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Death & life
6 min read

The really annoying thing about dying

In his first Notes from Solitude, the death of his dad causes Roger Bretherton to reflect on the relationship and the strange emergence of 'father’.
A pocket watch rests next to a black and white photograph of a father lying beside a new born baby.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.

The death of my dad was sudden and unexpected. I don’t know why it is that, from the moment he died, I have had to fight the almost irresistible urge to refer to him as father- a term of address I never used about him or to him during his life.  

Perhaps in some psychotherapy session at some point my therapist referred to my ‘father’, and I may have followed suit. And maybe occasionally when socialising with those who seemed a cut above my largely lower-middle class background, I called him father so as to avoid the flat northern vowel sounds that would expose me as an interloper. But that was just to fit in- on all other occasions he was decidedly not father and definitely just good old plain, dad.  

At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike.

But for some reason the moment he died, it felt like dad wasn’t enough. I now had to call him father - those were the rules. At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike by panting and sweating my five-year old self round the block, but the father who taught me to be… a man, or something like that.  

The F-word has gravitas, presence, authority. Dads are human, often bewildered, occasionally pissed off, eminently huggable, easily taken for granted - just there. Admittedly, Freud would have lost significant gravitas if oedipal theory had considered common-all-garden dads and not cigar-smoking brandy-swilling fathers. And no doubt the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back would have lacked considerable pathos had Darth Vader casually quipped, ‘No Luke, I’m your’re Dad’.  

The curse of the martyr, write Albert Camus, was to have other people tell their story. The principle doesn’t just apply to martyrs, it’s true of all those who die. To be dead is to become a character in other people’s anecdotes. That’s the really annoying thing about dying, we become a topic of gossip, people get to talk about us without the courtesy of ever having to talk to us. We become object, no longer subject. I think that’s why I resist calling my late Dad, Father. It objectifies him, makes of him something that he wasn’t. It, most definitely fails to do justice to all that he meant to me. 

She simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. 

I say he died suddenly. It was a Sunday morning. I was in church at the time. Actually, worse than that, I was on stage speaking to a church. As a psychologist working in academia, I teach and train all kinds of people in every kind of organisation imaginable, but every now and then I get to speak in churches.  

On this occasion I was talking about character, the positive qualities of being – like love, gratitude, hope, wisdom and so on – that make life worth living. When I stepped off the stage my wife was waving to me from the back of the room, which was weird given that we don’t go to that church and she hadn’t come with me. When I wandered to the back of the auditorium wearing my ‘what are you doing here?’ face, she simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. For someone who prides himself on social insight, it shames me to say that it took a while for the penny to drop. We were in the car with the engine running before it finally dawned on me what she meant. 

I try not to make too much of divine timings or fate, but there was something odd in the timing of getting that news. In that month I had addressed church congregations three Sundays in a row- which, as someone who is generally lazy and prefers not to work weekends, is an unusually intense frequency. But over three successive Sundays I had reflected aloud with those congregations that there were prayers that had accompanied the various stages of my life. Prayers that I found myself praying, almost as if they were prayed through me, as if they had chosen me rather than I they.  

In my twenties I had found myself praying as regularly as a heartbeat, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me, to make me into the person you would like me to be.’ It was a radical invitation for God to put me through whatever was needed to become who I was meant to be. But then the prayer faded. Its visit was over, it had done its work and it moved on. But as I addressed the congregations on those three Sundays I mused aloud that while the prayer of my twenties had departed decades before, I found a new prayer stirring in my forties. Now as the father of teenage boys, my new prayer was, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me to make me the father you would like me to be.’  

In the weeks that followed, people asked me whether I had had a good relationship with my dad. The most accurately answer was: we had the best relationship of which we were both capable. We both tried in our own ways to deepen our connection, but we were like the lovers in a romantic comedy; we always managed to miss each other. When he tried with me, I didn’t want to know. For several years, he left a book lying around at home that he wanted me to read. I never saw anyone touch it, but it moved around the house under its own steam. It was by my bedside, in the toilet, on the dining room table…  Macavity the Mystery Cat would have been proud. It was called, Things We Wish We Had Said. We may have wished, but we didn’t say. I never read it. Years later, when I tried with him, he was too flustered to respond. Both of us in our own ways lacked the courage to connect any deeper. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me, and I him. 

When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious.

He died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning asleep in bed, while my Mum was at church. Almost immediately his absence prompted a profound change of consciousness in me. When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious. If he was inexpressive, I was articulate. If he was like that, I was like this. And yet, almost at the very moment of his death, a reversal of awareness occurred. I started to see just how very much like him I was. His gentleness, his uncertainty, his scepticism, his care, his humour, were all mine. 

There is a rule in family therapy, that adult children relating to their parents should set their expectations to zero. We never truly see our parents until we stop viewing them through the lens of our own desires; what we wanted from them but never got. Until we do that our lives don’t really work, we sit around waiting for an impossible transformation, a payday that never comes, the moment our parents become exactly how we would like them to be, not as they are. For me, that moment of acceptance for dad only came when he was gone, I accepted him as he was when there was nothing left to accept. I don’t write this with any great sense of guilt or regret at opportunities lost, more with a sense of gratitude for what was given but often taken for granted.  

Oddly though, in the shadow of that seismic shift in my interior furniture, I detected the stirrings of an answer to my own prayer to be a better father. No longer compelled to define myself in contrast to what he was, I was freed to be what I was- both like and unlike him, and to be fair, more like him than I cared to admit. At some visceral level I came to appreciate how much of myself originated with him. I came to accept myself as a dad and my dad as a father.

Article
Character
Community
Economics
4 min read

Local businesses can love their neighbours, here’s how

The powerful partnerships quietly transforming Britain's towns
A knitted post box topper shows a group of people and the word powerhouse.
Celebrating Didcot's Powerhouse group.

In just three years, an Oxfordshire market town has cracked a code that's eluded community development experts for decades. The Didcot Powerhouse Fund has delivered £400,000 in grants to nearly 9,000 residents, proving that when local businesses and civic leaders work together, they can achieve remarkable results. 

Didcot's success is all the more remarkable given its context. Surrounded by world-class science campuses and the prosperity they bring, the town is simultaneously home to pockets of serious social and economic deprivation. This stark inequality demanded a fresh model for corporate giving – one that could bridge the gap between the wealth generated by cutting-edge research facilities and the struggling families living in their shadow. 

The fund's approach offers a blueprint for addressing one of Britain's most persistent challenges: how to harness private sector resources for genuine community benefit. Within five months of launching, it had generated £100,000 in grants. By year three, it had distributed 70 grants across Greater Didcot's 46,000 residents, tackling everything from domestic abuse support to youth skills training. 

What makes Didcot remarkable isn't just the money – it's the method. The fund, chaired by Oxfordshire Deputy Lieutenant Elizabeth Paris, doesn't simply write cheques. It convenes businesses, charities, local government and faith leaders in the same room, mapping community needs and systematically filling gaps. This year's annual impact event, hosted by the European Space Agency, drew 160 guests who would rarely otherwise meet. 

This model represents a fundamental shift from traditional corporate social responsibility. Rather than companies making isolated charitable donations, the Didcot approach creates sustained partnerships that leverage professional networks, legal expertise and grant-writing skills alongside financial resources. 

The success reflects a broader civic renewal happening across Britain, much of it led by the country's 5.5 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Across the UK, these businesses are showing what it means to contribute not just economically, but socially, to their local communities. They do so quietly — through their skills, relationships, and a belief in stewardship. 

Last winter, fuel-allowance reductions left many families wondering how to heat their homes. In East Yorkshire, a coalition of community groups supported by an SME mobilised at speed, distributing thousands of pounds in emergency vouchers. Similar efforts in Cambridgeshire and Nottinghamshire reached nearly 300 residents with targeted help. These acts made all the difference close to home. 

SMEs employ 60 per cent of the UK workforce, but their real power lies in their embeddedness within local communities. They understand local needs in ways that distant corporations or central government cannot. And SMEs, as groups of individuals united by a common purpose, have the unique ability to be good neighbours in the communities they serve. The most effective business leaders understand that creating real value comes from cooperation – from working alongside others to meet shared needs.  

Successful SMEs engage actively with their local communities because doing so helps them understand the people they serve, earns trust, and provides services that genuinely matter. This requires spending time with people, asking thoughtful questions, and recognising that local relationships are central to resilience.  

Through my role as Lord-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, alongside our team of 40 Deputy-Lieutenants, I witness this transformation first-hand. We engage with tens of thousands of people annually and can report that this quiet civic renewal is both important and accelerating. 

From the Isle of Wight, where former vehicle technician Jan retrained as an energy retrofit assessor to help neighbours cut bills and carbon emissions, to East Yorkshire, where community groups and local firms mobilised to distribute emergency fuel vouchers, SMEs are proving themselves to be critical civic actors. 

The most striking example may be Inveraray on Scotland's west coast, where the historic Local Pier had been shuttered for a decade. A local charity, supported by regional SMEs, raised over £275,000 across seven funding bids. The pier reopened in April 2024, now hosting monthly farmers' markets. As Linda Divers, Chair of Inveraray Community Council, said at the ribbon-cutting: "That vote of confidence turned a dream into reality." 

This matters because trust – the foundation of effective community action – is built through personal relationships. A 2023 King's College London study found that 98 per cent of UK residents trust people they know personally. SMEs, rooted in their communities, are uniquely positioned to nurture and leverage this trust. 

Parliament is taking notice. The Business and Trade Committee has launched an inquiry into what small firms need to thrive, with Chair Liam Byrne calling them "the engine room of growth and our biggest employer." 

The potential is enormous. Imagine businesses helping food banks become comprehensive community hubs. Picture digital skills clinics helping charities navigate AI-ready grant applications. Envision hundreds more professionals like Jan, retrained into green jobs that serve both local communities and environmental goals. 

The Didcot model shows this isn't utopian thinking – it's happening now. What's needed is recognition that the story is changing: from businesses as standalone economic actors to businesses as community builders, aligned with local purpose. 

At its heart, this kind of community investment reflects a deep, shared commitment to neighbourly love – not as a sentiment, but as a practical responsibility. To be a good neighbour is to recognise the inherent worth in every person, and to act with generosity, care, and purpose.  

It even calls us to see one another not as strangers or competitors, but as people closely connected, each carrying something of the same human dignity and potential. This recognition demands action: to build relationships that endure, to work for the good of all, and to strengthen the ties that bind communities together. 

The work of SMEs and local leaders across the UK embodies these values, offering a powerful example of faith in action within public life. In an era of declining social capital and institutional trust, it offers hope that Britain's communities will continue to build themselves from the ground up. We should celebrate it – and help it grow. 

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