5.15 Sunday morning, December 16 2012

Just three hours before this moment in time, my niece, Natasha, called from Canada to tell me that my brother, Charles, had died some half an hour earlier.

Thus he died at about 6.45pm on Saturday, 15 December Edmonton, Alberta time.

Regular readers may be surprised that I should break my rule of leaving these pages free from personal matters and details.

But my family, friends and those who know me well, will also know that, aside from my own Ballyduff family, he was the person most important to me and has been for all of my concious life.
And I told him this, sitting in his truck overlooking a vast refuse tip, on the last day of our visit to Canada in June 2010 when we bade one another farewell.

His death is, unquestionably, a release for him, and must be so for his family, for he had been ill and in decline for a long, long time: as you can measure from our farewell being now two and a half years ago.

I tell you, without hesitation or doubt, of his importance to me, but it is an illumination of the fractured family from which we came when I tell you also that, if I added together all of the time that we spent in one another's company in the sixty-five years since we returned from Jamaica, where I was born, I doubt if it would add up to one full year.

And so, with particular encouragement from Sue, I have decided that his death should, after all, be marked here.

I figure that this will be done, from time to time, with the odd anecdote or memory, including why it was that we spent so little time in one another's company but became of such importance to each other.

But, for today, I will merely observe that for Charles, his life ended on Saturday evening, 15 December whereas, for me, it ended in the very early morning of Sunday, 16 December and that perfectly exposes the difficulties, in terms of immediate communication, that this difference in place and time, between New Sarepta and Ballyduff, imposed on all of us who loved him, on both sides of the Atlantic, as his life drew to its end.

There are, of course, many and more varied pictures of Charles but these are the last images of him in my memory as they were taken in June 2010 when Sue and I made the most memorable, and happy, visit to Canada even though it was when we also said goodbye to one another.