Going on

Well, I have returned.

I am sorry to have left you in the un-diaried dark for so long. I have been unable to raise the time or the energy.

Also I have not been here. I have been at my parents’ house, as perhaps you remember.

I am sorry to tell you that my father died, the day before yesterday. We knew that he would, of course, because he had bat-flu, pneumonia, sepsis, and a massive heart attack, which is not a diagnosis leading to cheery bouts of optimism. He faded, slowly and quietly, supervised by my mother, brother and sister during the days, and by me, fortified by buckets of strong coffee, at nights. We were all there when he died, at around lunchtime, with a few fading breaths. It was quiet. Also it was dignified as anything as obscenely physical as dying possibly can be, and as far as I could tell, painless. I suppose there is no more that can be asked of a person’s end, since it is going to come to all of us anyway. It was a gentle slipping away.

Bizarrely, we had booked tickets to see Lord of the Dance at the theatre that night, with some friends and Lucy and Oliver, and I decided that we would go anyway, since by then I could not do anything else for him, and it had been booked and planned for ages.

It turned out to be the most peculiar, surreal experience. I think I must have been tired, and shocked, because the evening passed in a blur of colour and confusion, as if it was all happening to somebody else. We went for a buffet dinner, and I wandered about uncertainly, not quite able to work out what all the food was, or whether I would like it. I ate it anyway, still not able to tell, although I drank the wine with even more than my usual enthusiasm, and felt relief at the numbness that followed.

I could hardly tell you anything about the theatre. It was a huge relief to sit down and simply watch a story playing out in front of my eyes, not that there was much of a story. The dancing was amazing but clearly Michael Flatley had not thought very hard about the plot. It seemed to be about wicked cyborgs invading Ireland, and then being defeated by somebody who looked a bit like the late Prince Philip, and whose super-power was that occasionally he took his shirt off and twirled and hopped around without it.

Fortunately everybody else did all of the talking in the bar afterwards, because I had completely drained my stock of sensible remarks, and merely sat there, nodding and smiling, and trying to adjust myself to a world which was not a dim sick-bed, with Nat King Cole crooning away in the background, and listening to slow, gasping breaths. I was very glad that I had gone, because of remembering that there was still such a world, and people in a hurry, and bright things, but it was very shocking all the same, like one minute being in a narrow steel tube being served warm white wine by a smiling air stewardess, and the next minute plummeting several thousand feet through the vastness of the sky into an icy black sea.

We went back in the morning, just before the undertakers came to take him away. He was comfortably dressed by then, clean-shaven by my brother, and looking somehow thinner, both like and unlike himself, the way the waxworks do when you take your photograph with them at Madame Tussaud’s. Somehow you can tell, even in the photographs, that their lives are missing.

We helped to lift him off the hospital bed where he had spent his last hours, propped up in the dining room where he could see the flowers out of the window, and they put him in the back of a van and trundled him away.

Of course now there is a funeral to be planned, and then after that a life in which he is no longer there. I half-wondered if I might feel some ghostly indications of his continued presence, but I have not. If any last flickerings of his life are still amongst us, they are elsewhere, because I have not seen him even in my dreams. He has gone, from me at least, and I will never see him again.

I walked up the fells this morning, and got drenched in the August Lake District rain. I have dusted and hoovered, and put clean sheets on the bed. It has reached Thursday whilst I have been floundering, and my predictable domestic rhythm has crumbled like a stale biscuit carelessly given to Rosie on the sofa.

It can all be rebuilt, even though it will never again be quite the same.

I am on the taxi rank as I write.

My life is going on.