Begrutten

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Lindsey Mason, who writes a column for the STV website. Lindsey (tigerbaps on Twitter) is usually very funny, but her latest column has a more sombre tone. It's about what she told her daughters about their dad, who died when the eldest was six.

Lindsey wrote,

Hannah is the image of her dad, right enough. She even has mannerisms of his that she couldn’t possibly have known about. Sometimes I look at her and she’s chewing the side of her mouth the way he used to do when he was concentrating on something and it makes my heart leap. I said earlier that I don’t believe in life after death, but in a way I do, because I just need to look at Rachael and Hannah and there he is, looking right back at me. I’ve always felt that Hannah was searching for her dad. Searching for some forgotten memory or some vital piece of information that I’ve missed out about him that would make her unlock a memory. But the truth is, she IS the something she’s searching for. She IS her dad. She can’t escape that. It makes me feel good.

You can read the whole thing on the STV website, where you'll learn what "begrutten" means. I recommend reading Lindsey's other columns too.

A Flower Falls

One of my Twitter contacts, Meg, has just written an account of the death of her mother in an earthquake in her native Philippines, nineteen years ago. It ends -

After the funeral was over, the heavens opened and torrential rain came down thick as stair rods. My grandmother finally collapsed, wailing that her daughter would be soaked. The fact that my mother was dead and buried in a coffin six feet in the ground meant nothing to Lola. She could not be consoled. I held my grandmother's prostrate body in my arms, neither of us able to fully comprehend the loss of the woman who bound us together with a chain of kinship, history and love.

Only then did I remember it was my birthday. The day the earth claimed my mother a second time, I turned thirty.

The photo is of Meg (standing) and her mother Daisy, taken in 1983.