Forty years today

40 years ago today, at a little after 9 a.m., the phone rang in our student house in Hull. I ran downstairs, knowing exactly who and what it was going to be – no-one else would have called at that time of day. I grabbed the receiver from its cradle on the wall and listened.

“It’s all over.” Those may not be the exact words Mum used, but that was the message. A little over three years after being diagnosed with lung cancer, Dad had died in hospital in the early hours of the morning. He was 56 years old.

I had last seen him just a few weeks earlier, in hospital in Ipswich. He was by that time in a private room, receiving palliative care, I suppose. I know he was being given morphine and other drugs. He drank tea, and had a bite or two of a biscuit, but his weight had dropped to around 7 stone, perhaps a little over.

He was bright and talkative through the pain, that last time I saw him, bantering with the nurses who came in and out, and replying to one of them (who had asked who I was and commented that I was beautiful), “Of course she’s beautiful, she’s my daughter!”

I know I felt both guilty and relieved at being far away from Suffolk at university during the worst times of his illness, and have often thought since of what everyone at home must have had to cope with on a daily basis.

At Christmas, a few short weeks later, Mum gave each of us a solid gold pendant on a gold chain, each one inscribed with our initials on one side and “Love from Dad 1979” on the other. He’d planned the making and the giving of them before he died. I’m wearing mine today, quietly remembering the man who was my dad.

He could be a tyrant at times, unpredictable, quick to anger, and hard to please, but in those last few years of his life he made it very clear just how much he loved us all and how sorry he was to be leaving us so soon.