What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1: verse 9 (NIV)
My maternal Grandmother hailed from Leith (her father managed one of the mills there). My Grandfather was a Yorkshireman and a Merchant seaman.
When they married, they moved to Edinburgh – near the Murrayfield Stadium – and were blessed with two children: my mother and her younger brother, my uncle.
When Grandfather was returning from a particular voyage, he developed pneumonia. The ship docked in Glasgow and he was taken to the Victoria Infirmary where sadly he died – he was only thirty years of age.
So in the mid 1920s, my Grandmother was widowed with two small children to bring up.
She remained in the same flat in Edinburgh until ill-health prevented her. She was in her mid-seventies when Parkinson’s Disease made it impossible to live independently.
My parents married in 1946 and in 1950 we moved to a suburb of Glasgow, where my father worked.
It was decided that Grandma should come to stay with us which she did until her death two or three years later.
Our family GP, Dr Lawrence Reid, cared for her during these last times. And it was he who signed her death certificate.
Sometime later, my mother was sorting out Grandma’s personal possessions and she happened to discover her father’s death certificate from all these years before.
The signature on Grandfather’s death certificate was that of Dr Lawrence Reid!
It transpired that he had been a junior doctor in the Victoria Infirmary in the 1920s.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
meenister
Sky Pilot 