A sad anniversary but a nice article

This would have been Sir Clement Freud's 86th birthday today - and of course it's a few days now since the anniversary of his death.

Emma Freud has written this beautiful article on him... enjoy ...

Emma Freud: My father, Clement Freud, remembered

It's a year since Clement Freud – intellectual maverick, broadcaster, writer, politican and chef – died. just before his 85th birthday. His daughter Emma Freud recalls the emotional turmoil leading up to his funeral and her joy at discovering how much he was loved

Is it possible to have a good death? If it is, my father's death was good. He was 84, and hated being old. He was many stone overweight, his legs hurt constantly, he was slow and lame, and things were going on in the waterworks area, with which I refused to engage. For the last 10 years of his life, he was actively waiting for his death. He'd spent 70 years as a chef, soldier, journalist, showman, MP, knight, author and raconteur – he'd had a big, bold, adventurous life and he was basically over it. Every birthday, rather than receive a present, he'd ask me to come to his flat and take something of his away.

So when he was told by a doctor in February 2009 that he needed a triple heart bypass, he took the news calmly. As he'd planned a birthday party for himself on 24 April, he asked for the procedure to be delayed until after he'd turned 85. The party invitation said: "7.30 for 8pm – though it may be wise to keep an eye on the obituary columns."

He had made some decisions about how he wanted his death to be. He wasn't going to leave any money to his children, as he thought we all had enough. He was keen that someone made sure Mum had enough food she liked in the fridge. And he didn't want Nicholas Parsons, who he had been torturing on Radio 4's Just a Minute for 41 years, coming to his funeral.

In the week he died, he travelled 400 miles around the UK, wrote three articles, and did his last Just a Minute. On Wednesday 15 April, he was at home with my mother writing an article for the Racing Post about the race meeting in Exeter he'd attended the previous day. He was mid-sentence in the first paragraph, when he had a massive heart attack. My mother came in to find him still in his chair, with his head slumped to one side. He had just ended. The last words he typed were "and in God's good time … ". My mother said that in all his years of writing, she'd never known him make reference to God in his articles. The Almighty had waited 55 years for a mention, and having finally got one, finished things sharpish.

I was in Copenhagen the night he died, having dinner with my boyfriend, Richard, and our two eldest children in a basement restaurant of an old Scandinavian mansion. I turned on my phone after we'd finished eating, and saw that my mother had called twice. I left the restaurant and went up two flights of stairs to the main hall to ring her.

There was something so shocking, but so inevitable about the news. It was a scenario I'd envisaged many times – but when it came it was like my own small heart attack. I made a noise – a bit like a lion and a bit like a gasp. I instantly felt sorry that my mum had had to listen to it. I didn't realise that two flights of stone stairs below, in a crowded restaurant, my 13-year-old daughter had also, incomprehensibly, heard it and instantly ran up to me as fast as she could. No one else had heard a thing, but something communicated itself down to the basement and she responded in a heartbeat. For the rest of that call, she held me in her arms, and at that moment of my parental loss, while trying to give solace to my mother who'd just become a widow after nearly 60 years of marriage, I was given unconditional comfort by my daughter – three generations of love.

It turns out that there are three main things people instinctively say when someone you love dies: "I'm so sorry for your loss"; "thinking of you at this sad time", and "let me know if there's anything I can do". This last one is the worst because of course there's something you can do. Send a present – any present, preferably cake. But even though everyone offers in a well-meaning way, no one actually does anything, and it's too awkward to ask, so you end up buying your own doughnuts. We need a new tradition there.

The other thing I longed for were stories about him – even when he'd been infuriating, which he was almost constantly. I received 130 emails the day after he died. My mum got 400 letters. I loved the people who wrote – and the longer the letters, the more I loved them. I was ashamed to acknowledge that I cared when people didn't write. And I was then appalled with myself when I realised how many times I hadn't written to bereaved friends because I couldn't think of anything to say beyond "thinking of you at this sad time". Communicating in the aftermath of death is something we don't discuss much. It's not until you go through it that you know what's needed.

By the time I arrived at my parent's flat that Thursday morning, my mother had just come back from the cashpoint where her card had been eaten by the machine. As soon as Dad's death was announced on the radio, the bank had frozen his account. At a loss, she spent that morning preparing Dad's clothes for the undertakers, and found £2,000 in his jacket pocket – his winnings from the races on the previous day.

The funeral director who oversaw Dad's burial told me that the average funeral involves around 2,000 decisions. So at a time when your brain and heart feel like they are passing through a Magimix, you're called upon to organise one of the most important events of your life. And you have a week to do it.

We wanted singing at the funeral, but my father really didn't like music. We turned to the transcript of his 1960s interview on Desert Island Discs for inspiration, but sadly the musical choices were hideous – a ghastly brass band anthem, a pointless old sea ditty and Teach Yourself Italian (why?). Instead we chose the Minute Waltz – the theme tune for Just a Minute – to play his coffin back down the aisle.

It felt to me to be the most beautiful and appropriate funeral of all time. On what would have been his 85th birthday, a jazz band played as the mourners arrived. The church was filled with forget-me-nots – the only flowers about which my father had ever had an emotion. My tearful nephews helped to bear the coffin upon which we had seated my dad's teddy with whom he had always, always travelled. Do many octogenarians sleep with a bear? We remembered to remove him before Dad entered the furnace later.

The prime minister read the apt lesson about Jesus and the catering innovation at the Cana Wedding. My mother read a poem by Joyce Grenfell. Richard and my brother Dominic rewrote Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man speech to reflect my father's own ages. My brother Matthew spent three days composing a remarkable eulogy, a rite of passage for him to deliver. Eleven of my father's 17 grandchildren told stories from his writings. And then I sang …

What was I thinking? I'm no professional singer, but I chose I'll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places, accompanying myself on the piano. I never once made it through a rehearsal without crying. The funeral director advised me to change my mind as he'd seen that sort of thing done before, and it mostly ended in tears and lifelong regret. But in the end, I decided what I wanted to do that day was to give him a love song.

As I walked up to the piano, right next to a wooden box containing the body of my dear dead dad, and sat on the piano stool in front of 400 people including the PM, Stephen Fry, Nicholas Parsons (oh, yes) and Bono (can sing a bit), I imagined Dad covering his ears and humming loudly – he loathed the sound of my singing – and somehow that got me through.

There was a wake afterwards where we ate the food that Dad was planning for his birthday party, and lots of people got horribly drunk – he'd have loved it. Then there was a cremation in Golders Green where it transpired that Sigmund Freud had bought an entire room for the Freud family ashes – a fact my father would have loved to know, but which we only discovered because he could no longer hear that news. Later that night, Richard and I walked down to the ice-cream parlour for a late night treat. As we walked in, Billie Holiday was singing I'll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places over their speakers. Obviously my father hadn't gone to heaven, he'd gone to Gelato Mio instead. And while he was there, he wanted to hear the song sung properly.


And now he's gone, lots of things have changed. I listened to Just a Minute last week – the first I'd ever heard without him in it. After a lifetime of hearing that programme with a knot in my stomach, longing for him to be wonderful, to be funnier than the young comics, and to win – it was something of a shock to realise that it's not actually a high court of reputation and justice, it's just a light-hearted game show.

His publishers brought out a book of his articles a few months ago – and as I wrote the foreword, I felt I ought to actually read the book. Or some of it. He was obsessive about his columns and used to read them out aloud to us whenever we visited, with so much of his confidence resting on every page, so much unhappiness if we ever suggested he change a line, and so much fear that this would be the piece that might lead to a call from an editor doing away with his services for ever. But reading them again now, reading them as records of my wonderful father, rather than ongoing proof of his talent – they were all charming. Each one like a little piece of the man. That's one of the things about death – once someone dies, you start not to be annoyed by the things about them you can't change. In death, my dad was revealed to me as no longer a problem, simply my eccentric, outrageous, outlandish father. I wish I'd known that while he was still alive.

I wish he'd known it too. Rather than being an Austrian Jewish outsider, an intellectual maverick continually proving that he was still in the game, it turned out that he was enjoyed, liked, treasured, and respected. The problem was, he died the day before that all became clear.