I was named for my father.
My mother insisted, above all my father's strongest objections. He never could say no to her. Anything she asked would be hers. Sometimes she didn't even have to ask. She'd just give something a longer stare than normal and he'd move heaven and earth to see she got it.
Most people would've abused this but she never did. She saw it as a special thing. A kind of secret language they shared between them. She always noticed everything about him. He'd find his washing done when only the day before he'd huffed at a stain on the cuff. Or she'd have made the Scottish shortbread he mentioned once having at his grandmother's home.
They were perfect for one another. Which is why today is so hard for my mother. Today she buried my father.
It wasn't a surprise really, least it shouldn't have been. He was over seventy. He'd seen three wars, fought in the Boer War, and worked until his bones cracked when he tried to mount stairs. They'd kept him on as butler after Mr. Barrow passed. (Some kind of disease they said but the doctors couldn't be sure what it was that attacked his immune system like that. Thought it might've been a long dormant virus he caught in the trenches in the Great War.)
My father didn't mind being a butler but some of the duties were harder for him, with his cane and all. By the time they changed his position, shortly after Lord Grantham died of another ulcer, butlers were really just for show in these great houses. That's what George always thought.
He and I served together, in the second war, like my father and his grandfather did when they fought the Boers. I was his batman as we battled from a frozen foxhole in what they later called Battle of the Bulge. George lost some of his toes to frostbite and I ended up with hypothermia. But, if I hadn't, I never wouldn't met Adele.
Sweet, sweet Adele. She was the French nurse I managed to get home before everyone made a thing about "war brides". My mother fell in love with her immediately and soon Adele was running their little hotel better than my parents ever could. It was Adele who held my mother close when she cried about my father. I was trying to hold our confused children.
Little Gwen and Mary. Mary's named for the woman who all but saved my life really. Before me my mother had at least three or four pregnancies her body couldn't keep. In my medical coursework they say it's called "weak cervix" and while some are genetic I know my mother's wasn't.
She never wanted to tell me the story so my father confided it in me once when I noticed how scared Adele sometimes was around other men. What happened to my mother happened to Adele too. And, just like my father, all I could do to help it was hold her close as she cried.
Gwen is named for my mother's dear friend. She's the one who got Adele into a training course at the local girl's college before we married. Lovely woman, with four of her own ginger-haired daughters that my mother wished I could've married. Once she met Adele though she realized I could never marry anyone else.
But my father always knew. He spent hours reading to me as a child, chased me around our garden as much as he was able, and trained me to be a man. It was more than being brutish and angry, like the boys at school. It's things like helping my mother bake bread, washing out the tea cups when she asks, and being home on time so she doesn't wring her hands in worry.
He taught me how you love a woman. You hold her close, you protect her, you respect her, and you are weak for her but strong with her. I watched how he cared for my mother, how he loved my wife, and how he loved my daughters. He gave them piggyback rides even when his leg twinged, read to them when they begged for one more story, and ignored their squeals to kiss my mother. I watched my father breathe his last just to say my mother's name one more time.
Ours is a house of mourning. Not because society says we must. Not because one honors the dead with empty words. Not because it is how one generation passes to the next. We mourn in our house because a great man died.