Exactly 16 days ago, I landed at Dublin Airport for a week’s break from this strange gig I signed up for. On the bus trip home to Booterstown, lots had changed (what’s with those prancing hares in O’Connell Street?) but much had remained the same.
My priority on my first day home was to get my hair cut (plenty of barbers in the Gulf, but not so many good value hair dressers) and then head for the RDS where mini marathon registration was taking place. My mother asked me did I want to go and visit my dad at the home where he had been since last September; I said shure won’t we be going on Sunday? Dad, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, had been fighting an infection but while we were worried, we weren’t unduly alarmed.
On Sunday morning, the phone rang in my mother’s house and I answered it. A sympathetic doctor called Brian Parsons asked who I was and then told me that Dad had had a bad night; he suggested we come in. We were coming anyway, I said. I asked how long he had and pointed out that if he was dying, we’d like to be there. He couldn’t answer; you simply can’t tell in these cases, he said. When I replied that I was living abroad and needed some indication, he suggested it would be a matter of days rather than weeks. It was 9.40am.
At 11.40, the phone rang again. Mum answered and after a few seconds, her face crumbled. Dad was dead. We hadn’t made it.
She handed the phone over to me. Dr Parsons told me that my father had been suffering from a kidney infection that had become systemic. His blood readings had been abnormal, and he was having trouble breathing. Yet he had enjoyed his three meals the day before. After the earlier phone call, one of the nurses had called on a priest who was in the building to give my father the last rites. No sooner had the priest done so than my father slipped away peacefully. It was 11.30am on Sunday 4 June.
At Hampstead, we drove in through the big gates for the last time. My brother parked beside the leafy wall and my mother rang the bell. The remains of my dad were laid out on his bed, but I now know why they use that word: my father was gone. Only a shell was left.
All the nurses and carers were very kind; they had loved my dad, who despite his illness, continued to greet everyone with a beaming smile. Until two weeks before his death, he could sing a song and play a tune on the mouth organ. The twinkle, which characterised him all his life, was still there.
Alzheimer’s is a strange disease. You don’t die of it, they say, yet what happens is that the brain, which is being attacked by what looks like a series of mini-strokes, loses the ability to relay messages to the body. If you catch an infection, for instance, the brain can no longer tell the body how to fight it.
We went through the removal and funeral in a daze. One of my friends from Crusaders AC pointed out that while all I could remember of my dad at the moment were the years of illness and confusion, the good memories would reassert themselves in the coming weeks and months.
He was right; it is already happening. I am sorry I didn’t have the time while at home to find a small note he had scribbled to me many years ago when I was having a difficult time in my so-called career. In it he told me that I had nothing to prove to anyone; that all I had to do was be myself (except he put it better).
While Dad was ill and slipping away from us, I couldn’t listen to a June Tabor song called “Dream Factory” without dissolving in tears. There is a line in there that goes: “My father taught me how to sing……”
He did, and I am forever grateful.
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