It’s the end of a tough week here. The cancer situation continues to impact our lives in ways we’d never imagined. Lisa’s spending increasing amounts of time in Belfast looking after her mother. It’s a life of shopping, doctor and hospital appointments and tending to her mother at home. She fits in work when she can, [...]
Let’s come straight out and say it: Lisa’s mother has been diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer. The events that led up to this have been unfolding over the past month, and a fairly concrete diagnosis came something over a week or a fortnight ago. Lisa, naturally, was devastated. She didn’t help herself much by doing some [...]
I don’t think I’ve called you ‘father’ in years. I adopted the monkier of ‘Chib’ for you after years of cleaning chimneys together. It got shortened and distorted from ‘chimney sweep’, didn’t it? But it stuck. My nicknames always stick. The point is, you’re gone now, and everything you are or were has been added up: [...]
To say that the last few weeks have been stressful would be pushing the art of the euphemism to its absolute limits. My father’s condition has deteriorated (he has cancer) since his second round of chemotherapy. Suddenly, I’ve been dealing with some overwhelming emotions – intense grief and a sadness that I’ve never felt before. [...]
This could be quite a difficult post to write, because as I type this, my father is seriously ill in hospital. The outlook is not good for him. All of this started almost three weeks ago. We had returned from a short trip to London and the very next morning got a phone call from [...]
