He died before I was ready for him.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 164.

 The next few days are a blank. Strangely, I have no memory of my mother’s return to England, which is perhaps just as well. My next clear recollection is of the funeral. My cousin Charles Rutland had willingly given permission for the body to be buried at Belvoir. It was a bitterly cold January day, and the road up the steep hill to the Mausoleum and family cemetery was covered with ice. The huge and heavy hearse had a good deal of difficulty on the slope; most of us preferred to walk. Lunch was provided at the Castle for everybody—we must have been about a hundred in all, for nobody had had more friends—after which forty or fifty of us took the train back to London. Fortunately it had a large bar car. The wake has always struck me as being an admirable idea: after the stiffness and solemnity of a funeral service it encourages the pendulum to swing the other way: people relax, and even—I use the words advisedly—enjoy themselves. I remember thinking how happy my father would have been to see all his friends together there—he had always loved trains—laughing and drinking and from time to time reminiscing about him and all the fun he had been.

I had loved him dearly and missed him desperately, but I suspect that I never quite got over the slight shyness that I used to feel in his company. It was, I think, based on my feelings of inferiority. He seemed so much more intelligent than I was, so much more erudite, so much more a man of the world. My own chief interest was music, which—to his often expressed regret—he was quite unable to share. Somehow—though he himself would have denied it vehemently—I always felt that I was a bit of a disappointment to him. The sad thing is that if he had lived another ten or fifteen years we would have grown together. Our common love of history would have been a great bond, and I like to think that he would have enjoyed my books, to say nothing of my Christmas Crackers (of which more later). But there: as I have already said, I was a slow developer. He died before I was ready for him.