Tony Parsons - Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

But the truth is, we do not do it for them. The brutal fact of the matter is that – if we are one of the fools who dares to speak up – we are doing it almost exclusively for ourselves.

Our women – those pragmatic girlfriends, those hard-headed wives – think that ultimately it is not worth it. Risking your life for a random bout of inappropriate behaviour? That’s the madness of the macho man. I personally think that men like Kevin Johnson are modern-day heroes and we could use a million more just like him. But his son will miss his father every day of his life, and at some point he will have the right to ask, But was it worth it, Dad?

Fight or flight? These two disparate instincts have the same function: to save your hide. But sometimes doing nothing, while saving your life, robs you of your soul.

Ultimately, the only argument that matters is about the kind of man you want to be. And when did we stop being the kind of men who want to protect the people we love? When did that go out of style? When did wanting to protect your family become old-fashioned?

My old martial arts teacher had a wonderful recipe for dealing with trouble. ‘Walk away,’ he would tell me, after hundreds of hours spent teaching me to kick and punch and block. ‘Walk away.’

Yeah but no but, I would say to him. But he had heard it all before, and he believed that none of it was worth killing or dying for. Someone spills your drink? Walk away. Someone bumps into you? Walk away. And it’s true – most trouble you can just walk away from. You can smile. You can apologise. You can put the pillow over your head.

But there comes a point when walking away means that you will think yourself less of a man. For most of us, that moment comes when some careless stranger is far too close to our women and our children. And I don’t walk away from that – whatever the wife wants. That’s where I stand and I draw the line and I get ready to roll around on the floor of the restaurant.

I don’t want any trouble. Honestly. Really. But it’s just like Ennis says in Brokeback Mountain:

‘You need to shut your slop-bucket mouths – you hear me?’

If you only see two dead bodies in your life, then make sure they are your parents.

The death of a mother or father cannot be grasped from a distance. The phone call, the sealed coffin – it’s not enough to comprehend that kind of loss – that twice-in-a-lifetime loss.

Inevitable it may be, but the death of a parent has an unimaginable quality to it. You need to see for yourself that they are truly gone, to understand that the ones who brought you into this world have gone from this world. So go look at the body. That is not the end of losing your father or mother. But that is where it begins.

Even as the numbing bureaucracy of death clamours for your attention – the funeral arrangements, deciding what to do with the leftovers of a lifetime, the surreal task of choosing a coffin-would Dad like the simple pine number, or the Napoleon job with the brass handles? – you have to force yourself to go and see.

To the hospital. To the undertaker’s back room. Or – if they died at home, as my mother did – then to the master bedroom of the house where you grew up.

It helps. More than this, it is necessary. Yet viewing the dead body of a parent is a curiously flat experience. You feel it should be charged with emotion. There should be hot tears, and some final embrace, and Katherine Jenkins singing, ‘Time to Say Goodbye’.

But the emotion comes earlier – in the cancer ward, in the hospital café, sitting by the death bed drinking endless cups of bad tea – and it comes later – at the funeral, or when you go through dusty cupboards, and your dead dad’s clothes, or your mother’s heartbreaking jewellery, or their photograph albums, and it takes you many strange hours to realise the obvious.

Everything must go.

Those are the moments for the spikes of emotion. But when you summon up the nerve to gaze upon your dead parent-as you have to, as you must – you hardly recognise them. You even feel a bit cheated. Mum? Dad? Where are you?

And it is not because the undertaker has weaved his crafty embalming magic, or that a mouth is set in a line that you never saw in life. It is simply because the spark has flown. The thing that made that woman your mother, or made that man your father, has gone forever. And you don’t know if they have gone to a better place, or into black oblivion.

But that is not he. And that is not she.

You must look at the face of your dead parent not because it gives you a chance to say some last farewell but because until you do you will never even begin to understand that they are dead, and that you are alone in this world as you have never been alone before.

And even then it is hard. Even then it is next to impossible. Last month my mother had been gone for ten years. Ten years since the cancer overwhelmed her. Ten years since I returned to my home from her home to search for a hospice, leaving her in the care of an elderly friend, an ex-nurse – lovely Nelly, now gone herself-and got the call in the middle of the night to say come as fast you can. And it still wasn’t fast enough. Ten years dead – and yet, here’s the funny thing: I recently tried to call her.

I actually reached for the phone to relate some news that I knew would make her smile, and then I stopped myself, thinking – mental or what?

I got there not long after she died, and kissed her face, and saw an expression on that face that I had never seen when she lived, and yet it is still hard to believe.

Yet here is what you learn. There are two ways for your parents to die – quickly and slowly.

They go quick. They go slow.

But they go.

My dad was quick. My mum was slow.

My dad had lung cancer for a year and – being the hardest bastard in the universe – told nobody about it. His lungs were being eaten away and we never knew. Then one day he collapsed, was rushed to hospital and three weeks later we buried him.

A decade and a bit later, my mum had the same kind of cancer for the same length of time, but I was by her side and holding her hand when some busy NHS doctor told her there was no more they could do. And then she talked about it, and she weighed her chances of survival, and she confronted terminal illness with the combination of humour and grit that was peculiar to her generation of war brides. It was a very different experience to watching my dad go. But then she died too.

And I thought that the world should stop. Let me catch my breath. Acknowledge the passing of this woman – five feet nothing of bravery and jokes, even when the doctors were solemnly shaking their heads, and slyly looking at their fucking watches. It is only now I see the obvious.

Losing your parents is the most natural thing in the world.

And of course there are far worse things in this life than watching a parent die. Some people have to bury a child. Many people bury a spouse. Losing a parent is surely just another season, one more turn in the cycle of life.

Yet the world seems to change. First one goes, then the other.

‘You’re an orphan now,’ more than one person told me when my parents were both gone, and I thought that was a tad dramatic. I don’t see how a grown man can be an orphan.

It is completely natural to lose your parents. We all have our time. And then it’s up.

Then why does something so natural feel so completely and brutally unnatural?

You never know when they are going to go. Forget all that three-score-years-and-ten bullshit. I have a friend who lost his father before he was born. I have other friends who lost parents in childhood. I even have a friend who, when she was a girl, lost both of her parents in the same car crash – an incredibly common experience, as it turns out, because husbands and wives – fathers and mothers – regularly share a car.