18 June 2025

My dad was that thing every child wishes their parents could be: cool

He did not want emotional, protracted goodbyes, and so we did not say any.

In the quiet of the hospital ward at night, the rush of the oxygen tube sounded like the hiss of a record still spinning after the music has ended. I had never noticed it before, though it was our constant companion in his last days. In the half light of the small hours, we took up our places as watchful sentries at his bedside, we two women, daughter and wife. Death seemed to come for him slowly, and then all at once.

People say that once a person has died, what remains is no longer really them. But Dad looked just the same; gone and yet not gone, there and yet not there. The nurses who came to arrange his body couldn’t get his mouth to close, but I told them not to worry: my father slept his whole life with his head tipped back, mouth wide open, catching flies; it was only right that he slept that way in death.

We waited for hours for the doctor to come, to verify what we already knew, desperate for our beds and yet not knowing how we would bring ourselves to leave him. In the half-darkness and the delirium, I hallucinated that I could see the sheet across his chest moving. As I held his hand, I imagined that the pulse in my wrist and the warmth my skin lent his were not mine at all.

As my father lay dying, I had cried silent, hot tears, but after, they would not come. In the unreality of those in-between hours, it seemed that perhaps both our lives had ended. For weeks, his needs – rightly, gladly – had subsumed mine, and mine were yet to reassert themselves. It was strangely peaceful, to observe abstractly and from a distance the grief I knew was coming. His pain was over, and ours was just beginning.

My father resists neat description. He was unlike anyone else I have ever met. He was particular, a perfectionist, absolutely assured of himself and how he thought things should be done. He was a man of few words and even fewer compliments. He often did not have time for niceties, and he could be intemperate. I did not always find him easy, but he was brilliant, and utterly singular.

There was a sort of purity to his passions. He did things completely or not at all. He mastered everything he turned his hand to, and knew everything about the subjects he cared to know about. He had exquisite taste in music, and was better read than anyone else I know. He was a prolific collector – of books, records and tools. He always sought out the best, preferring to buy once and well – often at not inconsiderable expense. I don’t think he knew the words “that will do”. He had an irreverent, dark sense of humour. He was that thing all children wish their parents could be: cool.

I craved his approval more than perhaps anything else. His taste shaped mine so profoundly that I can hardly separate the two. I hold a lifelong aversion to the Beatles, Oasis, Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, limp handshakes, caravans, milky coffee and tan brown leather, for no reason other than Dad did, too. I listened to music through his ears, read books as though his inner world was mine, shopped as if he was waiting for me outside the changing room. I made few decisions without considering what he would make of them, so that really all my decisions were his. I simply do not know how to live without him.

My father did not want emotional, protracted goodbyes, and so we did not say any. I thought at the time that there was nothing left to say anyway. He knew I loved him, I did not need to repeat it. But if I had my time again, I would say it a thousand times over. I say it to his picture on my phone; to his driving licence, propped up on my mantelpiece; to the books he read and passed on to me; to the sea and to the sky; to the hiss of a record still spinning after the music has ended. I love you, Dad. And again: I love you.

Nigel Timothy Bailey, 30 August 1962 – 22 May 2025