Aunt Frances died last April. Not from Covid. You have to say, not Covid, because otherwise everyone assumes Covid. Especially when she was in a care home. She was 100. I was her legal guardian, though some of my cousins visited her more regularly than I did.
She was the last of a remarkable generation of siblings, born into a mining family in Cambuslang. Her father died in his forties, thus my granny, the only grandparent I knew, raised eleven children through the Great Depression and World War Two on her own.
She saved my life in 1960. A toddler, I slipped into the Cadzow Burn at the back of our home, and Frances jumped in to fish me out. I owe her my life. That's a lot to owe someone.
Because of Covid we couldn't have a proper funeral for her. She was always meitulously organised, and had her funeral planned right down to the hymns, and in which order they were to be sung. But circumstances dictated that it would be a fifteen minute graveside service, so I asked another cousin, an opera singer, to record Ave Maria, one of Frances's choice of hymns, and I played it at the service through my phone. It was a stunning early May day, with the sun celebrating her life, and the birds singing their hearts out for her. We shared it online for wider family around the world, and it brought us closer, and made the service a wonderful, memorable occasion.
I was all choked up when my cousin sang, not just because of the service itself, but because my cousin had sung the same ethereal hymn at the funeral of both my parents, some seven years earlier. You carry the loss with you for the rest of your life, but you can also carry the gratitude and the marvel at such a beautiful song.
As per her plan Frances was buried alongside one of her other sisters, Mary. Both were unmarried and had no children. Mary was born with learning difficulties and a physical disability. When my granny died, she came to stay with our family, so I got to know her well. A gentle, simple soul, in the good sense of the word. Mary liked a cup of tea, and she like watching Crossroads. She was like a Zen master pretending to have difficulties, such was her acceptance and serenity.
Now that Frances had died we had to have her name engraved on the headstone already in situ for Mary. At that point my sister had a great idea. Why don't we take the opportunity to add wording to commemorate a third sister, who died aged only three months, back before Mary and Frances were born?
So it came to be. You can see it in Bent Cemetery in Hamilton. The original wording read:
In Loving Memory
of
MARY MURPHY
DIED 13th MAY 1992
AGED 74 YEARS
To it we added:
FRANCES MURPHY
DIED 24th APRIL 2020
AGED 100 YEARS
and
ELIZABETH MURPHY
DIED 12th OCTOBER 1916
AGED 3 MONTHS
and finished it with
BELOVED DAUGHTERS OF
JAMES AND MARY MURPHY
In this way we managed to pay tribute to, and celebrate, not only Aunt Frances, but Mary once again, and poor, tiny Elizabeth. We don't know where Elizabeth's actual grave is, assuming there is one surely.
We also wanted to celebrate our grandparents, who lost the baby, raised the two very different girls, until peritonitis took him away in 1937. Frances, drowning in grief at the loss of her father, asked her mother, 'How could God take away my daddy?' Granny replied, 'You are lucky. If it had been me that died, you'd have all had to go to the orphanage.'
We have no idea how lucky we are. I sometimes sit in wonder at their generation. What they endured. What they achieved. With so little. How much we owe them all, and how much we should, now, celebrate their love and kindness to my generation.
I also can't fathom, though of course I know the truth of it, that two siblings could die a hundred and two years apart. Also, how Fate can play such different hands to three sisters born in three short years between 1916 and 1919. One to die as an infant, another to live a normal lifespan but without many of the capabilities most of us take for granted, and the other, Frances, who graduated from the University of Glasgow in around 1940, daughter of a miner's widow.
Frances emigrated to America where she set up her own Montessori school which was fabulously successful. She finally retired at the age of ninety-two, to come home, as she put it, to die. She died, at the care home, after lunch one day, in her room, sitting on her chair, with her prayer book in her lap. You couldn't make it up. It was almost as if she said 'That's it, Lord. I'm ready.'
She was ready. Frances was always ready.
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