I say ‘concocted’ because my father was not a conventionally religious man and indeed had no time at all for certain aspects of the more formal aspects of religious observance. Dad had his own terms for many things, and he called Ministers ‘sky pilots’! Fortunately there was an occasional sky pilot who Dad considered, unlike the rest, and the Reverend Sandy Gunn was one of these. These were two men who had a fundamental disagreement over the biggest question in life but respected each other as men and simply put their disagreement aside even teasing each other on occasion as Sandy said, ‘Forrest may not agree with his calling but he had to admit that his boss had a particular liking for men of a seafaring profession’ and thereby appeal to one of Dads weak spots. Dad had not left specific instructions for what he wanted but had often enough told his children what he didn’t want, so he left a final little puzzle for his family to resolve. Fortunately I had little idea how to run a funeral, didn’t know what was normal and so we made a bespoke version that I like to think would have fitted Dad perfectly.

Sandy helped enormously in so many ways, guiding a complete novice in such arrangements. And especially in how to do what Dad wanted, to celebrate his life with a service that would meet the needs of those who wished to pay their formal & religious respects if they needed to, but not offend his memory for others. Sandy was also with my father when he died along with John, I was on my way up from Leicestershire and Dad knew this, but to my regret I did not get to him in time. His passing was peaceful and at the Abefeldy Cottage hospital, a hospital of a more human scale than most, so he was amongst those who had known him for many years. He had been keen to get back to Cruichan the nursing home where he had been since he reached the point of needed more care than my mother could provide even with help at Birchburn. He would not have liked or survived long going back to the massive PRI, the Perth Royal Infirmary he hated.

I can only write this from my point of view, everyone in the family would have their own experiences, but I will write this like a diary. As I was writing this on returning home, Peter Thomas rang with condolences, and to say his Mother had just told him, and he would have wanted to be there. Sorry Peter for not telling you personally, but I think I had people like Jane’s daughter Katie, who was in her first week at Southampton University and unable to make the trip, and Peter’s Mother Olive and others often too frail themselves to travel in mind writing this. Olive and Basil were dear friends of my family in Wallington, part of the Carleton Avenue community that I remember as a gang of kids growing up together. I have kept in touch with Peter, but pretty seldom, one of the things a funeral does is put friendship, love, family, and so on into its correct perspective. Peter and I will get our families together again soon. I had thought Olive surely could not travel all the way north, but Peter said he would have tried to make it possible.

I set off for Aberfeldy on hearing from John that my father was failing at about 6.00pm and reached Scotland around the time John called at 11.31 pm to say he had died. At that moment the focus switched from getting to Dad, to supporting Mum who would have to be told in the morning, After making quite a number of calls it seemed pointless to press on, so I pulled over and managed to find a hotel and get a little sleep.
I went straight to John who now lives in Aberfeldy and he made me breakfast over which we discussed what to do next, the first and most obvious of which was to go round to Abbeyfield and give Mum the sad news. Mum had been with my Father the previous day as she had been every other. That afternoon they had had a scare as Dad had seemed to be failing but then had recovered. My Mother and John had left but in the early evening John was called back as Dad had slipped back again. John had had the difficult decision of whether to call Mum and decided, rightly I think, not to do so.
Abbeyfield is like a sort of hotel for gentle ladies, Mum has her room, and lunch and dinner, but is otherwise independent. She is happy there, in a room which has been decorated as a copy of her room at Birchburn, close to Cruichan for her visit to dad which have been the focus of her time there.

Telling my Mother was remarkably easy, partly because John did the talking, and partly because Mum straight away was happy for her beloved man to be relived of the suffering inflicted upon him since his stroke in October 2000.

We spent a lot of time with Mum who was both distressed and relieved and her mood varied between those extremes, it was I think good that this was a Sunday morning as we really just spent the day talking with Mum and could not get sucked into starting any other arrangements. We made a lot of calls that day and I discover what a pain answering machines can really be. Obviously we all hate them but in these circumstances do you leave a message? Or do you ring over and over when you have so many calls to make? There is no answer to that question and you just do what seems right where you know the person you are calling and leave the rest.

Sunday was a perfect blue sky morning and John suggested we all go for a walk, Mum chose a beautiful and favourite walk of which there are so many in Tayside – down the glorious banks of the Tay to the Chinese Bridge and back. Most Sundays recently Mum and Dad if at all possible would go to the restaurant of the Kenmore Hotel for Sunday lunch, always eating the same meal, sitting in the same seats, in a glass walled restaurant overlooking the start of the River Tay. An obvious favourite of my Father and it was a fairly raw experience sitting there the three of us and one empty place. I had tried to divert my mother from this choice but she was insistent that she had to live here, and would face the world, actually quite right and I suppose a very good sign for her coping.

By now Mum was exhausted so we returned her to Aberfeldy and John and I continued calling round the answering machines again and got started on the few things that you can do on a Sunday and met with the Minister and Funeral Service Director. John and I formed a team and supported by Julia back at home we started on dealing with something that ought to be quite simple but actually explodes into a million pieces all of which have to be managed, I soon realised that I could have benefited from bringing my laptop and some project planning tool! - but actually had left home without even thinking of bringing my ‘Mum & Dad file’ with all their papers. Fortunately with Julia at home she could cover for this mistake.

There is no need to go into the organising arrangements we made, No one other than John and Julia can ever know all the myriad of things we did and what those few days were like. We instantly formed a military style team sharing and swapping jobs, sanity checking with each other, and running through lists which went on an on, at each stage you think ‘that’s it its under control’ but in fact the new lists don’t stop, even now back home on the following Sunday afternoon, I find I still have a list of things to get back to John about, a list of things to do after this is all over, as we did nothing we did not really have to at the time. We went flat out every day, dawn till the wee small hours as the call them in Scotland, Monday was taken with carrying on the calling round and the first bits of administration that come with a death. Probate, Pension, Solicitor, Wills, National Insurance, Care allowances, Tax, Local Authorities and so on into the haze. Everyone seems intent on you proving a death, and that the body has been legally disposed of etc. you begin to form the impression that there must be a lot of people who are not dead, but pretending, and/or buried in places it is not allowed, or surely all these questions would be unnecessary? Because it was a holiday week in Scotland the two nearest Registrars were on holiday so we had to go to Pitlochry. Lots more questions but the one I recall was how many copies would you like – I said two? But I wished she had said as soon as you leave here every official body you contact will want an original and unless you want to track the going back and forth take plenty – I should have said at least half a dozen.  Dad wanted to leave something for the nurses and I had noticed in Cruichan the Nurses small break room was bare of anything (but an ash tray) so suggested they might like a little music centre, that went down well so I was able to knock that one off the list in Pitlochry too, and Dad left a good chunk of cash too for both the staffs at Cruichan and the Hospital to have a good Christmas party and remember him fondly for a moment if they would. but to skip to describing the service and onward for those of you who could not be there, but would like to know. The only other thing to mention is the date chosen, it seemed to me a little rapid to have the service on the Thursday and there will have been folks who could have used more time to rearrange diaries, but I was told it is the tradition in Scotland to be prompt in such things, and in the event the date was the only one possible, you end up with a series of interlocking pieces which have to fit the various availabilities, and the date chose itself. One other thing I would like to mention is the calls I made in particular from the car heading south on Tuesday. I ended up driving home on the Tuesday and back again on Wednesday. This was a bit odd, but worked out quite well. I had to go home to pick up the family, we had to come up in the car that took all 6 of us as Julia has been unable to do long distance driving since her viral meningitis which has left her fine except for an odd eyestrain which only manifests itself on long periods of concentration.

Anyway on the Tuesday driving down I visited the crematorium, the Hotel we intended to use for the party Dad had requested, and Kathleen had organised ‘in principle’ a year after Dad’s massive stroke, the family graveyard at Haddington, and St Mary’s Manse to meet the Minister, Jim Cowie. It is worth recalling that this was a terrifying meeting. The funeral director in Aberfeldy had pointed out how lucky we were in having Sandy Gunn to conduct the service and that many a local minister would not have gone along with the kind of service we were organising, were sticklers for how it has to be done, and will do that despite family wishes.

Jim Cowie turned out to be another Minister of the same mould as Sandy Gunn and I began to wonder about the possibility of some kind of intervention? He lives in a beautiful traditional Manse nearby the church and we sat in his drawing room discussing the arrangements. I had to simply tell him the true position that my father was an agnostic knowing that if I was unlucky with his views there might be a real problem fulfilling my father’s wishes for a scattering of his ashes there, in fact he had no problem with what I requested and could not have been more helpful. I asked about the possibility of putting up a stone on the wall nearby his fathers. I assumed there would be all sorts of permissions required, as this church and graveyard is frankly a national treasure with history encompassing the siege of Haddington, the reformation, and a few stones which go back to a period before names dates were put on stones, and have death masks and medieval style decorations. His reply was that I needn’t even bother having to go through the local funeral service, and could come and stick up a stone myself some time – no one would notice the difference!

What I was going to say is that on this drive which took 12 hours I started on Mum’s address book at A and got almost through to the end by the time I got back home. I made some marvellous calls, speaking to people who sometimes I had known very well as a boy but had not met since, though they knew all about me and my life, as they had visited Mum and Dad at Birchburn or just kept in touch though the years. Some wanted to reminisce about some memory of my parents and I felt the emotion and the love that my parents had created amongst their circle of friends many of whom I was unaware of. The odd thing was that I wasn’t even tired at the end of the journey even though I knew I would normally be. The other thing that struck me was how many people read the announcements in the papers! We put them in the Courier, The Scotsman and the Telegraph, this was very much Johns suggestion I wasn’t against it but thought it may be a waste of money, I was wrong.

The whole time Julia had been doing her usual behind the scenes role, doing all the bits I couldn’t, and we had a wonderful reunion even though I had only been away two and a bit days.

Wednesday was a whirl of preparing and gathering up all the bits and pieces we needed for the following day. Late in the day we realised we hadn’t even started on the packing to take the family north which usually takes all day anyway – I’m really not sure how she does it? -  a female mystery.

In fact we got away pretty much on plan and arrived up at Birchburn at two in the morning, before I had left I wanted to make the arrival nice for the family so I made all the beds put on the bedside lights and had the place all set up so we could just press the electric button (I remembered to take for the garage doors) and fall into our beds, but Jonas had been in an locked the internal door connecting the garage to the house, so that plan didn’t work, and for a moment I thought we might have to go and wake up Sheila and Jonas (who have a summer house that Jonas built across the other side of Loch Tay) fortunately Jonas had put the spare key back in its hiding place and even in the pitch black I managed to find it.

Thursday morning was the start of what was really 5 ‘events’ over 2 days for 89 people, as I was told were at the church and hotel, which we had organised over the previous 3 days - most of which is pretty much a blur now. But I remember the events themselves well and I hope I always will with the help of these recollections.

I was told by the funeral director that the form in Scotland is for the family to arrive after the church is full so that is what we did. The family all met at Birchburn ready to go along to the church for the 11.30 service. Despite that Mum and dad hadn’t lived in the house since summer 2004, we kept Birchburn as a place from which to visit Mum and Dad. Especially so that at a moments notice you could come north and have a place to land at any time day or night. That has worked well.

Thursday Morning was yet again another beautiful Scottish autumn morning, sunny and warm. The service we arranged was I suppose unconventional but was guided by the wisdom for such events of Sandy, and consisted really of four speeches one from Sandy in the service and one from each of the three sons. Several people have asked to be sent the texts of the service if possible, and I suppose that is what got me started on writing this. Sorry about the length but I found this a therapy for myself.

The service was a Thanksgiving for my Father’s wonderful life, a celebration, and at his request and a happy occasion.

Thanksgiving service for Captain Alexander Forrest Dickson O.B.E.