I thought i'd try to fill in some of the events of the last two years.

On July 22 2003, I arrived at Heathrow from San Francisco. I cleared customs and as usual switched on my mobile phone. There was a message asking me to call home. When I did, my mother told me my thirty-eight year old brother Alasdair died the day before.

My brother’s girlfriend, Gail, arrived at my family’s home next day, half an hour before I did. In the intense grief it was incongruous to find Gail receiving my Mum’s genteel hospitality, drinking tea from the good china. Gail was describing what had happened. Painful though it was, we were hungry for the details of my brother’s last hours. He and Gail had been in the pub drinking. They had picked up some methadone, and gone home. They shared the methadone, had cheese on toast, then went to bed. Next morning Gail went to the toilet to vomit and came back to bed to find my brother dead . My brother had always lived recklessly. One of my earliest memories of him was aged six, hanging by his fingernails from my parent’s upstairs window. It was impossible to believe he had finally fallen.

Next day we went to the police morgue. I sat with the body and sat through the grief to a strong feeling of love and, inexplicably, connection.

Because they decided to press a homicide charge against the dealer, the police kept the body. We waited week by week to find out when we could bury him. When they released the body, some two months later, they also released the keys to the flat, which until them had been a crime scene. No-one had disturbed the flat since Alasdair’s death. The crusts of bread and cheese were still on a plate on the floor; Gail’s vomit had dried around the toilet bowl. I spent hours sifting through what was left in the flat, satisfied to be touching the fabric of my brother’s life.

Meantime, my father, who seemed broken by his son’s death, began to have seizures. He had been holding prostrate cancer at bay for ten years, but now a scan revealed a brain tumour. Over the next months my father’s condition continued to deteriorate, and he decided to have surgery. In November they removed a tumour the size of a tennis-ball. A few weeks later, he seemed well enough for me to go to India in December and the United States in January.
There was a dreadful feeling of déjà vu when I got back to Heathrow from San Francisco, to a message that they had found four more brain tumours. The doctors gave my dad between three and six months to live.

The different cancers interacted cruelly. The prostate disease meant that my father had to pass urine often; the brain tumours meant that his mobility and balance were getting worse. He could only get to the toilet with my mother’s help, and each journey took twenty minutes of every hour, sometimes every hour day and night. Similarly, he could only leave the house with help. It was clear that if I could spend time there it would make a real difference.

So I spent the next three months living with my parents, for the first time since I was seventeen. I hardly knew my father. I had left home before I was really an adult. We were on friendly enough terms, but my life baffled him. We had hardly ever spoken in depth. Now, helping him dress, feed and go to the bathroom, meant that we started to make a connection, maybe for the first time, in a very basic way. The first few weeks were mainly trying to manage the symptoms. After trial and error with different urine bags, sheaths and adhesives, we got that under control. It’s hard to explain how much difference that made to him, and what a relief it was to be able to sleep right through at least one night in two.

I was impressed by the resources the small Scottish community provided. Social services quickly made a wheelchair and an expensive stair-lift available; a blacksmith fitted a custom-made ramp for the wheelchair. Each morning two home helps would bath and dress my father. District nurses and a Macmillan cancer nurse would visit. The local pharmacy would make sure drugs were there when we needed them. It showed the town in a flattering light. A lot of people helped look after my father.

He took a new interest in seeing Scotland. We developed a routine. My mother and I would work in the mornings. In the afternoons we’d go for a drive. Sometimes the Clyde valley; sometimes the coast; sometimes if my dad felt well, we’d head north. He’d go for radiotherapy in the morning, for example, then we’d get a picnic lunch, and head for the highlands.
It was poignant looking at landscapes that my father would not see many more times. It’s a commonplace that nearness to death lets you see with fresh eyes, but it’s true. I had forgotten how beautiful the Clyde coast was, how Arran took the mountains of Argyll south of the Clyde. Driving across dull moorland in horizontal Scottish rain became urgently beautiful when you saw them through the eyes of a man who wouldn’t much longer see moor or rain.

My father took a liking to being wheelchaired round the local town and even round the supermarket. I was seeing the simple texture of life; people buying what they needed to eat, the unremarkable, warm exchanges of neighbours, things he would soon leave behind. And these outings gave us a chance, two or three times, to talk. He was ready for death, he said .

We got into an almost pleasant routine. In the novel ‘Big Fish’ there’s a line that says, ‘my father had been dying for so long we thought he would just go on dying for ever’. We had hoped that he might live through the summer (it didn’t seem fair to spend your last days in dreich Scottish spring weather). But on the first weekend in May he developed a chest infection. The doctor gave us a painful dilemma. Pneumonia was ‘the old man’s friend’, he said. We could treat it, or leave it. If we treated it he might improve, but he was showing symptoms of secondary cancers spreading to the bone. The pain of that might be what we were sparing him for. What did we want to do?

We decided to treat the symptoms (the doctor decided he was unlikely to recover anyway). By the Wednesday he was in pain, despite the pump giving him morphine. That evening and night was the most difficult time, as we listened powerless to my father literally begging for help, with pain in his hip, his arm, his chest. Despite more morphine, nothing took the pain away.

In the early hours of Thursday morning he started to settle. Dad was hardly conscious by now, and hadn’t spoken for twelve hours. The home-helps came in as usual, with a new low friction sheet for moving him in bed. The home-helps weren’t used to it, however, and they catapulted him up the bed, hitting him off the headboard. The last words he spoke were, ‘Bastard.’.
For the next twenty four hours my father slept, till next morning, while being bathed again by the home-helps, with no fuss, not even a deep breath, he died.

My father died on the Friday morning; my sister was due to have a baby on the Tuesday. So, we decided to have the funeral before she gave birth; on the Monday if we could. My mother, as is traditional, wanted to have the body at home until the funeral. However, the coffin, chosen by my sisters who have some money, was a little too grand to fit through the doors of our council house. The undertaker insisted in that case the body would have to stay in their chapel. My mother was just as insistent that the body should be at home, without the coffin if need be. So an hour later the outraged undertakers brought the dressed body of my father back in a body-bag, raising neighbours’ eyebrows, and laid him on his bed. He looked great in his Daks suit and Armani tie. Over the weekend the family and neighbours, admirably unperturbed by the body, were able to sit around the bed talking and reminiscing. I could meditate in the room each morning, till on Monday we took him to be buried.

On Tuesday, my sister went into hospital to have her baby. The birth, my mother imagined, would be a comfort. The operation should have been finished by lunchtime; when we hadn’t heard anything by late afternoon we started to worry. I reassured myself that I was overly anxious after my dad’s death. In fact what should have been a routine caesarean section had become complicated, and my sister had started to haemorrhage seriously. After a transfusion of 14 litres of blood, enough to fill three people, they managed to stop the bleeding. My sister, they told her later, nearly died. Now, I’m glad to say, she and the baby, Ciara, are both well.

I’m writing this on retreat, on my own on a bay on the Rhins of Galloway. A Buddha figure, Vajrasattva, is on my shrine, an image of something still and unsullied. I’m doing the metta bhavana and the tonglen element of the bodhicitta practice. I’m not sure what one is supposed to do with bereavement. But the practice has been perfect: it points you straight at the pain, and encourages you just to stay open and aware in relation to it, in quite a concentrated, meditative way. It hasn’t felt morbid or depressing at all, just deeply sad and integrating.

At sunset I watched gannets dive for fish, a white barn owl hunting to feed its young, a hare nibbling fresh cut stubble.