2 July 2025

When my father died, I felt I should have been full of profound words

Instead, I found that I had none.

The day a doctor ushered me into a corridor and said, in hushed, kindly tones, the words “possible end-of-life event” (no one ever says, as they do in the movies, “He has two weeks to live”; it’s all so cautious, so couched in caveats), I was supposed to be at a wedding.

I had spent the previous day – his first, of this admission – at my father’s bedside. He was unwell, yes, but he had been unwell before, and recovered, and gone home, and surely would do so again. But then my stepmother rang: she had spoken to Dad; she was worried. And so I went. And so I stood in that corridor. And so I sat on a bench in the park across from the hospital, grateful for the sunglasses that hid my eyes as I rang my brother, my partner, my best friend, and told them the unimaginable. The dress I had ironed for the wedding remained hanging, pristine, on the outside of my wardrobe for weeks – a constant, needling reminder of what could have been. What was supposed to be.

The closest experience I have with which to compare this grief is a break-up. I know all too well the instinct to pick up my phone and text him, to share the tiny everyday happenings to which I know he’d have some cuttingly funny response. The artefacts that litter my flat – the turntable he bought me, the shelves he built for me, the cards he wrote me – provoke a familiar sting. But the comparison is, of course, all too insufficient – not least because I have never really got over a man until meeting another, and my dad is irreplaceable.

Popular culture is once more a ghost train of lurking frights. There seems suddenly to be an inordinate number of funerals in every TV programme. On Father’s Day, which happened to be the day before my dad’s funeral, we sought distraction in my favourite improv comedy group (Shoot from the Hip, whom I once described in this column as “the sort of men you wouldn’t be intimidated to take off your clothes in front of” – a quote that made it on to a promotional poster). But no, even here, in a show that includes an improvised play titled “Moist Espionage”, there are multiple Father’s Day references. I seek solace in the cinema, and find myself crying to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later as Ralph Fiennes’ character assures a small boy: “There are many forms of death. And some are better than others.”

Perhaps it seems odd to speak of shock – this was no sudden cardiac episode or freak accident. It had been two and a half years since Dad was diagnosed with the leukaemia that killed him; two and a half years of living with the knowledge that this might be how it all ended. But compared to that long, looping cycle of hope and dread, those last weeks seemed so compressed.

In his last days, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was doing it wrong. This is, I realise, a very type-A approach to death. But I was acutely aware that I only got one go at this, that whatever I did in those last days could never be undone. Yet there is no rulebook for this most everyday and terrible of things. I felt that I was failing to grasp the emotional gravity of what was happening, and embarrassing myself by overreacting. That I should be brimming with those profound words that I’d never had the courage to speak until now, yet unable to think of a single one.

It was a time of curious dissonance. The death of a parent is – in the sense that it happens to almost everyone – one of the most natural, common human experiences. Yet it feels so unnatural, so uncommon. The hours by his bedside were at once interminably long and cruelly brief. The prospect of his death was unfathomable, enormous, yet the days before it were largely mundane, a predictable routine of transfusions, test results and ward rounds.

How strange it was, walking from the hospital to the station each evening, to pass the crowds of office workers spilling out into the streets outside pubs, revelling in the May sunshine. How dare they! Didn’t they know what was happening! And how strange it is, now the funeral is over and the admin done, that there is nothing more to do except, somehow, go on living.

[See also: Morgan McSweeney’s moment of truth]