A quick working week gave way to an extended weekend, but no real joy about it. 

After a slow and ponderous start, I finally dragged myself off on the bike up to the station around midday. To board a train to Dalmuir and to my aunt's funeral. 
Plenty time on the train to think about it all. I know from my father his whole life is shaped by waking up one morning at 15 to find his parents hadn't made it home and were killed in a car crash. As the eldest of 5 he suddenly became the head of the family. The three boys were sent to one wicked uncle and aunt, the two girls to another. My father finished his schooling a couple of years later and worked as an apprentice painter and decorator in the family firm (who are still going strong in Glasgow) but it was made clear that he was to have no future in the family firm and was paid off (not very handsomely) and off he went to make his way in the world. 
His brothers and sisters were sent to boarding school where the 2 boys and the 2 girls at least had each other up to a point. But there were age gaps and once the older sibling left school then the younger one was back to be being alone. My aunt was the younger daughter and hated school and this seemed to set the tone for a life of privacy and I remember her always as quiet and withdrawn.
As my father remarked at the weekend she was his blood relative and not much else. I  certainly knew my aunt - she lived in the village where my parents were from when I was 20 so whilst I didn't grow up around her, as an adult I saw something of her and her daughter (my cousin)

As time wore on she became more reclusive and what were considered idiosyncracies became more obviously mental health issues, and with my cousin leaving home to go to university and no one to check her, she very slightly and very slowly drifted into her own world. 

She would appear at Christmas and other family occasions and sit and contribute snippets but all the while there seemed to be a sadness she'd never really lost from her early years and the trauma that she never really seemed to shake.

67 and gone, taken by lung cancer - she smoked prodigiously - but it was good to see my limping brother from Orkney - trying to work out how much is MS and how much is broken ankle recovery, my favourite uncle from the US with his younger daughter who I hadn't seen in ten years, all the Peebles contingent and of course my cousin who I'd not spoken to for a couple of years either. All in the pouring rain of the west of Scotland in early autumn. 

Then we sat in the nearby hotel and watched the traffic chaos of rush hour outside and chatted and remembered and that was that. 

I grabbed a lift with my brother and his wife back to Edinburgh; got the train into town; went to hers for a teary hug and then onwards, homewards in the rain. 

I'm looking forward to seeing my boys after school on Friday...