A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MY DAD

Hello, you lot. Thank you for all the kind messages yesterday. Too many to reply to individually, but we read - and appreciated - every single one of them. We're doing alright, considering. It has been busy - just so much to sort out - and tomorrow will be another full-on day.

I know from experience that often these things don't hit you until you stop, and life returns back to 'normal' - albeit a normal with a big hole in the centre of it. That side of losing somebody can be unpredictable. We all react to grief in different ways, and I don't know how I'll be affected by losing a parent, because it has never happened to me before.

I suspect I'm going to be okay. I generally am.

Anyway, I shared this over on Facebook, and thought I'd do the same here.

Thanks again, everyone. 

My dad and I weren’t very much alike.

We had points of contact in terms of interests. We both liked world history. We both enjoyed reading. We both liked a takeaway. That was about it really.

But, as people, at least outwardly, we were very different.

I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. My dad never found it easy to show affection. He'd never in a million years have written something like this.

I often tell the story about the time my mum asked why he never said he loved me, and he replied… “I don’t need to – Paul knows I like him”.

It wasn’t just me. It was borderline pathological. He couldn’t say it to my sisters either. I was in the car with him earlier this year when my nephew, his grandson, called to wish him luck for an operation I was taking him to, and ended the call with a knowing “Love you, grandad”.

My dad didn’t know how to respond. Just sort of twitched a bit, let out a strangled, embarrassed, cough, and muttered “Yep… yep… yep… bye”.

Then as I wished him good luck at the hospital, as they led him off to the ward, he stuck out his hand to shake mine. I refused it and moved in for the most awkward, hilarious, hug of my life. He just froze, arms at his side. I’ve hugged him many times more since.

None of us expected to hear “Love you too” from him, ever. We didn’t need to hear it, because we knew he loved us.

And we liked him too.

He was also a deep worrier, who tried to control his anxieties with order and regimentation. He would set out his things for breakfast the night before. He would label everything with the date their warranty expired. To the point I’m surprised he didn’t stamp today’s date on the back of his neck.

Going through his paperwork earlier, everything was already waiting and in order, right down to the details of service for his funeral.

By contrast with all that, I’m a sort of live-in-the-moment agent of chaos. I'm not even sure who my life insurance policy is with, let alone where we've put the paperwork.

He was set in his ways; profoundly fussy with food, reluctant to try new things. I mean, the fuss he’d make if you so much as mentioned pasta … Whereas I’ll try most things once; the newer and weirder the better.

Growing up, those differences were often a point of conflict, stoked by my mum with whom he had – until the last couple of weeks of his life – a tricky, and feisty, relationship. I’m not going to sugar-coat it; they fought a lot.

Until I left school, and started to grow up a bit, I was firmly in my mother’s corner with all that, because I spent the most time with her. Both of them confided in us in recent times that they weren’t sure that they'd even loved the other.

And then 10 days ago, he held my mum’s hand in the hospital, said he missed her, and that he loved her (which was lovely to hear with my own ears, even if the most the rest of us got was a blanket “I love all of my family”, said to one of the doctors early in his hospital stay). The day he told my mum he loved her was also the day I said goodbye to him, because after that visit he went downhill dramatically.

When we saw him yesterday he was so out of it he was mainly trying to bite her arm.

I never felt he understood me. I always remember my parents and I discussing which subjects I was going to take in high school. For years, they still had the placemat upon which he’d written down everything he thought I should take for my ‘O’ Levels – sciences, German, and… I forget all of them exactly, other subjects I had zero interest in… whereas I actually ended up not doing a single science, and taking art, graphical communication/technical drawing, English language and literature. I’d have done drama had my school offered it.

Basically, I did everything creative that was on offer. He expected me to do the opposite.

I was an alien to him. In many ways, he was alien to me, not least in his love of football. Beyond a year or so where I tried going every week with him, primarily to try and fit in at school, he could never encourage me to go to a game. It didn’t stop him asking. I’d say I regretted not taking him up on the offer, but – frankly – I’d have been bored witless.

Similarly, I did briefly entertain the idea of joining the Air Training Corps, because military stuff was what people did in our family. I went along to the induction session, came home, and said I was never going back. He must’ve been crushed.

When I was 16, my dad got ill. His kidneys stopped working properly, and he was in hospital for a time. Nobody really knew what was wrong – though they eventually controlled the issue with medication – and it was the first time I realised how much I loved him, and didn’t want him to die.

Everything he did do for me growing up came into my awareness. Taking me for days out. Photocopying and stapling my weird comics at work. I realised what a pain in the arse I probably had been to him, from flushing his watch down the toilet, to dyeing his hair orange while he slept. No wonder we fought.

That hospital stay was a massive turning point in our relationship. We became closer, we could have conversations for the first time. We made the effort with one another. That grew over the years, as I moved further into adulthood.

Some years back we went on holiday together – just the two of us. We took a road trip around a big chunk of America, and he  said it was the best holiday he’d ever had. I took him to the sites where many of his favourite Westerns had filmed, and though I came away from that week understanding why he often drove my mother mad, I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

We also took a trip to Ukraine and Chernobyl together, of all places, along with my friend Sebastian.

One of the worst/funniest things I ever saw was in Kyev’s Holocaust memorial museum. A place of quiet reflection, full of true horror. Overwhelmed, Seb and I had taken a seat in one particularly harrowing gallery, waiting for him to catch us up. When he eventually did, he wandered over to one of the exhibits and leaned in for a closer look – not noticing the glass screen in front of him, which he cracked his head on noisily with a KLANG that reverberated around the hall, before he rebounded off it like Mr Bean.

We were laughing so hard we had to go and hide. It wasn’t the sort of place where you were supposed to get a fit of hysterics.

There are loads of stories like that. He had a sort of bumbling, gentle, vulnerability that made him impossible not to love.

He still never really wrapped his head around the job I went on to have. Having got an apprenticeship straight from school, he was deeply against me becoming self-employed. He never really knew what I did, didn’t know how to ask me about it. When I was first nominated for a BAFTA I took the certificate to show him and my mum, and he didn’t know what to say. Not because he was so proud and overwhelmed. It was just so far outside his frame of reference.

On more than one occasion he’d call at mine for a cup of tea, or I’d be taking him somewhere – once it got harder for him to drive – and he’d say “Not working today then?”.

I’d always point out that the only reason I wasn’t working was because I was answering the door to him, or because I was taking him somewhere. I still don’t think he understood. I suspect he thought I just sat around all day, and got magically paid for doing nothing.

I know, though, that he was proud of me. At least until the last couple of years kicked my feet out from under me, I managed to make a career for myself, in spite of his many reservations. He knew I worked hard – whatever it is that I do – and that from a young age I’d been responsible enough to support my family, get a mortgage, and do all those grown-up things that he related to and respected.

Even if he never understood exactly how I’d done them.

And, as the years wore on I noticed more and more similarities between us. We both, I suspect, had a limited social battery. Whereas my mother wants, and needs, to be surrounded by as many people as possible at all times of the day, my dad could never really wait to get away from social gatherings, to be back home with his books and telly, and peace and quiet. I’m the same. I get overwhelmed by too much noise and chatter, and we all suspected the reason he went deaf was to shut it all out! I could relate to him more over time.

We may not have had the same passions, but we were passionate in similar, all-consuming, ways. With me it will be music and films and TV shows. With him it was football, history, the army... Literally anything to do with the army.

I did feel a pang of sadness when I saw how close he grew to those of his grandchildren who played football or joined the military, and that I could never have that.

He really came into himself as a grandparent, and as the years wore on he mellowed. It became so clear how much he loved his family. All of us. I also became aware of how sensitive he was, and how deeply he felt things. He may have struggled to express those feelings, but he wore them on his sleeve every bit as much as I do, just in a different way.

He would always be there for all of us. He would do anything if we asked. He might’ve grumbled about it, but we could rely on him. That constant, having somebody that reliable, in your life, that kind, that sensitive, is such a gift.

And now he’s gone. I loved – love – him so much. We all did.

The last few years of his life were hard. He started to go downhill when his younger brother John died. I had to deliver the sad news to him, and I saw something break in him the second I said the words. He was never quite the same after that. His health faltered, due to a slow-moving battle with cancer, and having to use a catheter.

That damn catheter….

It caused him so much stress. Constantly getting blocked… leading to middle-of-the-night A&E runs, and it really limited his quality of life. That, and the loss of John, affected him in ways that he couldn’t articulate – because he just didn’t talk about things like that – but which we could all see. He often mentioned hating getting old, and wishing he could end the suffering that it brought. He became very stressed and unhappy, and it led to clashes with my mum that we all found upsetting.

Throughout it, he never stopped caring about us though. He never stopped worrying that he'd become a burden. Never stopped worrying about us.

And then, about two months ago, he got Covid and never got better.

I started properly grieving him a few weeks after he first went into hospital, when I realised I would never have him back in the way he’d been before. Then 10 days ago, I said goodbye, properly, and he said goodbye to me. It was heart-breaking, because I somehow knew that was it. I still visited after that, but I never really saw my dad again. He was gone after that day.

Grief isn’t a straight line. It ebbs and flows like a current. There can be unexpected squalls, and eddies.

Our family, sadly, is no stranger to grief. We’ve lost too many people, and the feeling we’re experiencing today is all too recognisable.

But also – even if it doesn’t last – I know that the main thing I feel is relief. Selfishly, I’m relieved that we’ll no longer have to split our time between hospital visits and caring for my mum. That, coupled with the emotional drain of seeing him in such a state, has been exhausting, swallowing up whole weeks at a time. I’m also relieved that I will no longer be required to take him for catheter changes, which were always profoundly traumatic for us both.

But I’m mostly relieved for him. He was unhappy and suffering for a long time, and the last two months in particular were hell for him, but now he’s at peace. True peace. I’m happy about that, because I hated seeing someone so kind, and sensitive, and gentle, suffer in such a way.

Yes, he could be a difficult, peculiar bugger at times, but what a brilliant, wonderful, dad he was.