6 Months Without You

On the 22nd of November, six months ago tonight, I went to bed as usual, giving my Dad a kiss on his head and a big cuddle, exchanging the words ‘love you’ – not knowing that I would never get to do that again. I woke up at 2:30am to find him awake with chest pain, I drove him to hospital and within hours I was on the phone with the rest of my family telling them to come to the hospital as soon as possible.

On the 23rd of November, at 5:30am, we sat on a chair out the front of the hospital huddled as a shocked, grieving family as people passed by.

That same night I went to bed with no kiss, hug or ‘love you’ from Dad. Instead, I took a sleeping tablet and cuddled into the shirt that Dad was wearing when I took him to hospital, and since that night, I have not slept a night without it.

I have flashbacks from the time I spent at the hospital with him that night. I see groups of people surrounding my Dad. I can hear again the counting of compressions to his chest and then I get angry. I get angry at myself because I don’t want these flashbacks. I feel in these moments that it is ungrateful of me to be experiencing post traumatic stress when I should just be fucking grateful, right? I feel deep rage towards myself and am utterly disgusted because what should have been a beautiful moment, has ever since been uncontrollably ugly and terrifying.

I can’t control this, so I learn to be with these moments, let them go and do my best to not allow them to overstay, because it’s the only way I know how.

I am working on this so that one day I can look back on my father’s last moments and feel the deep, deep fucking gratefulness that I know lays beneath all this. I chose to witness Dad in his most vulnerable state, but I could not imagine having done a single thing differently, because turning away in a moment he deserved to be held didn’t feel right to me. It was the least I could do. I will stare at this PTSD, butt heads with it however many times I have to just to beat it to the fucking ground so that I can see the beauty again.

In the last six months I have wondered why Dad hasn’t given me a sign that he’s still with me. I have stared blankly across from the very chair he sat in before I took him to hospital, wondering why I haven’t felt him around. It is a bizarre, agonising thing to go from living with someone so close to you, to then learning a life without them. Rethinking what the new ‘normal’ within the house will look like without their presence - but always, always waiting for them to come home.

In the initial months, and even sometimes still, I would go home looking forward to telling Dad something about my day, or asking him a question that only he could answer, and having to remember that the only way I can now speak to him is with a pen and paper in a diary I have dedicated to talking with him.

This is showing the parts of grief that otherwise don’t get spoken about, and although everyone has a totally different experience; this is mine.

I hope that in sharing this, I can create awareness that when someone is proving to be strong on the outside, there is a world of hurt within.

I wish that, although life is tough, you believe in yourself every day, because we got this.

Just keep doing it, whatever ‘it’ looks like for you.