The Eulogy I Didn't Read

The eulogy I wrote on the ferry over and did not read, because I could not get past the second paragraph at the lectern and Morag had to take the page out of my hand.

My father moved to an island I had never visited and built a life I was not in. For a long time I told that as a grievance, because a grievance is portable and grief is not. You can carry a grievance onto a train. Grief you have to set down somewhere, and I did not have anywhere to set it, so I kept it as anger, which fits in a handbag.

What I did not understand until I got here is that he did not leave me. He left a marriage and a city and a version of himself he could not stand, and he came to the one place that would take a man as he actually was and hand him a pub and a tide chart and a reason to get up in the morning. He became someone here. People keep telling me small decent things he did and I do not recognise the man in the stories and it makes me furious, because it means he had more to give and simply gave it somewhere I refused to go.

I am not going to stand here and say he was a good father. He was a man who became good late, on an island, in a way I arrived too late to watch. If there is a lesson in that, it is probably about going to people while they are still somewhere you can reach. I am writing it down so I do not have to learn it twice.