![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “One for the hospital,” he said, “and one for the reception.” As we drove back one of the best men joked that now he knew why I’d insisted on two best men. I started to wonder what was happening at the wedding reception. The jazz band was actually playing When the Saints Go Marching In, when Dad died I found myself hugging and consoling him, as his helmet fell to the floor and rolled along the ground until two young children picked it up and couldn’t believe their luck, picked it up and began to play with it. I told him it was mine and he promptly burst into tears. At the end of our short interview, he asked me whose wedding it had been. I looked around casualty at the usual Saturday regulars – rugby players, drunks, elderly people – how could life go on as normal after what had just happened? Then, an improbably young and apologetic policeman arrived to ask me some questions. In the A&E department of Singleton hospital, the doctors told my sister, Valerie, and me what we both already knew. I later thought if I’d put that in a script, people simply wouldn’t have believed it. They stopped immediately in a chorus of discordant confusion. The jazz band was actually playing When the Saints Go Marching In, when Dad died. Two others began to marshal the guests, some still unaware of what was happening, up the hill towards the house. One scooped Rachel up and ushered her away from the scene. Two of them, doctors, took over from me giving my father CPR and the kiss of life. He was 65, exactly the age I am now as I write this’: Tim with his bride Rachel and his mum and dadĪs if with some unspoken understanding of what needed to happen, several guests sprang into action. ‘As we left the church, my father suddenly collapsed and died in my arms. She looked like a bride out of a Tim Burton movie. My beautiful wife, in her extraordinary silk wedding dress, was looking on, tears flowing down her cheeks in a tidal wave of black mascara. My two elderly great aunts were standing over me and Dad, praying furiously for his soul. I thought it was a fly, but discovered it was a rosary bead. I turned to look for Rachel and swatted something away from my face. In a morning suit on a damp lane outside a small Welsh church. My ambition at the time was to be a movie writer and director, and I suppose my subconscious was telling me that none of it mattered because this is how it could all end. Please don’t make me the guy whose dad died at his wedding.” Perhaps a little more oddly, I also found myself wondering who had won the best picture Oscar in 1948, the year my parents were married. I started to give him CPR, our morning suits and tails suddenly incongruous in the moment. His lips flapping together in a valedictory raspberry to the world. He seemed to deflate like a punctured tyre. As he fell to the ground the air was expelled from his lungs with a fatal wheeze. ![]()
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