After laying my Dad to rest, I found myself wondering about one thing

How should we mark the end of a life? Is there a right way? Returned to the earth, or fired into space? Cryogenically frozen with your fingers crossed? Maybe we should all be a bit more pragmatic, donate our bodies to medical science and let student doctors have a go. Or, sod it, go out with a flourish and be compressed into a diamond. Whatever we choose, we have at most, two or three generations before we completely vanish from living memory. Yet, every year millions more gravestones are erected and chiselled with names soon to be forgotten.

Forgive my morbid pondering - I have a good reason. June 4 is the first anniversary of my dad's death, and a very small gathering of family and friends who remember him said goodbye as we intered his ashes. His final resting place: a cold grey marble sanctum in a scruffy council-run cemetery off White Hart Lane. No, it's not a grand basilica, but it is near our old family home.

Was it the right choice? Honestly, I'm not sure. He'd been in my front room gathering dust for nearly a year, and I'd gotten used to him being there.

He left no instructions, but I can hear him, his soft Belfast accent, shrugging it off: "Ach, just chuck me on the compost with the potato peelings, pet."

Even as dementia eroded his mind, he never lost his sense of humour, foul-mouthed and off-the-wall. Once, when I was visiting him in the hospital towards the end, I pointed out a small rash on his arm.

"Oh, that looks sore," I said. He looked at me, with a mad glint, and barked out across the ward: "I've had skin detectives from all over the world come to look at me. I just told them to f*** off!!" The memory of it always has me laughing and crying.

He was a brilliant, gregarious, troubled man - a tangle of contradictions. A Catholic Marxist. A feckless intellectual. A fervent political activist, at times more devoted to ideals than to family. Deeply loving and deeply selfish.

A profound alcoholic who only stopped drinking when severe brain damage meant he no longer could - by then confined to a wheelchair, staring out the window of a care home.

But, I loved him all the same. No tribute can ever encapsulate the complexity of a life once it has passed. Life is fleeting and fragile. The beauty is in the transience. For me, John Keats' self-penned epitaph captures it best: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."