Robbing the dead

Next February, it will be 30 years since my mother passed away. It was a particularly cold month, and a large amount of snow was on the ground in the small village where she lived, in the Central Highlands.

Because of the house’s remote situation, and my mother’s health, she had help in the house, and there was more than one local keyholder. After the immediate trauma of the funeral was over, I had the task of clearing the house. I’m an only child, so all of that task fell to me; my youngest son was under two years old, so all of the house-clearing had to be done with a toddler in tow. Due to the distance from my home and my other three school-age children, and the weather, for the first month or two I could only be at the house occasionally.

That’s when I discovered that, even in rural Scotland, people think nothing of robbing the dead.

Of the several things that had vanished, there are two I have never quite got over. The first was the inscribed gold watch given to my father when he retired after spending all his working life in J&P Coats’ Glasgow office. Because ours was a somewhat dysfunctional family, I really knew my father very little (he died when I was in my early twenties), and I have very, very few things that belonged to him. Having the watch would mean a lot to me, and no doubt its fate was to be melted down anyway, because of the inscription.

The second stolen item that haunts me still was the small brass figure of a sleeping, nude woman, lying on her side. Although she was nude, there was nothing immodest about her. She was, quite simply, exquisite. My stepfather (who was also my grandmother’s cousin, and therefore a blood relative I’d known all my life) had brought her back from France, where he had a most distinguished service record in WWI. She had no identifying marks, and would hardly have been worth melting down for all the metal that was in her. I’d like to think that at least she is still intact, somewhere, and that whoever stole her, or whoever has her now, appreciates her as much as I did, and my mother did, and my stepfather did.

Little things mean a lot.