Swans and Angels

I met the third angel the day my father died. You can’t help but wonder at how these things all come together and you end up having to believe that there is someone or something looking out for you.

It was just a week and a few hours after Ashley and I had got lost in Outwood Park. It was also one week and one day exactly before our daughter’s wedding. I had flu, maybe the swine variety, maybe something else. No one else caught it though. Interesting. I didn’t visit my father the day before he died because I felt too ill. We got the call at nine o’clock in the evening telling us that he was very poorly. There were some complications from his operation. The call to say that he’d passed away came at two in the morning.

I’d booked leave because of the wedding and had to have just one extra day off because of the death or because of the flu – take your pick. No one would have noticed anyway as it was my research day and I would not have been expected in the office. In a sense, I was researching anyway, because the third angel brought me the plot for a story. I was under pressure – self-imposed pressure but pressure all the same – to create a story from the point of view of an animal for an anthology. I got my story that day.

It didn’t end there, though, the angel work.

The registrar who registered my father’s death also lost a grandparent the week she was married. And in that disappointing British summer I recall just two warm and sunny days: the day of my father’s funeral and the day of our daughter’s wedding. The wedding, incidentally, wasn’t clouded by the death: it was rendered more meaningful.

I’m shocked now as I look back and realise that there was only a week between the first time I’d met the cygnets and this second time, just a few hours after my father’s death. It seemed like weeks at the time and the babies had grown so much anyway.

It’s odd, too, how in the middle of the turmoil of arranging a funeral, coping with the shock – for it is always a shock no matter how much it is expected – and getting ready for a wedding there come those few minutes of calm.

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