Death. Its one of those things that's really final. No more to pass go, collect £200. No Do Over's. No come backs, no final countdown. Its pretty much MORE the end, than finding you've got to the bottom of a packet of Cadbury's clusters. And the emotional fall out is pretty heavy as well. (The death not the clusters)
And this is where I find myself sitting. A week on from the passing of my wonderfully brave father who lost his battle to lung and brain cancer on the 8th October at 8:12am Saturday morning. He is gone. Completely. Everything that made him walk, talk, tick and move has been removed from this earth in the short space of a last exhale. And it is the most painful shockingly sad thing I've experienced to date. However. We become so entrenched in the death of someone, so locked into that final moment or moments leading up to it that we seemingly forget the actual life that person led. The fun the laughter, the mad mad moments. Believe it or not it was writing my fathers eulogy that reminded me of this fact. My Father was Flipping funny. Don't get me wrong, he could be a cantankerous old badger who could be so momentously grumpy you would be hard pushed to not want to kick him in the knackers. H A R D........ And sometimes he created moments where you would genuinely want to suffocate him with a pillow. He had a temper that could light a rocket, and an arse that Sadam himself would have wanted to patent and use against us.
In the last year of his life, with the doom of the Big C lurking around him like a spectre waiting in the shadows, he became superman. He looked Cancer in the eye, and sized him up. And then said 'Right you rapscallion, you rumbustious little ne'er-do-well. Lets see what you've got.' In the end it beat him. But he gave it a flipping hammering all the way there. He even remain hair in-tacked and asked when given the option of radiotherapy if he would loose his hair. If he was going to, he said to me, he wouldn't have it. Because he would end up looking like a fucking trophy cup. He had dark days. But Chemo wrecks your emotions anyway.
I have always been a Daddy's girl. Not in the 'Daddy buys me everything I want' kinda way. More in the 'Dad buys me beer and lets me smoke' kinda way. So when he eventually shuffled off his perch, I was left standing there thinking, 'Balls. I've not got a Dad.' To be honest I felt like I had suddenly been orphaned and left standing in the middle of a supermarket at the age of 5 with no bugger to come and collect me. And the roller coaster you get on, for the 'Grief Train', is not one you can actually get off of once you're on it. You end up crying at times that are highly inappropriate, staring inanely at walls, and for me, I appeared to have lost the ability to think, speak in coherent sentences and even feed myself. I've lost half a stone, I've the agility level of a flattened skunk and I look like something pulled out from the bottom of a freezer.
Its like the weirdest cycle on the planet. The sheer wave of sadness knocks you off your feet, only to see you picked up by anger and tossed BACK onto your feet, to then have denial take you up the river in Egypt, only to be bought back down a passing river that's called reality who then hands you off to sadness who knocks you down again......... etc etc. I sometimes believe that I have wandered through the proverbial looking glass. Then there's the arrangements. Oh My SWEET Jesus. Coffin's and flowers, Orders of services, tea, cakes, sandwiches. Music, the service itself. The venue for during and after, the cars, and then the readings and the eulogy. Timings, the vicar, or in our case, where is our vicar....... The obituary in the paper, (that was weird) so that by the time you're finished doing all the above I don't know whether we are cremating Dad or getting him prepared for a wedding.
I'm going to miss the sarcastic charming bastard with a passion fit for cheering on Scotland in the rugby. He was my Dad. And to me, the only one fit for wearing that red cape of superness.
My Dad. 8th May 1939 - 8th October 2011
May there be nurses for you to ogle
May your glass always be full
May your pipe never be empty
And your farts still clear a room
May your cards fall as you choose them
May your feet still smell like cheese
