🖤 7 YEARS SINCE [DAD] 🖤
This is a personal abstract (super muted) 'tribute' to the man who made me cry. I refuse to give creedence to the day of my Dad's Cremation. [22 MAY 2024]
“ANTHONY Scally had few expectations for the book he wrote about living with paranoid schizophrenia. But today it is cult reading among patients, a must-see text for mental health professionals and a fixture on students' reading lists…” writes Journalist / Reporter, Paul Taylor. (Click Image) to read the archived article on the M.E.N. website; promoting Dad’s memoir Eyebrows & Other Fish back in 2010 (updated 2013) which was first printed in our local newspaper the Manchester Evening News. The original newspaper article cutting was taken down from a frame he used to keep ‘pride of joy’ over on the wall beside his window, where he used to lean against the windowsill and smoke - like I do here at mine to this day, I wanted the cuttings to keep safe myself but chosen first by his ex-wife for my Sister and Dad’s Grandchilden which is fair enough.
YOU know Anthony Scally has a sense of humour even before you clap eyes on him. On the path to the front door of his home in Wythenshawe, the outline of a body is painted in white, crime scene-style.
"The Jehovah's Witnesses walk straight past and who can blame them?" he says.
I ‘rescued’ some alabaster type ornaments of a male and female both in poses of despair. I think the nicotine stains are an added extra which adds tone and character to the overall sadness in them. My Dad and I always relished in our own melancholy.
What I did with this recording today -contents:
1. Read: an excerpt from pages 135-136 of Dad’s memoir about his experience with Schizophrenia in the early 1990’s when the stigma was a lot different than now.
2. Recited: A Late Lark Twitters From The Quiet Skies by William Ernest-Henley
NB: a song choice picked for Dad’s memory and in respect of his taste.
Gentle Abstract Musings -22 May 2024
Title: 7 YEARS SINCE by Chasey Delaney
NB: not intended to be an essay nor a story… just some light relief for me typing this evening.
It’s the same day to the exact date only seven years later that I tasted, what appears to be now, my last ever drop of whiskey. It’s a perfectly shit day for some people but one of the best for me - if only weather wise. The rain has poured for hours teasing torrential rain. Puddles formed in front of my eyes, which were also wet from memory tears not all sadness, wistfully frustrated but mostly reminiscent. The patches of doc leave type weeds seemed to grow to monstrous proportions as soon as my back turned for a second.
I do actually take note of those because normally, me and the dog have a track, a small path, our little route through the small city garden. It’s ours, attached to our ground floor apartment. Just strange to have such a privilege of one in this area, so I always make a fuss of having a fucking garden! Ooh, look at us! I just love that it's big enough for us, Lola and I to make routine walks around the same flagstones, over to the gate, past the wild plants, these doc leaves, which she’s always trying to dig up and eat them from the roots. They were flat and widespread yesterday morning. Now they are tickling my legs just above the knee at best.
I’ve never really been green fingers and never will be, not even in my 80’s should I ever be so bad to get to stay on earth that long. Only the good die young. It’s the Day we let Dad go on his way. The day of the Manchester bombing where tragically we lost 22 lives which would have made Dad cry more had he been alive. He would always get upset with news reports, especially something this close to home and of such severity . Had he been alive we might have never seen the chaos unfolding as we arrived home to empty streets cordoned off by Police and the sound of the emergency services constantly ringing in our ears all night. We were returning from Dad’s wake. Walking together, me and my current partner, hunched together in a daze. After getting stopped by one official for using the shortcut, and for obvious security reasons, as we explained that I’d been to my Dad’s funeral, something caught in my throat and I croaked a question, probably to avoid any further introspection, “what’s going on?” and was told something along the lines of “a very serious incident has taken place at the MEN arena tonight, make your way home now!”
We gave him a ‘good enough’ send off from what I remembered. A funeral of sorts. I tried to forget the finer details but it's hard not to wince when they talk. Some relatives refer to such things and they slip it in almost as an afterthought that ‘’your Dad was cremated this day‘’. I had to get away as visions of my Dad’s grey white blood-black flesh was burnt behind those deep red curtains; and while alight and his deliverance unto fuck knows who or where to. All anyone who had ever known him, loved him, missed him, cared could do was turn their backs, just as we had to the police tape and blue lights bouncing, casting our shadows from wall to redbrick wall and all anyone was supposed to do was walk away, wondering what might’ve been.