Sunday Blog 203 – 5th October 2025
Top right, the four eldest boys Mick, John, Jeff, Gerard – Irish quadruplets if you will (there were plenty more where they came from)
Bottom right, the correct headstone with Dad’s beer mug for some cheer on his fifth deathiversary
It’s Dad’s five year deathiversary, and I think enough time has passed to tell this story.
It wasn’t until two weeks before his death that I even knew there was a three-for-one grave at Fremantle cemetery that Dad had purchased back in 2003 or thereabouts for his brother Jeff. Irish twins, Jeff was born on 5th October 1924, Dad was born on 11th October 1925.
Jeff’s grave had been largely unloved and unvisited since 2003, but in 2020, Dad suddenly piped up with an offer for Mum to join him there if she wanted to. It was a tense conversation with hospital staff during his last hospital stay, where they essentially said they wouldn’t admit him again. Dad was getting the tip the end was nigh. His burial arrangements were the least pressing issue of the moment. Nonetheless, Mum rose to the occasion.
“I’m going to insist on being buried there,” she said.
When I went to do a site inspection, Jeff’s headstone had been placed on the grave as if there were no further guests to be accommodated. As if Dad had planned for his own death but largely hoped it wouldn’t happen. In the end, he died on what would have been Jeff’s 96th birthday.
Time passed after the funeral, with only Uncle Jeff’s headstone in place. After much wrangling and thinking and going to several monument providers, I was advised to remove Jeff’s headstone and replace it with one that had equal room for all three inhabitants, both present and future.
Fine, I thought. How hard can it be? I just needed to copy across the wording from Jeff’s headstone (Most Sacred Heart of Jesus I Place My Trust in Thee) and agree to the wording for Dad’s third of the granite among his surviving adult children. Simple.
Quite pleased with myself at emerging in one piece from the fracas of finalising the copy for Dad’s section of the headstone, and in 2022 I signed off on the proofs for the memorial company with a smug sense of completion. Then, light of heart, I headed to Europe for my annual Greek September pilgrimage. Divine.
So that meant it was the early hours of the morning when I received the email from my sister who as executor paid all the bills. The memorial company had faithfully engraved the wording I had approved. She’s spotted the mistake straight away which I’d missed.
“Oh dear,” I said. “I’ll admit it all to Mum when I get home.”
When I visited Mum for a cup of tea with a side of confession, I took my time leading up to it. My admission of the gaffe that was carved in granite for all to see was hard to broach. It was not at all what she was expecting, so she kept supplying suggestions for what I was trying to spit out.
Eventually I burst forth. “It says scared heart of Jesus, not sacred.”
Such a simple transposition. A short silence.
“To be fair, he probably was quite scared,” Mum said. How we laughed.
The monument provider was mortified by the mistake and a little scandalised by Mum’s amusement.
So today I took a moment to visit Dad on his fifth deathiversary, Jeff on his 101st birthday, and visit all three now at rest in the grave. When Mum joined the brothers in 2024, I had the melancholy chance to update the headstone, remove all traces of my error.
I took down fake candles, Dad’s old beer mug engraved by a group of students in the 1970s I couldn’t bear to throw out, and decided to play the short video of the wake speeches.
Happy deathiversay Dad, if that’s a thing. No scared hearts here at all.