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My Dad Died and It’s Been Really Shit
February 2024
“It’s terminal. They’ve said I’ve got a year.”
When my dad told me he was dying, I didn’t know what the “right” reaction was supposed to be. What do you say when you hear something like that? I just stood there, listening as he laid out the facts. Stage 4 lung cancer. It had spread to his lymph nodes, his spine. There wasn’t any good news, no magic cure or optimistic treatment plan. My dad was going to die. It was just a matter of when.
But then again, everyone dies. That’s not news. The difference is when you’re given a cause and a timeline. Suddenly, everything tilts. Life splits into a “before” and an “after.”
In our family, we weren’t big on emotions. No grand gestures, no tearful confessions, not even much hugging. And even this, terminal cancer, didn’t change that. We didn’t have a big cathartic moment where we all poured our hearts out. After that initial conversation, after he told me what the doctors had said, we just sort of moved on with the evening, like we always did.
Later that night, I lay in bed, wide awake, trying to imagine what the next year would look like. My mind kept showing me pictures of my dad, deteriorating bit by bit as the cancer took over. I imagined it dragging on, consuming him and us, all at once and slowly.
But as it turned out, none of those imaginings would come true. Instead, what I hadn’t prepared for, was how quickly it all happened. How sudden and unexpected it would really be.
If you’ve never been inside a hospice, it’s almost impossible to describe the atmosphere. There’s a touch of that sterile, hospital vibe, how could there not be, when people are so unwell, when life is ebbing away? But there’s also a stillness, a calm that you can’t prepare yourself for. My dad had been transferred there after a few tough days in hospital. Those days had been traumatic, to say the least. Now, he was lying in bed, unable to move or speak, completely cut off from communicating with us. We had no idea what, if anything, he understood about what was happening around him or how he felt. Not that he would have said much about it anyway, he just wasn’t that kind of man.
That last week was a steep decline. Watching someone’s breathing change as they’re dying is a particular kind of agony. It’s a sound that digs itself into your memory, buries itself deep. I can still hear it now. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t sit there and watch my dad die. The idea of listening to him take his final breath felt unbearable to me. So I stayed home, while my mum stayed by his side.
May 2024
“He’s gone. He died about twenty minutes ago.”
The words hung in the air like smoke, but instead of drifting away, they wrapped themselves around me. I sat down slowly in my dad’s recliner. He wouldn’t sit in it again, not now, not ever. Mum had been the one to call. It was over. He was gone.
The TV was on, but I couldn’t hear a single word. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you what was on. None of it mattered because my world had just cracked open, and I was sitting in the middle of it, tears streaming down my face. I looked around our little council house, this place that had always been a cocoon of comfort, and realised that it would never feel the same. The thought that he’d never walk through that door, never slump into this very chair again, was like an itch in my brain that I couldn’t scratch.
At some point, I stopped crying, not because the sadness went away, but because my body was just… done. I hauled myself up, trudged upstairs, and crawled into bed. Tomorrow would be the first day of my life without him, and frankly, I didn’t know what that meant yet.
I woke up early. Of course I did. How do you sleep through a seismic shift in your life? The world was carrying on, as if the sun hadn’t just risen on a version of reality where my Dad didn’t exist anymore. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, asking myself the kind of deep, philosophical questions that you can’t even Google for answers. “How do I even do life now?”
Cue Alfie, our ten-year-old ginger-and-white moggy, who hopped up on the bed like it was just another Tuesday. Alfie adored my dad. They were a pair, thick as thieves. And now, here I was, with this overwhelming urge to tell my cat that his best mate wasn’t coming home. I mean, how does one explain death to a cat? I couldn’t even explain it to myself. So, I cried again. Properly ugly, snotty sobs. I was crying for me, for Alfie, and for a thousand things I didn’t even know I was crying about yet.
The Next Six Weeks
Death admin. No one warns you about it, yet it’s waiting for you the moment someone you love dies. It’s this strange, cold shadow that looms over your grief, a checklist of tasks that you suddenly have to manage, even though you feel barely capable of managing yourself. After my Dad passed, I thought the hard part would be saying goodbye, sitting with the sadness, trying to make sense of the gaping hole in my life. But no, what came next was a long, exhausting, soul-crushing march through paperwork and phone calls.
It starts with the basics. The death certificate, one simple piece of paper that somehow becomes your entry ticket to an endless bureaucratic maze. You need multiple copies, they said, for the cremation, for the bank, for all the companies that now need proof that my Dad is no longer alive. Each time I had to explain it, I felt a fresh stab of pain. “He died last week…” The words didn’t sound real to me yet, but they tumbled out, again and again.
What follows is a strange dance between grief and admin. You’re knee-deep in details, arranging a cremation, closing accounts, changing direct debits for utility companies, and every form you fill out seems to strip away a little bit more of the person you’ve lost. I couldn’t help but feel like I was erasing him, piece by piece, reducing his entire life down to account numbers and signatures. At times, it felt easier to bury myself in the admin, as if tackling another document would keep me from confronting the enormity of the loss. It didn’t, of course. The grief sits there, waiting.
There were moments of frustration, too. Death admin isn’t just emotionally exhausting; it’s infuriatingly slow. Companies that are quick to take your money are surprisingly slow when you’re trying to close an account or simply change payment details. Hold music, call transfers, explaining for the hundredth time that, no, my dad isn’t available to speak to customer service anymore. It’s all so mundane and yet, it chips away at your emotional bandwidth.
In the end, death admin is just one of those things no one tells you about. It’s the unwelcome companion to loss. You get through it, though, one form at a time, even when you think you can’t.
July 2024
Six weeks. That’s how long it took me to realize that I needed help. I found myself pacing outside the therapist’s office, questioning if this was really the answer. Was talking to a stranger going to magically sort me out? I had my doubts.
“Gemma?” A voice pulled me back to reality. I turned to see her standing at the door. “I saw you pacing. Why don’t you come on in?”
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