(We cremated my dad on Tuesday.  I closed the service with this short eulogy)

It falls to me to say a few words to bring this service to a close, some of which I wrote a few days ago and some I wrote this morning.

I wrote some this morning because I’d woke early.  I couldn’t sleep for thinking about my dad; several separate memories, some of them almost trivial.  One in particular was about the way he combed his hair.

We all know he had a good thatch, right up until he died.  It reminded me of a bird’s nest.  And even when he combed it it didn’t lie down but rose like a wave.  The reason, of course, is that the hair didn’t want to be combed backwards; it wanted to be combed forwards and lie flat.  But all his life he combed it back.  Which seemed to me to be a small symbol of how he lived his life.

There may have been an easier way to do something or a more accepted way but my dad would do it his way.  At various times this has infuriated me and at others made me proud.  It defined him and made him the man that he was (many will testify it has made me the man that I am).

As we all know, my dad wasn't a religious man.  He wasn't a worshipper and, to my knowledge, had no great belief in God; which is why we're having this remembrance here rather than in church.

A few years ago I gave him a book which I know he enjoyed.  I know this for two reasons.  Firstly, although the book was over 600 pages long he read it at least twice to my knowledge; and secondly, on every occasion I visited he would talk about some aspect of it.

The book was "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson and I'll read a short passage from it - not one that he ever discussed with me but one which makes a big impact on me.

"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you....That is, of course, the miracle of life."

So whether you want to call it a life-force or a spirit or a soul, something no longer resides in the shell of atoms he leaves behind.

I'd like to think that somewhere that spirit is now twinned again with that of my mam, who he adored and whose loss was too hard for him to bear.

As we leave we'll listen to the song "Moonlight and Roses" - not one of his favourites especially, but my mam's.

Together again.