Catching Up

Things are slowly beginning to get back to normal for me.

Last night I returned home having spent the last three weeks since we learnt of my father's death with my mum. During that time I've collected his death certificate with my brother from the hospital, officially registered his death with my mum and daughter at the Registry Office and organised and attended his funeral - all a steep learning curve for me as I've never had involvement in such processes before. Strangely I found myself switching to auto-pilot in order to get it done properly; detaching myself from all emotion and writing endless lists of things to do as one day rolled into another. I say strange, because I'm usually the most emotionally disorganised person on the planet. I suspect it was my way of coping, but I'm surprised at how little I seem to have mourned my dad's passing.

My mum and I were talking about this before I came home as she too feels guilty for not being more upset that she appears to have been. We concluded that in our own ways we both went through a process of mourning before he died, knowing as we did that he was living....or should I say merely existing..... on borrowed time. Selfishly it's incredibly hard watching a once strong and ebullient man fade away as he did.

Over the last three weeks we've removed all evidence of his illness - three bin bags of pills and inhalers, his oxygen machine and all the plastic tubing that went with it, his nebuliser, and various artefact's too personal to mention - from my mums house and have started the process of clearing his downstairs office which had been converted into a bedroom for him, away. The house I grew up in is slowly beginning to feel less like a nursing home and more like the home I remember as a child, a source of comfort filled to the brim with his life's work and that of my mother. It almost feels as though I'm getting a sense of my old dad back before all the illnesses that robbed him of his vitality took hold.

My mum has expressed a desire to eventually turn my dad's bedroom into a craft room of her own. It was something they'd both planned many years ago but never quite got around to doing. Undoubtedly the room will be filled to the brim with my mum's spinning wheels and looms and I know without doubt I'll be spending time with her in it, reacquainting myself with the various processes of converting fleece into wool then dyeing it using a variety of natural sources - something I'm very much looking forward to doing, safe in the knowledge that my dad would undoubtedly have approved.