It was a week ago today that we said goodbye to Mike.
In 1998 I had been with my wife Allison for just over three years when I asked Mike if I could borrow some money.
I had just attended my first implant course ever and decided that dental implants might be the future for me, but I didn't have the money to buy a kit.
Years of racking up debt at uni and then living on a credit card as a young junior hospital worker meant that I just didn't have any liquid at all to be able to spend on something like that.
My boss at the time thought there was no future for implants and decided he wouldn't be investing in it so; it was down to me to buy my own kit and to hire the practice on a Saturday for my implant patients.
I chatted through the problem with Mike, not expecting him to help, but just asking where I might find solutions and without hesitation, he gave me £6,000 and told me to pay him back whenever I could.
Maybe that was in his interest to try to look after his daughter (we were engaged by then) but actually, I think it was just a measure of the principles of the man. Just happy to help in those circumstances knowing that he was ‘nowt to 6000 quid’.
More than 20 years after that, we put a plaque beside the lift in the practice to dedicate the lift to Mike so that on the open day in 2020 he could come in his wheelchair and attend the upstairs party with everybody else, being the person who from the start had made it all possible.
‘My old pal’ was a friend and confidante and just great all-round guy for more than 20 years of my life.
To my wife he was a father, to his wife he was a husband, to his boys he was the best dad in the world, to me he was the 1st Yorkshireman I ever got to know, and he really taught me the ways of the Yorkshire.
After we lost him about 4.5 weeks ago, after battling a long illness for over four years since his 80th birthday party, one of my small tasks as the family rallied round and built the most extraordinary farewell celebration was to go to the neighbours next door who had known him from the insurance industry to tell them what had happened.
The neighbour next door was shocked at first, but ultimately invited me in to sit and tell me stories about the man Mike was.
Mike had known Edward next door since he started his insurance broker business and had asked Mike for help in setting things up.
I listened for ages to hear the stories about how Mike was so kind and full of integrity and honesty and trustworthy.
He told me that if Mike Brearley said it was going to happen, it would happen, and a handshake was enough. No one required a piece of paper.
Long gone are those days but I was struck by the principles by which Mike left.
And so, in the celebration of Mike’s life my daughter, Rosie, read some quotes from the boy, the mole, the Fox and the horse, which I think for all of us are just worth reciting here.
“What do we do when our hearts hurt?” asked the boy. “We wrap them with friendship, shared tears, and time, till they wake hopeful and happy again”.
But the most important one which sums up the principles of Mike's life is this one.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Asked the boy.
“Kind” said the mole.
As I was figuring out what I should write here and if I should write anything and whether people might be sad or upset, I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast series and an extraordinary episode about a scientist from the 1960s and 70s called Ivan Frantz.
Ivan Frantz researched vegetable oils and cardiac health, and spent a life trying to prove that eating margarine and cooking in vegetable oil was much better for your health than using other fats and butter.
In the end he could prove nothing, and he stored away all his data from trials and hundreds of thousands of people, which up until a few years ago, was still there.
After he was long gone his son, who is now a cardiologist was asked to try and unearth the tapes for other researchers, who eventually went on to prove that the data from Ivan showed that vegetable oil is worse, not better for your cardiac health.
Gladwell talks here about the job of his son to unearth those tapes, and why he would do that and bring it to public attention almost in defiance of his father's life's work.
But Ivan’s Son explained that he did that because his father was a scientist, and he would want the data to tell the truth, regardless of whether it went for or against the work that he stood for.
Gladwell used this to explain ‘what a child owes to their parents’.
He says it's our responsibility to keep them alive in our hearts, and we do this not by upholding their values as we are different to them.
We live life in a different place and time and in a different world, but we can uphold their principles.
Mike’s principles were kindness and trust and integrity, and I will keep him alive in my heart by trying to live through all three.
As Gladwell interviewed Ivan’s son in the podcast, he had lost his father three days earlier.
In the end of the publication of the broadcast, he says that what Ivan Frantz’s Son has done in upholding his father's principles was impossibly beautiful and, in his grief, gave him solace.
Gladwell's podcast gave me solace in my grief.
See you later, old man, we will love you as long as our arses point south.
Blog Post Number - 3299