JOHN MACLEOD: How can one capture a life lived to the very fullest in a few short words?

It’s Friday evening and, with the usual weird stage fright whenever I am about to write anything, I sit before my laptop, eye the blank screen, swallow firmly, and type ‘IN LOVING MEMORY...’

I’m just back from a ploy to the cemetery, within sight of the Butt of Lewis lighthouse, where we buried my father last May.

It’s a daunting place – all sea and sky and with a terrifying sense of exposure.

This mission was softened by the immediate duty, showing a second cousin and his little boy where all assorted relatives lie, including the unmarked graves of our MacLeod great-grandparents.

Murdo is now going to do something about that. But I need in turn to deal with my father’s grave.

Still a visible mound with torn sod, marked only by an apologetic little plaque from Timpson, and for the moment a place of pain, a place of separation, and a place of horror.

A permanent headstone will bestow both dignity and distance. I have already identified three monumental masons to quote for the job and all I need now do is draft the wording.

I have been writing for a living since 1988 and, in general, specialise in steepled-fingers essays and features at around 2,000 words each and the crisp little column at around 1,200 words. 

But I never forget that, tomorrow and for the most part, my exquisitely turned prose will wrap the fish.

A gravestone, by contrast, may endure for centuries – and must be worded with terrifying concision. On a daunting tightrope between warmth and dignity.

And you have only to wander round any cemetery, from the Outer Hebrides to any Scottish city, to find innumerable instances of tone-deaf wrong. 

Rank hypocrisy, jarring humour, and seeming denial of the reality of death itself. 

It’s extraordinary how many are reluctant actually to use the blank word ‘died,’ try to pull off a lame joke, or add pictures and props, football favours and so on, more reminiscent of dispatching a Viking to Valhalla.

On my annual jaunt to Ireland, there is one obligatory outing – to visit the grave of William Butler Yeats at St Columba’s, Drumcliffe, County Sligo – and displayed churchyard rules categorically forbid photographs of the deceased on gravestones.

Indeed, as in all Anglican churchyards, even the inscription must be approved by the vicar. Sensible and classy.

I have two more pressures. One is that, on an island where Free Church ministers are yet held in high esteem, local expectation is that my father’s memorial be to some degree a potted biography; and that the final wording must be approved by my mother – on the perfectly reasonable grounds that she is paying for it.

So emails ping back and fore between myself and my younger brother, her computer-literate representative on Earth.

1940-2023 falls at an early hurdle; the coffin-plate phrasing, ‘Died 21st May 2023 Aged 82 Years’ is insisted upon. 

The two pastoral charges must be recorded. I know the first was ‘Kilmallie and Arisaig,’ but was the second ‘Partick (Highland) Glasgow,’ or ‘Partick Highland, Glasgow’? 

I lean back for a moment and recall the appalling pressure on a young husband and father, still not 30, who had in the tenement canyons of G11 to preach five or six times a week and in Gaelic and English.

Preparing each sermon as three yowling pre-school brats pined for Lochaber.

And recall one of his funnier stories. As Presbytery Clerk, in the last gasp of his Kilmallie days, he had to administrate the ordination and induction of a new Free Church minister for Mull.

Unfortunately, the charge was not simply called ‘Mull’.

It was ‘Tobermory, Torloisk, Torosay, Ross and Brolas,’ and had to be so described in the assorted forms, records and pulpit edicts.

‘And I had to type it out many, many times,’ Daddy darkly recalled decades later.

Another stumbling block is recording where, exactly, my father was from. Like most of his generation, his birth was inconvenienced by Hitler.

But for the Second World War, Daddy would have breathed his first in Greenfield Street, Govan, and might have ended up doing stir with Jimmy Boyle.

Instead, while my grand-father was off doing cool Royal Naval Reserve stuff like chasing the Bismarck, my father was born at 3 Habost, Ness – in the same traditional blackhouse where his mother had been born. 

And her father. And her father’s father, in the very year of the Disruption – 1843.

I think this is kind of cool, and Daddy was certainly proud of it. But wider family are not keen – arguing that he was only resident in Habost for several months – and I let it go.

So I trot out the CV – ‘Professor of Systematic Theology and Principal, Free Church College, Edinburgh’ – and then must settle on adjectives.

‘An Esteemed Father’, I decide, is too chilly.

I settle on ‘A Sorely Missed Father,’ tap my teeth for a minute, and then add ‘And For 58 Years Cherished Husband of Mary MacLean.’

There must follow a tactful gap for further text, and that is the most searing moment of all, gazing into the abyss of orphanhood entire.

Finally, local custom calls for a quotation – normally scripture, like ‘Gus Am Bris an Là Agus An Teich Na Sgailean’ – until the day break, and the shadows flee away.

In fact, my father provided one. In the last weeks of his life, concentration increasingly shot, he increasingly dwelt amidst psalms and hymns, and in the very last thing he ever wrote – the preface to his last book, which he never lived to hold – he concluded with lines from a seldom sung verse of Praise My Soul, The King of Heaven:

Frail as summer’s flower we flourish;

blows the wind and it is gone;

but, while mortals rise and perish,

God endures unchanging on...

Apt, indeed – and my mother loves it. But how I wish I had been kinder, more patient, in his last failing weeks, from the small-hours howls for Oramorph to his growing reluctance to eat; though even he had no idea he was so near the end of his life.

‘John, I know I’m demanding,’ he confided late last April, ‘but it’s only for a few months more...’ Four weeks later, Daddy was dead.

Emailed tenders are already coming back from aforesaid monumental masons, complete with computer-generated graphics.

I have already had to remind one that the breathless ‘Preacher Pastor Author Journalist And Scholar’ was originally filed with commas.

And another that, diverting (and gluey) as it sounds, my late father was not Principal of the Free Church Collage.

But I shiver a little at one thought. Who will write my gravestone?