It was supposed to be fine and we had planned to hold the wake in the garden but the clouds were angry and there was a sadness in the air. In the studio, Trish lay on a bed of heather in a coffin which Robin had made. The wood came from a large Scots Pine which best man, Malcolm Morgan, had provided and cut into planks. Saw miller neighbour Davie Mark supplied the strapping.
Sons-in-law David and Jackson helped with the sanding and the setting-up of the studio which was dressed with the black velvet drapes. The coffin, illuminated by a single shaft of light, lay on a green baize catafalque with four large alter candles burning at each corner. Margaret Buchanan Smith arranged a spray of freesia on top of the coffin with a bouquet of white lilies at the foot. The floor around was strewn with Cyprus.
However prepared we are, death always comes as a shock. Today we have to confront a great loss and begin to come to terms with it. It will take time to adjust but today is a new beginning for our life without her.
Probing the limits of our humanity and of the world around us is the privilege we have in this transitory phase we call life. Our known universe, we are only now just discovering, is not the only universe and its beginning and ending over millions of years are not the alpha or the omega of time. Death is not something to be shut away and never talked about. It is a part of daily life! From the moment we are born, we are born to die.
In a funny way it is somehow appropriate that as Trish departs this life, a grandchild is about to enter. Life and death are part of a cycle, a brief span in eternity. What matters is how we use that microscopic blink of time - how we make an equally microscopic contribution to the world and society in which we live. Down at the burn, Trish and I picked up fossils of life here 30 million years ago. Within this continuum, Trish's lifespan of just 56 years is a humbling perspective ...
When I married her Trish was stunning with a 21 inch waist that I could put my fingers around. No wonder Salvador Dali asked her to model for him in his illustration of Ruth in his Vatican Bible.
It was very surprising we ever got together. We met at university. She didn't take to me much and it was reciprocal. She thought I was a grubby little Scotsman, and I reckoned she was a bit of an Oxford snob. Then we got thrown together for a weekend. After 24 hours we began to quite like each other. After 48 hours we were in love. So we went out on Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, and on Friday night we went for dinner at the Cramond Inn and under the light of the moon on the foreshore we became engaged. That was the Spring of 1962.
We spent two years trying it out and were wed in 1964. We never looked back. Someone once wrote: "it doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find next morning that it was someone else." In a way it is true. People change and from the moment you are married you either grow together or you grow apart. We mellowed each other and for nearly 35 years it was a wonderful partnership ...
Trish was happy here. She wanted to die, looking out on the ever changing light across the moor, in the place and with the people she loved. Before she died she told us how much she loved us all, and how lucky she felt she had been to be surrounded by not just a close family, but such a strong group of old friends and such a supportive community of neighbours. She fought death and beat the odds, but she never feared it. She felt fulfilled. In her dying days, she said to me: "All my life I've been surrounded by love and joy, laughter and security. I have had the greatest blessing any human being can have because these things are the centre of true life".
A new group of bearers representing the village - Davie Mark, Ali Cowan, Gerry Elliot, Bill Purdie - took over at the end of the drive. Halfway down the lane, they were relieved by Adam Thomson, Fred Edwards, William Corlett, Big Tam, and a final relay of David Steel, Bill MacArthur, Mike Jones, Steven Morgan carried her to the grave. As they approached a robin flew out of the hole.
At this point it was discovered that the slings had been left behind, so there was a contemplative moment while Malcolm muttered imprecations under his breath, Robin beamed and Jackson ran off, kilt flying in the wind, back up to the house to get them.
Hugh Dorrell, David Stewart, Andrew Jackson, Malcolm Morgan, Bill MacArthur and Michael Jones lowered the coffin.
As we pass on, we pass to you
Some things we learned, the love we knew.
Blessed, we lived beneath this sky,
And here, fulfilled, we gladly die.
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