of vocational zeal and piety I headed to the bed, at which point the occupant yelled, “**** off padre—she’s in room 2!” Crest-fallen I headed for room 2 and humbly administered the Last Rites. Again, the recipient in this final sacrament bore little physical resemblance to the lady I had visited the previous day.

That night as I lay in the bed staring into the glass, I am conscious that as well as a portent, our mirror, like the mirror in Snow White, is also a rebuke and reminder of loss.

I feel guilty that I respect my father more with hindsight than I had the grace or courage to tell him when alive. I feel bereft that he and I never really ‘spoke’, and more shockingly that I never asked.

I now hope that Izzy and Alex do not have to fill in the gaps, guess how I feel about them or life, and that they know how deeply they are loved.

The thoughts tumble, and roll…

Before my PET scan the radiographer did the pre-scan assessments, which included measuring my height. “So Robert, 174cm”. I enquired as to what that was in, “real money”.He dug out his mobile, and Googled the answer: “5 feet 8 and a half inches”. “That’s wrong”, I said, “I’m 5 foot nine!”, and like a prospective MP on the verge a breakdown demanded a recount… and another. I lost half an inch! Is that cancer’s fault too? Or perhaps the fruit, rather than the mirror, doesn’t fall that far from the tree of life after all.