In Memory of Mike Brady

On behalf of Maureen and our family, I want to express our deepest gratitude for the kindness, generosity, and love shown during this difficult time.
Your donations of £766.90 given in memory of Mike Brady, mean more than words can say. They not only honour his life but will also help support both Dementia UK and The Amyloidosis Centre. We are truly touched by the compassion and support from friends and family, and the High Storrs and Basketball communities.
Thank you for keeping Mike’s memory alive in such a meaningful way.
And as the man himself would have said

"CHEERS!!"

Maureen & The Brady Family

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DvW4tq1Jx/

Mike's funeral is at
Friday 17th April at 2pm
Hutcliffe Wood Crematorium, S8 0HP
Dress code: Bright & Cheerful

When a parent dies, it alters every goodbye that came before. That’s the real claim of Mary Catherine Bateson. All the airport waves, the end of Christmas, the slammed teenage doors, and the drive back to your own house after Sunday lunch. You realise you were always leaving inside a structure that assumed return. Death removes that assumption and rewrites the memory.

Bateson wrote that line in a memoir about her own parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who weren’t ordinary parents by any measure. They were public intellectuals, travelling, arguing, thinking in big patterns about culture and family while their daughter watched. She grew up inside ideas as much as inside a home. And still, when they died, she was simply a daughter.

Because what she’s getting at isn’t only grief. It’s the way memory behaves once the future is closed off. When your mother is alive, even if you haven’t spoken in months, some part of you assumes there will be another attempt. Another phone call where you mean to say the thing properly or another visit where you’ll be less irritable. You don’t phrase it like that, but it’s there. After death, every earlier moment solidifies and can’t be revised.

And that’s unpleasant to face because many of those earlier partings were careless. You were distracted and impatient and already half turned toward your own life. There’s a selfishness built into adulthood. You build your independence by leaving and that’s healthy. It’s also, at times, indifferent. When death happens, the old exits don’t feel neutral anymore. They take on a finality they didn’t have at the time.

It makes me think about how we rehearse separation. University and moving in with someone. Each step is a practice for leaving home, and parents encourage it. They tell you to go and say don’t look back. Then they die and you realise every one of those encouraged departures has been folded into a final one. Did they feel each of them more sharply than you did? Probably. You were busy becoming yourself while they were already counting the absences.

Joan Didion wrote about the way grief distorts time, how the mind keeps trying to reverse what has happened. Bateson’s line goes somewhere slightly different. It’s recognition that the story of your life with your parents has an ending now, and endings change the earlier chapters whether you want them to or not. You read them differently. That argument when you were twenty becomes harder to shrug off and the apology you never quite managed becomes fixed in place.

There’s also relief sometimes. If the relationship was strained, death can bring a kind of order. No more unpredictable phone calls and old patterns. Then the earlier partings reappear in another light. You see where you withdrew and where they did. You can feel regret and release in the same moment.

I wonder whether this is why middle-age feels so crowded. Parents dying, or ageing toward it, children growing up and edging away. You’re in the middle of departures in both directions. You tell your daughter to enjoy her trip, text when you land, and you hear your own mother’s voice in yours. The chain is obvious.

Bateson spent her career writing about learning and adaptation, about how people revise themselves over time. Death interrupts that revision. You can’t test a new version of yourself against the person who first knew you. That can be freeing but it can also feel like losing the only witness to certain earlier selves. Who confirms that you were once shy, or reckless, or adored? Siblings do some of that work, friends a bit, but parents held the original record.

Maybe that’s why the past surges forward when they die because we’ve lost the future reference point. Every goodbye we treated as provisional becomes absolute. And you’re left standing in a string of doorways you walked through without looking back properly, realising they were leading somewhere you can’t return from either.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

Image: Festival della Scienza, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

With great sadness that we confirm the death of Mike Brady, on Tuesday 17th March 2026, in the NGH after a short illness.

Please, share your stories and memories of Mike, we the family have found comfort in reading the messages left on other pages.