There’s no such thing as a bad year

It must be said – since about April last year a ton of things have gone horribly wrong for us. We’ve been worried about money, whether we can continue to run a home business. My father was diagnosed with cancer and died. Phew, that should have been the worst thing to happen, right? Wrong. After [...]

Not Coping With Grief and Loss

As the regular readers among you will know, my father died in June from lung cancer. I guess the survivors have dealt with the grief in their own individual ways. For my own part, I was devastated and temporarily paralysed by the grief I felt afterward. A cornerstone of my life…gone. But strangely enough, real [...]

My Inheritance

Before he died, my father insisted that he wanted me to have two old fog watches that his father had passed to him. My reaction was visibly lukewarm, but I accepted them and promised that I would make sure to pass them down the generations. As long as Lisa doesn’t eBay them first. I’m joking [...]

One last letter…

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: [...]

Lourdes and home again: The death of my father

My father died at roughly 5:30am on Thursday 25 June 2009. Later that day, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett would follow him, a fact I’m sure he would not care about. As you know, he died from lung cancer and the weakening side-effects of chemotherapy which left him vulnerable to pneumonia. This is the story [...]

Deathbed scenes and false alarms

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. [...]

Lassie: an unexpected death

The family dog, Lassie, died yesterday. Lassie was a border collie that my father and I had brought back from a house he was doing some work in. She’d been in the family for years, like since I was back in secondary school. Before my father got taken into hospital, he’d remarked on how the dog’s health [...]

An impending death in the family?

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 [...]

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