It’s been a year today since my father passed away and in hindsight, I don’t think I’ve ever been affected by something quite so much and yet quite so little at the same time. His passing filled me conflicting feelings from grief, sorrow, sadness and loss to relief… and guilt for feeling so relieved that it was over for him… but also for us. Dad had MND (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and it was a desperate thing to watch him slowly deteriorate and ultimately die from it. People who’ve suffered this particular indignity describe it like being buried alive in your own body, and my father went from being a strong fit man who hiked the Himalayas and white water rafted the Zambezi to being a wizened shell of his former self and totally dependent everyday on my mother to bathe him… dress him… feed him…
My Dad was the strongest amongst us throughout the entire ordeal – he displayed a quiet internal strength in the face of this insidious disease that you couldn’t help but admire his unwavering fortitude. He was always one to accept what life dealt up and handled everything in his life with dignity and aplomb. He was the insightful, sensible and calming influence on all of us… always the peace broker in a house full of women 🙂 Even right up to the end, his primary concern seemed to be for how we were all coping with his condition, and never once did he seem to concede even an iota of self pity. I wish I could have been there more for him – and more for my Mum – but to be honest… I felt so helpless that I often just tried not to get in the way.
I miss his ridiculous inability to tell a joke without cracking up before getting out the punchline. I miss seeing him up a ladder or under the car being all masculine and useful and hitting things with a hammer. I miss him sending us off to ‘stick your head in a bucket and make yourself presentable before coming to the breakfast table’. I miss his lopsided smile and his inexplicable enjoyment of crap British comedies like The Two Ronnies, Auntie Jack and Benny Hill. I miss the way he always tried to temper or softly interpret my often vociferously stated opinions over the dinner table. I even miss his disapproving looks at our pathetic efforts during the ritualized anal retentive Saturday morning clean ups that we all abhorred and tried to skive out on at any opportunity.
I never told him often enough how much I loved him, and how lucky I felt to have a father like him.
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