On the 8th of May, just two and a bit weeks ago, my Dad died. He was 87, diminished by vascular dementia and felled by heart failure after a series of obviously painful heart attacks. He died with nearly all of his kids there with him, and mum, and his daughter-in-law. Ok, we did miss it (it? the bit when the dying shifts into a past tense, when the body cools, when the stillness descends, the colour changes, when Dad becomes a body to dress and to bury rather than being the father we all wanted to touch and stroke and look at, to examine properly while we still could, though we did that a bit too, after). We missed it maybe by just a few minutes, but I don’t know enough about the body and the dying process to know quite what the timings were. But he was still warm and I could still touch his skin and speak to him and feel the remnants of life still evident, at least for a little while.

We missed that exact point because we had been gently informed that sometimes people like to die unwitnessed. That the vigil by the bedside might be the exact thing that keeps a person from being able to slip away. So we left while he was being transferred from the hospital (full of those angel nurses who knew what to do and who cried with us and kept his drugs topped up and had helped Dad to the toilet throughout the night when I was too scared to help him) to the hospice which took him immediately without the paperwork because they knew none of us had any time. We got back to him in the early afternoon and we kind of knew that this was it. We gathered on the bed and touched him and spoke to him and told him all the things we needed him to hear, and we told him we loved him and that he had been a good dad. He was listening because he would sometimes try to talk and he was squeezing my hand. I know he could hear us.

We left him then, taking mum back home for a rest, a few of us out for a meal, and then we drove back to see him in the night. The hospice was this weird silent pause of a place, off the main road, with no one at reception and no one around but these quiet rooms full of people sleeping. My brother and I walked into his room and he was still. His face was different, and the heaving of his chest and the effort of trying to breathe was over. He was still so warm. He was Dad, but he was gone.

So I don’t have a Dad anymore, which is strange and sad. I know I join everyone else in this, and I know he was old, and that bodies wear out and that minds get muddled. I know that dying is ok. But it’s so hard to grasp the full and final extinguishment of all that he was, and his ideas and his thoughts and all of those experiences that were interior or secret or long forgotten. Mum was a witness to so much and his four brothers experienced things with him that we heard about (repeatedly, it must be said, with less and less coherence as time went on but no less enthusiasm) – but it has all of it gone. He was a contradiction, like everyone is, but there’s no sense to be made of any of it. A eulogy is a neat and important way of creating some order, but I thought at the funeral about everything that wasn’t said and wondered about the everything else that had made up the gaps in his timeline. All this stuff only really known to Dad.

And then – who was he anyway? I only knew him from when he was 40 years old and he changed so much over that time. I didn’t have to personally experience the Dad Version One who was by all accounts a hard man who did some damage as he battled with what being a father should be. Strict, religious, influenced by Old Testament thinking and a very unforgiving church doctrine that took many years to shake off. He was that version with my brothers and sister. I can only really remember the slammed doors of teenagers and the heaviness he could bring to us as a family, and how hard he could make things for my mother who was doing her best, battling him back in her own way.

My version of Dad had hangovers from some of that, but I was ten years later than everyone else and he had softened. My version of Dad was a tall, strong, expressive, emotional man who sought forgiveness repeatedly. He wrestled with faith and constantly sought out ways to live right which was a heavy moral burden for him sometimes. He was curious and interested in people and ideas, though never read a book which my mother would be very quick to point out. He was a terrible fiddler, ruining their wifi connection constantly and unable to think through a process from end to end, leading to an enormous number of Facebook accounts that he started and abandoned as the passwords increasingly escaped him. He liked a certain level of control with finances and decisions and things, owing various devices but not sharing these with my mother who never learned to use any technology beyond WordChums. This has not served her or us very well as we figure out how to keep her close and safe. Thank goodness for my sister who does all the hard work on this, caring for her and untangling things so she can live independently, at least for a while longer.

Dad leaves a big dad gap. He would send me emails weekly, sometimes daily, giving me a few lines about what he and mum had been up to and always signing off with a profession of love and a thank you for everything. He would take photos of the flowers and fruit in his garden and send these to me to cheer me up. He would speak with me on the phone and beam into the camera. He would often cry as we finished up a call, telling me how much I was loved and how proud he was of me.

Here he is. My Dad:

Bye, my Dad. I love you.