The 72 Hour Day

You're not imagining things - do not adjust your brain. There was no blog yesterday.
That's because all in all, there was no yesterday.
Yesterday started some time on the 7th of September. The first night of the Night Shift with Dad, following his having a hypo and falling out of bed...again. My brother Geraint and I went up and stayed with him all through the night. The next morning we got to bed for about three hours before starting up again. By the time we went back that night, the 8th, there was something...wrong. Or wronger, really. His breathing had turned into a rasp, his speech of the night before had slurred and turned more into a grunt or two in the right direction. By the time Ma left at 3AM, we'd spoken to another doctor - Dad hadn't passed any urine in over 12 hours, and the doc mentioned that his kidneys were marching towards failure point.

Oddly enough, he had a quiet night. As Geraint put it, while the night before, we'd been necessary to stop him falling out of bed, that night, it was just all about being there.

Which means we were still there at 6.15 AM yesterday. His breathing had become laboured and heavy, and then - very suddenly - there was no labour. Geraint and I looked at each other, hoping for a moment that the ominous silence simply meant he was breathing easier.

He wasn't. He wasn't breathing at all.

We called the nurses, and on their advice, called the family. After so much fighting, the end was quick, and painless, and peaceful.

Today has been a day of mainly dealing with some of the mountain of Stuff To Do that comes attached like a John Doe tag to the toe of a dead person. Tomorrow is likely to be the same.

In Disappearing terms, this has been a crapulent period - odd hours, the feeling of being beyond the boundaries of normal life, and a really quite impressive hospital canteen have resulted in my eating lots of stuff I'm not supposed to, and justifying it as Comfort Eating. Or at least Easy Eating.
This means tomorrow's going to be an unmitigated disaster - although such terms are of course entirely relative. There is only one disaster this week...and to paraphrase Shakespeare, it can be truly said that "the loss of such a man includes all harm." I'm not going to turn this blog entry into an obituary for my dad. Maybe, a little down the line, I'll try and give you a picture of the man as I experienced him. But then again, maybe I won't - it almost seems a little tacky to pay tribute to so impressive a human being on a blog that includes entries about craving for chocolate sundaes and essentially shitting myself...

We'll see. All I know right now is that the man who gave us all our core principles has gone from the face of the Earth. While we have breath in our bodies, he will never be gone from the world though, because his standards are imprinted on our brains, and we take them forward. Every time we see something through, every time we make good use of our enthusiasm, every time we think hard or act with passion, or do something with no thought of reward for people we hardly know...that's Dad, living beyond the years of his life. That he does so is the best tribute we can pay to the man.