Journey's End

I'm a bit tardy in posting this, but many of you will be looking at this having received our Christmas card and so, in the spirit of properly relaying the major events of the year, I had better record that our major news this Autumn is that my father died in hospital after breaking his hip. He'd been fighting Parkinson's disease for 12 years and, at the end, it really was a blessing. He spent eight weeks in hospital after the fall, which was a great strain on Mum and I, especially as he was at death's door and then rallied on three separate occasions and was unconscious for the last five days. He had just passed both his 84th birthday and their diamond wedding anniversary when he died on 9 October.

It means that Mum can enjoy life again; a great relief for me as she was nearing the end of her tether as his sole carer. As I wrote to a friend recently: "We are all OK about it, really we are. Had he survived he would have had absolutely no quality of life, he couldn't have returned home, gardened, read or done any of the things which mattered to him. So this was for the best. Of course, people tend to expect us to be more upset than we seem to be, but after living through the past two months and saying mental or actual goodbyes to an unconscious father three times, there's only so much grieving you can do."

As well as seeing Mum regain her vitality and spirit, one of the nice things now is that I'm starting to recall how he was before he contracted Parkinson's and I'm really grateful for that. I had feared as he got frailer and frailer that my enduring memory of him would be that distressing one, but the mind is a wonderful thing and more and more that image recedes and is replaced by the handsome, smiling man in the photo. Outwardly rather stern and principled, he was at heart a generous man who never failed to remind me that Gill was the best thing that had happened to me, and who was so proud of Edward. Although when I was growing up being his son wasn't always an easy path to tread, we had an easy and warm relationship in later years and I in my turn am so proud to have called him Dad.