Life post Dad – a loss reflection

Warning: there are some adverse words in this blog

Losing my dad has been a quick and completely unexpected experience that, in all honesty, has left me feeling like all I want to say is “what the fuck just happened”.  I’d meant to call him that evening and tell him about a work event that I’d been throwing all my energy into – I wanted him to know that although I’d been stressing (unnecessarily) about it, it had gone well, just as he’d predicted when I spoke to him several days before. I didn’t, because I was tired and all I wanted to do was drag myself on a run in the glorious evening sunshine and refocus my brain ready for work the next day. I’d had an unsettled feeling in my stomach half way through the run. I couldn’t finish it and I paced back to my flat feeling anxious and checking my phone every minute and a half. I’d tried to do some yoga to relax me when I got in, but that soon faded as the uneasiness crept in. It’s after these events happen that you find your mind drawing back to these spiritual feelings that you never quite knew you believed in before; desperate to find some sort of real connection within them.

It was only an hour later that I received a Facebook message from my cousin: “your dad has been in an accident, I’m so sorry, my dad is with him in the hospital now”. I thought it was a joke at first. I looked at my boyfriend and I said “I think my dad’s dead”. Bewildered, he pulled me together and got me on the phone to my cousin to confirm what, where, when and how. I’ve heard stories of people that say they can’t remember patches of time from when they receive the news, but I’m quite the opposite. I remember immediately wanting to throw up. I remember wishing it was a joke. I remember the panic of trying to get a nurse from the hospital to disclose information to me over the phone.

Eventually I was directed to the critical care reception at Coventry and Warwickshire University Hospital. “We have an unknown male at approximately 45 years of age that came in after an accident similar to what you’re describing”. I was saving that little joke for dad when he woke up, “they put you at 45 you old bastard – you’ve still got it!” My uncle came on the phone to explain that it was looking bleak and I had the last train booked back to Coventry arriving at 1am the following morning. I left with my pyjamas on and a bag with a bottle of water in it. Somewhere within the chaos I’d called my dad’s girlfriend, my brother, my step dad, and I’d received a call off my sister who was trapped in Cyprus. “Oh shit, it’s real isn’t it” was the only thing I remember her saying the second I answered the phone, partially hyperventilating and trying to gather my thoughts before the journey.

We’ve got a lot of memories in Coventry and Warwickshire hospital. Both of my parents had had treatment for cancer there, and walking the halls trying to find the critical care ward felt like too familiar an experience in too short an amount of time. I was buzzed onto the ward and by my dad’s bedside after what felt like a never ending train journey. The first thing I said out loud was “what have you done to yourself now you silly twat”. As a kid I’d loved my dad’s heroic and, in hindsight, idiotic injuries; falling off a roof and taking a nail through the bicep, which he pulled out himself, nearly cutting this thumb clean off with a circular saw and sewing it back on himself, bursting his ear drum in a diving accident, his constantly blackened thumb nail that (strangely) I’m going to really miss, from where he repeatedly joked he was shit at using a hammer despite being a roofer. This one didn’t feel much different – it was just another haphazard accident that he’d walk away from and we’d laugh about in a few weeks’ time. The only elements that added any realism to the situation were the breathing tubes taped into his mouth and the pressure bolt drilled into the top of his head that was reading his ever fluctuating brain pressure.

I stayed in the hospital for the next 48 hours of the critical period, by the end of which I went down to the café to buy cup of tea number 58 (exaggeration). The fucking lid to the take away tea cup wouldn’t go on and, had the cup grown in size on purpose so that I couldn’t fit it into the holder? A sympathetic doctor watched me attempt to pour milk into the cup for 30 seconds before pulling it from my hand and finishing it for me, sealing the lid and saying boldly “it gets easier”. I don’t remember at which point I became aware of what my dad’s injuries were, but I remember feeling devastated by his vulnerability as they told me that he had taken the full impact of the accident in his head. He’d shattered his cheek bones, broken his top and bottom jaw in several places, broken his neck and had a bleed on the brain that they were treating. His brain pressure had skyrocketed above normal levels, which was the main concern for the team.

When you think about two weeks in the context of your working life, or a holiday, it feels like the shortest amount of time. The two weeks that my dad spent in that coma were simultaneously the longest and shortest I’ll ever experience. There were the ups as his brain pressure started to come down, and the downs as the nurses revealed that they suspected he’d torn his aorta and that he was already brain dead due to lack of blood to the brain. A day later a new up followed as they withdrew their original assumption and confirmed he had not in fact lost blood flow to the brain at all. Within two days they were bringing him around from his sedation and his eyes had flickered open – we’d all celebrated with a beer in the local pub thinking we’d be chatting to him and calling him a prick for scaring us in a matter of weeks. It makes the disbelief almost too much to confront when you hear the news that he’s got a chest infection, which turns into pneumonia, which turns into sepsis. Even as you’re waiting in the consultation room and your heart is pounding and the nausea has come back because you know the prognosis is bad, you still don’t expect the words “it’s time to say goodbye” to come out of the doctors mouth. But they did.

Exhaustion was taking over at that point. All I wanted was to crack out the Smith humour and have a laugh with my dad, my brother and my sister. We joked one last time with him about how we’d pay for his curry and beer for the rest of his miserable old life if he shocked us all and pulled through. We laughed about all those memories that make a childhood so bloody perfect. We shared stories about private times we’d spent with dad that had meant so much to us that we hadn’t shared with each other before. And then we went home, we showered and we slept and waited for the call to tell us that it was time. We spent the rest of the next night in the waiting room of the hospital after being told he could cardiac arrest at any minute due to the amount of medication they were giving him in an attempt to pull him through. We knew he was a tough old twat and that he’d push through it if he could, and luckily for us his heart held out for long enough that when the decision was made that the treatment wasn’t working, at least we could be with him as he passed away peacefully with each one of us sitting by his side.

I’ll never forget the feeling of his hand in mine as his lungs took their last breath. I’ll never forget the colour of his skin as it faded to yellow and then grey. I’ll never forgot, regrettably, looking at his eyes that had glazed and lost life after the nurse told us he’d gone. Most of all though, I’ll never forget spending hours on the beach in Feuterventura as an 11 year old starting wild fires with dad and toasting marshmallows on them. I’ll never forget him being the last person standing on the beach clapping when I lost an important windsurfing race. I’ll never forget watching endless repeats of Laurel and Hardy with him on sick days as a kid. I’ll never forget taking him to see AC/DC in the summer of 2016 and laughing as he shouted “I’m the hottest grandad in here”. I’ll never forget sharing a 2 man tent with him around the south island of New Zealand for 6 weeks in 2014. I will never forget how unbelievably lucky I was to have such an incredible and inspirational character in my life.

If I could say one last thing to him, I’d have to repeat back at him two particularly legendary Pink Floyd lines that remind me so much of my childhood and any car journey I ever spent with my dad:

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond and we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year. Running over the same old ground, and how we found, the same old fears, wish you were here.