Last year was one of the most difficult years of my life, I have been through many difficult things, but nothing compared to the sudden and gut wrenching loss of my dad.
In June 2023, my Dad went to work one morning and within hours was driven home by his colleague. My sister managed to talk him into going to the doctors, and the doctor sent him into the hospital for tests and monitoring. This was a Thursday, by the early hours of the Sunday morning, he was gone.
I’m not going to go into immense detail about the run up to his passing or his time in the hospital out of respect to my Dad, my family and myself. What I want to do is share a little of how I’m doing and I can do that without taking away anyone else’s dignity.
The first and most obvious thing is I miss my Dad! I still live at home so I saw my dad every day, I kissed him goodnight every night. I sat and watched his quiz shows every evening tag teaming the music rounds, he cooked me Sunday roasts, taught me how to cook a steak or a chow mien, and always knew when I needed an extra hug at the end of the day. To this day there are still moments where I forget that he’s gone for a tiny second and I expect him to call me from the supermarket and ask what I want for dinner, or to hear his alarms going off all day on a Sunday. Then it hits, that’s never going to happen again, and it absolutely crushes me every single time.
Then there’s the guilt, as I said I lived with my dad, why didn’t I make him see a doctor, why didn’t I do something, why didn’t I make him seek help? The truth is, I tried. Me and my mam tried SO hard, but he didn’t want to, and we didn’t want to go behind his back. Since it happened, I’ve had people ask why I didn’t go to them about it, but the truth is my dad would have seen that as a betrayal, he wouldn’t have forgiven me for going behind his back like that, he forbade my mother from telling my siblings anything, and I couldn’t risk him blaming her either. We did what we could, we offered him as much help as he would allow and in the end I think he went the way he wanted, peacefully. He never liked needles or doctors or hospitals, he wouldn’t have wanted to be poked and messed about with, and I try to remind myself of that when the guilt strikes. I also feel guilty for the fact that during the pandemic we couldn’t have people in the house because I needed to shield, but I have to remember that my dad wouldn’t have wanted me in danger, and he was more than willing to see my siblings outside or in their homes. I know he wouldn’t have forgiven himself if I got sick because of an action he took. The truth is we all thought we had more time. I spent the entire pandemic imagining what it would be like when I could reunite with my family, and in every single vision, my Dad was at the heart, watching his kids be together, proud and loving.
The other thing I want to talk about is the physical impact. I wasn’t sure about sharing this because I don’t want it to be taken the wrong way or for people to think I only care about myself because that’s absolutely not the case, one of the worst things about this is watching what my mam and siblings are going through but its not my place to tell their stories. Grief, like any strong emotion, has physical impacts, especially on people who are already unwell, and I want to share this because when other people go through it I want them to know that its normal, and its ok to talk about it. For me the biggest physical impact is that its really flared up my Crohn’s disease and cluster headaches. I have been in really severe pain ever since Dad passed and I haven’t been able to get any kind of control over it. As well as the physical pain from my illnesses being worse, the mental toll of dealing with them is much higher without my Dad. My dad never had to say much to comfort me. I’d often be sat on the sofa, thinking that I was actually hiding my pain quite well, and he would always glance at me as he went outside for a cigarette. I could always tell when he was worried about me because that glance would linger, he’d pause, look me right in the eye and I knew he could feel my pain, and that alone was so comforting. Then there were the hugs that went on forever, usually when I was about to go to bed, but sometimes just when I was passing him. We were always affectionate, but on the bad days or the worrying days, I’d get an extra long, extra tight hug, as if he hoped he could protect me from the world by holding me closer, and I immediately felt my problems melt for those minutes. As much as anything else, my Dad showed me how to love by being such an amazing husband to my mam, and it’s because of him that I now have an amazing partner.
A few other, smaller things happened after this which delayed my return to blogging, such as catching the flu for 6+ weeks and having to go to the hospital, but the vast majority of the year was taken up by trying to put one foot in front of the other and help my Mam as much as I could. We have just got through our first Christmas , and I got through my first birthday, and it hurt, but we made it. I know that I will one day learn to live with this loss, but there will always be a part of me missing.
Chronic musician 