I don’t mind if you skip this bit. It’s really sad. But you probably didn’t know my dad personally, so you may be OK with it.
The thing is, most kids these days don’t have to deal with people dying very much, at least not in real life. Don’t get me wrong – I think that’s a good thing, I really do. It’s just that when it happens, we’re not ready for it.
Look, take Grandpa Byron. When he was a kid, pretty much everyone in a family he knew, including a boy he played with, were murdered one night just because they were Muslims, or Hindus, or something. Not that that was normal or anything – there was some kind of war or ‘civil unrest’ going on at the time – but still …
His own grandpa had lived with Grandpa Byron’s family, and died on the veranda one afternoon, and Grandpa Byron discovered him, still holding his teacup. This guy, Grandpa Byron’s grandpa, had been taken by his own dad to see a load of men being hanged outside a prison in the city they lived in. Can you imagine that?
My mum’s mum, who lives in Ireland, was alive during World War 2, when loads of people died, and her mum, my great-grandma, had four brothers and only one of them lived beyond 20 years old. One was killed by the Germans, one died two days after being born, and one was a fisherman who drowned at sea.
I found all this out after Dad died.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that in the olden days, people died all the time, and I guess kids just got used to it.
That’s scary, isn’t it? It keeps me awake sometimes, or it did, at any rate, for a while, until I stopped thinking about it so much.
Dad was really weird in the days before he died. Obviously, I know now why that was, but at the time I didn’t. He went for a long walk, like really long, on his own one day. It must have been a weekend. And he kept hugging me really hard. It wasn’t like Dad never hugged me, it’s just he did it more, much more, and harder. It got to the stage where I asked him to stop, and that really hurt his feelings and we had a bit of a row about it, which I’m still sad about, because now I know what was going on. Now I know that he had learned he was going to die.
Then on the night it happened, he just went to bed as normal. He and Mum were reading in bed. Mum put out her light and went to sleep, and when she woke up the next morning he was still there, propped up on the pillows, bedside light on, but dead.
The first I knew about it was Mum coming into my room. She was really, really calm. That’s how I knew something was seriously up, because Mum only gets that calm, and talks in her deep, calm voice, when there’s something very wrong. If something’s gone a bit wrong, like she’s burnt the dinner, or pranged the car again, she’ll be all, “oh oh oh!” and flapping around, but if it’s something serious, she’ll be all calm, like when I was six and she told me that the baby brother she was growing for me had died inside her tummy.
She sat on my bed in the same place that Dad usually sat when he told me stories.
“Al,” she said, “wake up. I have something important to tell you.”
I was awake straight away.
“Your dad has been taken very ill in the night. The doctors will be here any minute. I need you to be very grown up, and get dressed quickly.”
I’m sorry. Do you mind if I don’t write the rest of this? It’s making me really sad.
You kind of get the idea, though, yeah?