The questions you can no Longer ask

(Content note for bereavement and poignancy)

When someone passes away, there’s a lot left behind for others to deal with. Paperwork that could sink the Titanic, funerals, dealing with Personal effects and belongings. If you’ve been there, you know or can guess what it feels like. Some of it is baffling (“Why on earth did she keep that?” “What was he thinking?”) and you have to use your imagination to try and understand it. Some is obvious; we found a fabric art picture I did for my father when I was six. It hung on the wall of his office at work and when he retired, it came home and hung on the wall in his study. But sometimes you find things that make you wish you could ask questions. It’s not the big questions, because to be honest, I probably know the answers or could intuit them.

It’s the small things.

We found among my father’s papers a letter from one of the big TV channels. Taped to it was a small flint Arrowhead. Dad had apparently sent it to them, so they could pass it on to Time Team, one of his favourite programmes, to find out more about it. The letter was polite and kind, but they couldn’t help and made some suggestions about how he could find out more about it.

The trouble is, I have no idea where he found the arrowhead. No idea at all. I have no memory of him finding it, or mentioning it. He probably did talk about it but amid the events of decades, stuff like that has a habit of vanishing utterly.

It’s a genuine arrowhead. My best guess (from size and type of working) is that it’s Mesolithic. But I can never now ask where he found it and I’ll never know, and weirdly, that hurts more than I would ever have imagined.

I’ve put the arrowhead on my personal altar and it’ll stay there. If I ever get a chance to speak to someone who’s an expert on such things, I’ll ask. But beyond that, I’ll never know its 20^th century history.