SHERINGHAM DIARY 18 ~ Before & After Dad Died

Dad and I in Southwold

The Sleeping Prelude

Dad fell again, breaking his hip this time, dispatched to Scunthorpe General Hospital to have it replaced. The second fall in a year. Yet another long car journey up north to see how he was. We visited him three times in hospital that weekend, but each time he was sound asleep. One could have been forgiven for thinking he was already at the final precipice of death, as he drifted in and out of blurred wakefulness. When the nurses tried to stir him to eat, drink or take medications he'd wildly gesture them away, sometimes swearing as if in a drunken stupor.

However, all we got was one croaky 'hello' on our second visit after a bit of jokey cajoling from me. He was still there, but buried beneath what felt like a wilful blanket of slumber, a dogged refusal to come back into full wakefulness. A few weeks later his condition was much the same even though he'd returned to St Mary's Care Home. Experienced carers recognised the nature of what was taking place, what this state of almost perpetual sleep was a prelude of. So the nature of his care regime was consciously moved from being palliative to end of life. When that end might be was anywhere between a few days to a week, in fact that point was reached a day and a half later. Dad passing away during the early hours of the 27th July 2018.

Dad always had this streak of passive resistance in him, that manifested when he felt he was being pressured to do something he didn't want to. Were any family member to have the unenviable task of trying to persuade him to act on an issue, you'd see the familiar 'I'm shutting down now' look pass over his face. He would be doing no such thing. With hindsight, I'd say Dad had on some level 'shut down' on living much longer, at least as long ago as last year. He'd deliberately stopped taking his medications then, which within a few months did lead to his heart attack and first fall.  After each fall and hospitalisation he fought off anyone attempting to comfort or make him better. Even if these were partly symptoms of his Alzheimer's, Dad's existential will was still being pitted against those of the medical staff's best efforts.

After some dithering on my part I decided not to do the final dash to the death bed thing. Every visit lately had already felt like the last. The personality I'd known had dwindled away. Each time I'd said goodbye with the intuition I might not see him again. After his heart attack last year I'd had a conversation with Dad that trod gently upon spiritual earth. Though befuddled around the edges by the pain relief drugs he was on, his conversation nonetheless contained beads of clarity. He spoke of seeing people he'd not seen for decades, 'As if they've just walked in from around the corner in the corridor, and they leave the same way, They've never been that far away apparently, just around the corner'. He then did an unheard of thing, for my Dad, he held my hand affectionately, whilst he told me of  how 'its so lovely standing at the top and look down the Hebden Valley and the sun rising on the horizon, its so bright'. Those were the sort of parting words that I could treasure.

The House That Dad Built

Even before he died it was clear Dad would never return to his home. In the early 1980's he'd spent two years designing and building it, using every ounce of his spare time. He'd have been in his mid fifties then and it was the only time I saw him close to complete exhaustion. But he was driven by a lifetimes dream to build his own home. Dad could have these flights of fancy, that my Mum would sometimes have to bear the consequences of. Mostly these weren't of the scale of building a family house, but smaller enthusiasms, such as a new job, or things to do, to collect, the fresh skills he wanted to learn. Dad was the ambitious amateur, not put off by lack of precedence in talent or expertise, he took the attitude that things couldn't be that hard to do, he'd just give it a go. So the house became filled with the detritus of numerous past projects, plus the collections he'd begun but subsequently lost interest in. When I looked around the house with a more acquisitive eye I was left wondering what, if anything, of these possessions I'd want. Just a few tools that either I don't have or are better quality, and a few odd bits and bobs, not really much else.  I didn't share many enthusiasms in common with my Dad, apart from a love of history.

The house is structurally sound, though some of the woodwork in the eaves need attention. Internally it has an older person's aesthetic. Designed to meet their domestic needs, this was the house of Mum and Dad. Potential buyers will need to factor in the expense of altering all of that. Now he's died the disposal of his former possessions stepped up another gear. My Sister, Brother in law and their family because they live closer than I, have borne the lions share of this great task of clearance. I travelled up the Monday following his death to do what I could in the seemingly never ending chucking out of a life times collection of junk and clutter.

Dad in 1999

Knowing Dad Through The Stuff He Kept

As a Joiner by trade, my Dad accumulated racks full of wood, shelf after shelf of half rusted tins and jars containing half corroded nails, screws and fittings. Not to mention all manner of things that he put aside because they might prove useful someday. Going through endless amounts of tat, sorting out recyclable items, is rarely rewarding work. Behind it the emotional thrall of throwing away the symbolic remains of your parent exacts its own particular psycho-physical toll of weary lifelessness There is so little room for sentimentality here, or ecological concerns about how much stuff you are consigning to landfill. You just need to get shot of things, keep your head down, and at some point you'll emerge out the other end and be able to move on.

Clearing a parents house draws you closer to them, by virtue of entering into their private world. Glimpsing what they thought important and how they chose to document it. Dad's approach was, as ever, all his own. My Sister unearthed over twenty plastic folders stuffed with family photos that I went through selecting out what I wanted. Though things were well labelled and filed, the way he arranged the contents within wouldn't always conform completely to logic. As Alzheimer's began to alter his ability to organise, arrangements became more random, prone to following the whim of the moment. Interspersing random newspaper clippings and plant catalogue extracts with family photographs, each moving freely in and out of sequence, backwards and forwards through time. The effect of flicking through these files was like viewing life through a kaleidoscope.

A typical man of his generation, Dad was self-contained, with a secret emotional life, but with an easy going manner and a lovely helpful man to encounter. As my Uncle Trevor put it, 'though a quiet man, he was good, honest and true.'  To me he will forever remain a bit of a mystery. One of the challenges in being his son was trying to understand what moved and made him tick. He'd never proffer spontaneous utterances about what he thought or felt. This made it hard to emotionally identify with him, keeping any desire I had for a better connection at a distance. Being demonstrative or tactile wasn't in the lexicon of his behaviour, his parental feelings for you tended to become manifested through practical tasks. If you wanted a gauge how much he loved and cared for you, you'd have to read between the lines of the jobs he did for you, what he made for you, or by what things of yours he kept. He could be inflexibly opinionated if you didn't manage to avoid 'certain subjects', though he was at base extremely kind, infinitely patient and caring, for whom nothing was too much bother for those he loved or appreciated.

After repainting the entrance door, and clearing, pruning and tidying up the garden as much as I could, I was ready to approach that seemingly disordered pile of stuff scattered across the desks in Dad's den. His den was his bolt hole, a place of retreat. Often he'd spend hours up there, whenever he wanted a bit of peace and quiet, away from the infinite spontaneity of Mum's conversational drift. Emotionally I was holding it together quite well, until I stumbled across a small white plastic bag. Inside this was a small black cap for St Augustine's Primary School, with its school crest of a book, cross quills and a crown above a heart surrounded by flames, The symbolism of which appears to me now to be prescient of the sort of qualities I've tried to develop in myself. This was my first school cap, that I can be seen proudly wearing in early photos.  Such a little thing, to touch so deeply.

The Crest of St Augustine's C of E School, Halifax, Yorkshire

The Heart - the symbol of St Augustine of Hippo
The Sun - part of West Riding of Yorkshire's Coat of Arms
The Black - represents the black cassocks of Augustinian Monks.
The Crown -from the See of Wakefield's Coat of Arms.
The Pens - represents Learning
The Book - represents the Augustinian Rule.
The Crown - represents the Highest Thoughts
The Silver - represents Truth
The Flaming Heart - represents Love
The Blue - represents Loyalty.

Me in 1963

A Gathering Of Those Who Remain 

When you die in your nineties most of your contemporaries have already pre-deceased you, or like two of his remaining sisters, are in Residential Care Homes. So apart from my Auntie Joan, herself 89, but still able to drive across country to a funeral all the way from Chesterfield, and Dad's remaining brother Uncle Trevor, forever mischievous and lively even at 86, it was largely a gathering of my cousins and my Sisters family. Though a handful of people from the Scunthorpe Male Voice Choir that Dad had been a member of, and Natalie his main carer from St Mary's Care Home also turned up.

After a brief committal service at Woodlands Crematorium, it was back to Crowle Methodist Chapel for a remembrance service followed by a buffet at the 7 Lakes close by. A good turn out of people from the Methodist Chapel congregation was handy as most of my family would know none of the hymns Dad had chosen. Yet hymns do have a power to them, no doubt originally composed with the aim of stirring up responses from out of the intransigent mud of faithfilled depths. I certainly started feeling emotionally wobbly whilst singing them. They felt a fitting musical salute to Dad, a bracing praise of vocal trumpeting for his life. You could always find where my Dad was beavering away at a task, by locating the sound of him humming to himself. The tune he was humming was usually well nigh impossible to identify, it more resembled the hum of a contented bee at work collecting pollen.

Parental Influences

The best of my parental influences have served me well, a mostly happy childhood brought up in a peaceful home where I felt loved and appreciated, fed, housed, educated and nurtured. Giving me an ethical basis for getting on in life. There are always less helpful traits you pick up from them along the way; in my case it was being overly self-conscious, anxious, struggling with my self-esteem and confidence. These have proved testing to find ways to overcome, bypass, or at least learn to be less angsty about them.

Throughout childhood a repeated refrain was how much like my Mum I was, mostly it was in physical resemblance, but inferred to be in personal and emotional character too. This became like a family cliche, tending to disguise my own sense of agency and ignoring where I was actually very like my Dad. Though over the years I've discovered for myself what I inherited and learnt from him. I'm clearly an imperfect melange of both my parents personalities, with things that are all my very own mixed in. A bit of a dreamer like my Dad, but one who has been known to cramp the flourishing of those dreams behind an anxious fence of practicalities, that is quintessentially my Mum. Learning how to be more laid back about such things, as Dad seemed always to be, has been a job of work.

I've turned out to have a mix of practical and creative talents. The practical tending to dominate if I let it, doing the logical, responsible thing to which creative fulfilment, artistic endeavour and aesthetics will always play second fiddle. 'Its all very well you day dreaming Stephen, but you have to earn a living.'  says the Northern puritan work ethic hard wired from my upbringing. However, not pursuing dreams, to stifle them rather than actively get behind creative urges has often swamped the joie de vivre in a jungle of melancholy that I had to learn how to hack my way out of. How best to keep practical and creative impulses in a healthier, sympathetic relationship, is still my work in progress.

Moving On

They say we inherit from our parents all that is resolved and fully realised in them, and the rest, though perhaps stuffed into the corners of a battered old holdall, is where all their unresolved unrealised desires fester. The task for any son or daughter is to unpick yourself from the complicated tapestry of what your parents psychologically bequeath  you.  To find what is of value to you, to either cast aside the rest, or set about with a passion to resolve the unresolved, to realise the unrealised, through your own life.  Inheritances don't need to be treated as fate, with an awareness of other possibilities, we can take our parental legacies as a gift that you can either welcome, refuse or exchange.

As only the psychological and photographic archive of my Mum and Dad are now left, it remains to be seen what will flourish in the currently self-transforming perspective, where only their dual absence tangibly remains in reality.