My parents are both dead.  I loved them both and they were good parents; I was lucky in my relationships.  My mum, in particular, had an ability to accept mortality and this was a great gift to my brother and me, helping us when we faced bereavement. Indeed, when dad and, later, mum died, my feelings included not only acceptance but even relief, alongside loss and sadness, since each had suffered from debilitating medical conditions before their inevitable decease.

Neither death is a recent event: all the final paperwork and administration are long completed, and life has moved on. A new stage of mourning has emerged which I suspect may, rightly, never end.  One part is a sense of continuous loss and the other  (confessing to which I feel faintly ridiculous) is a regret that my parents can never know of the new things which happen.  I graduated recently and was highly conscious of their absence. Dad, in particular, would have been very proud and my own sense of achievement was largely informed by the values, the respect for education and diligent studying, that I had inherited from him.  He would have made every effort to have been there – in fact only something like death could have kept him away.  So a day of celebration underscored the absolute fact of his demise.  With mum, with whom I shared – from whom I gained – my enthusiasm for theatre, it just feels wrong – and may always feel wrong – to be unable to share the latest productions with her.

After mum died, I bought a coat with some of the inheritance. Not a huge extravagance – and my existing charity shop garment was very tatty.  As a child in a household where there was adequate, but little surplus, money, I understood that a garment such as a coat was a significant purchase, an investment which needed to last.  It would be the focus of a specific shopping trip, dad carefully balancing a desire for quality with the constraints of his enforced budget, mum anxiously checking that there would be enough ‘room to grow’ so that it would (with some taking up of hems and later letting down) last as long as possible. The purchase was a microcosm of parenting.

Buying my own coat, therefore, seems a definitively adult act. I have to exercise my own judgement about quality, budget and durability. I do not need to worry about taking up the hem or letting it down. I am now, officially, all grown up. I think they would have liked – would have ‘approved of’, to use dad’s phrase – the coat I chose. Classic cut, smart navy, ironically it has proved very useful for other funerals. It also, however, has a detachable, optional, ridiculous fun fur collar. Wonderful for winter visits to the theatre, mum!

Whenever I put the coat on, inevitably I think of them. I imagine their approval of the purchase. I can picture them feeling pleased that I am ‘wrapping up well’ and taking care of myself. I think, also, they would have liked to see me looking smart. And putting on a coat is putting on a layer of warmth and protection before going out to face the world. It is a material embrace. So every time I put my coat on, I am now hugged by my mum and dad.

I have children of my own, whom I love dearly. They are of an age when they are leaving home and starting their own adult lives. I relish their growing independence while still, always, yearning to protect them. In time I will die and, if I am lucky, they will mourn me, they will deal with my paperwork and do the administration, at the end of which they may receive some inheritance. I hope that they will miss me. If so, perhaps they will each buy themself a new winter coat.