A lonely Glaswegian goodbye

As family histories go, Laura O’Connor’s* is desperately sad. Born in Barmulloch at the tail-end of the Sixties, she and her four siblings started out in a happy family unit. But in 1976 their mum, Mary, died, at just 35 years-old. “That’s when things changed,” Laura says.

“I don’t remember half my life because of the trauma of that time,” she says. “My dad’s family and my mum’s family wanted to take all of us, but that would have split us up and my dad had made a promise to my mum that he would keep the five of us together. He had to give up his job to look after us. He did the best he could.”

Laura’s dad, Hugh, was initially able to keep his pledge to Mary, but struggled with his youngest sons’ behaviour. James and Robert, were as “thick as thieves”. Just four and five when their mum died, the pair went from playing up in the classroom to avoiding school altogether. As their truancy escalated, first James, then Robert were taken into care when they reached high-school age. 

Hugh took comfort from the fact the boys were kept together in care and, when they were sent home at 16, that his family was reunited. For a while things were good. James found work as a plumber and Robert as a gardener, but by that point the brothers were already dabbling in the addictions that would kill them. 

“I was 19 when I found out they were taking speed,” Laura says. “I was the quiet one and that was a shock.”

Hugh died in 1998. Laura’s older brother, Joseph, followed soon after, taken by complications related to alcoholism. Their sister Emma, a diabetic, had a fatal heart attack in 2016. By the beginning of 2023, Robert, James and Laura were the only ones left.

“They both had health problems because they had been addicted to amphetamines for so long,” Laura says of James and Robert. “They were lovely boys but they couldn’t work because of their addictions. They were more in the house by then than anything.” 

Then, at the end of that year, Laura got the phone call she dreaded. James had suffered a massive stroke. It wasn’t his first, but when she went to see him in Stobhill Hospital she knew he “wasn’t coming back from this one”. James knew it too. “His eyes showed me he was really scared,” she recalls. Days later, at 8am, she got another call. James was dead. He was only 53.

With Robert suffering his own health issues, Laura was left to arrange James’ funeral on her own. Stressed and upset, when the idea of a public health funeral — which took the form of a direct cremation — was floated, she decided to opt for it. Paid for by the council, such funerals see the deceased taken directly to the crematorium, where there is no service, no mourners and no marker provided to show the person was ever alive.