Conscience

If you don’t wish to rent a box at the post office, you can place one on the nearest rural route, but as you can see from the above, it is rather haphazard. Not to mention damp and insecure.

Which is why we rent a box. Even so we often get delivered someone else’s mail. What hope must there be for the folk who own the above boxes?

Snail mail is obviously low priority nowadays. To my parents, the mail was supremely important. Dad impatiently awaited the postman, getting very put out if the man ran late and the moment the delivery dropped onto the mat, it was pounced on.

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Of prime importance was The New Yorker to which my father subscribed for all the years that I knew him. Living in SE Asia, delivery was unreliable, not to mention expensive and it was a source of great frustration and complaint. The magazines arrived in the wrong order and many weeks late. When one went astray, moaning intensified.

The New Yorker was read cover to cover and often quoted, though opinions were not always agreed with and sometimes letters were written to the editor.

When Dad had finally to enter a nursing home, The New Yorker still found its way there and it was the last item my father hung onto after he’d stopped caring about all else.

For years there had been Letter from America by Alistair Cooke, which was held in even higher regard than The New Yorker. That letter was delivered over the radio once a week and woe betide if reception was bad on the night. Mother had to program dinner around the broadcast. Nothing was allowed to interfere.

My father had such high regard for Alistair Cooke, I wondered what he would do when Letter went off the air. Sir Alistair continued broadcasting until just before his death in 2004 and my father died almost exactly a year later, also due to cancer.

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Of secondary importance were personal letters, depending on their provenance. Some were deemed lower priority than bills, since Dad was always anxious about the content of those.

Letters with attractive or unusual stamps were seized for safe removal of said stamps.

After my mother died, Dad came to live back in America again. When they sold their property in Barbados, my parents had purchased a house in Florida, but with no medical insurance, in the end they had returned to England for my Mum to have a hip replacement.

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Widowed in 1997, Dad decided to avoid winters by spending those months in Australia and that worked well for him twice, but in 2001 it all went wrong beginning with a delayed flight. That year he’d booked a different hotel where he arrived exhausted and jet-lagged, finding things didn’t work the way they had in previous years.

The food was wrong, the room uncomfortable, the location inconvenient. I began getting phone calls in Seattle and tried to sort it all out long distance to no avail. Eventually I went to my boss, begged for leave and flew to Australia where I spent a week trying to coax the old man out of a depression.

God forever bless the Australians who were so supportive.

What I soon realised was that Dad did not want to go back to living alone in England. I could not go there, so the question was, should I encourage him to come and live in Seattle?

For starters, there was that question of medical insurance. Dad was prone to chest colds but other than that, he’d always been healthy. Yet he was 88. However, it was for him to decide.

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It was not the issue of medical insurance that had me tossing and turning for an entire night. It was a moral dilemma.

From the age of 11 when I went to boarding school, I never again lived with my parents for more than a few weeks and I had never been close to my father. He was moody and difficult and he made me very uncomfortable. If he came to Seattle, I’d end up running around after him and honestly, I resented it.

Horrible person that made me. But it wasn’t the doing I resented. It was the being treated like a rather inadequate servant.

On the other hand, if Dad remained alone in England, becoming increasingly needy, I could see myself travelling back and forth. That was one thing when I lived in New York which offered many daily flights, but Seattle was very much further and served with only one flight a day which therefore tended to be full.

When you struggle with such issues, you have to try to put aside the personal stuff and ask what is right, what is practical and ultimately, what your conscience will allow you to live with afterwards, which you can only guess at.

If you follow your conscience, even if you get it wrong, at least you will have the comfort of knowing you believed you were doing the right thing.

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By the time I left my father to finish his winter in Australia, his spirits seemed to have been revived by the idea of moving back to the States. Later that year I went to England to help get him packed up and the budgie adopted.

Three years later, Dad was diagnosed with cancer.

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