I started this post on the 20th of April 2020 which means Dad died on the 17th, and I don’t know if you remember this but at that time we were right in the middle of the first COVID lock-down. That’s what he died of, COVID.
Anyway I got 2 paragraphs in and ground to a halt. I had stopped writing here about 2 years before then after breaking up with my then wife. She found this blog and left a huge amount of unpleasant comments, most of which I think I found and sanitised.
I had no idea where I was going with it but I feel compelled to give it an ending now.
I miss my Dad, I had dreams about him a year later and wrote a poem.
I dreamed about my dad last night,
He came to say goodbye.
Wandered in from the familiar strange garden,
And as we sat confused my Mum
His grandchildren and I
The man I knew as a child
Announced he was off,
On his way to the hospital.
As he reached the door
I stopped to thank him for this chance
And as I was in his arms
His bristled lips buzzed against my cheek
Like they did as he left for school when I was young
My face wet as he held me
Like he never had when alive
And in that bitter sweet moment it was OK
Because even though we would never meet again
We shared that moment
That chance to say gooodbye.
What I miss most is being able to show him how good my life is now. How happy his granddaughter seems, what a wonderful fake wife I now have, and the house I live in which I know he would have loved.
I miss my Dad and thinking about him is bitter sweet.
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My Dad died last Friday.
One of the things he left me with was this simple piece of wisdom. Life is not fair. He used to say it when we inevitably pulled out that universal childhood whine of ‘that’s not fair’ and there was no arguing with it. The evidence was there in front of us. Something we considered unfair had happened and it was part of our life. Life simply was not fair.
So why pull this out of the bag now? Well one of the responses to the death of a parent or anyone is to exclaim that it is so unfair, but why would anyone expect anything to be fair. To be honest there have been more unfair things than his death which have perturbed me in recent years as far as my Dad is concerned. The last time I can really remember him as my Dad was years ago when my brother and I went with him to France to find where he was stationed during the war.
By the time he went to hospital he was an old man and in some ways I had already said goodbye to him. I think I said goodbye when I spent a weekend looking after him at my childhood home. He woke up in the middle of the night screaming and crying. He was having a nightmare and I couldn’t see my Dad anymore, all I could see was an old man scared and confused. I have no idea exactly what he was dreaming about but I know even though it was never spoken of that he had seen some terrible things during the second world war.
He was right, life is not fair, it wasn’t fair he had to experience that when he was just out of his teens, and it wasn’t fair he had to die away from his family in a hospital bed from COVID when we could not visit him.
Life is not fair but despite that he tried… He tried to protect us from the worst of the unfairness, and he tried to prepare us for the unfairness that life would throw at us.
I miss my Dad…. He was not perfect, but he was a good man.
saulbee 