Fifty Shades of Sundae

As I mentioned, two nights ago, we went as a family (minus one...and no, still not even remotely used to that) to the Harvester, where Ma had her multi-salad meal and the rest of us had...y'know, real food.
When we finished, d picked up the dessert menu. I snatched it from her, and perused. It's been the kind of week where everybody's wonderfully understanding as you stuff your face, and make reassuring noises about "getting back on track once all the turmoil's over". And they're all absolutely right of course. But I figured - with the kind of evil, twisted, advantage-taking whisper in the brain of the truly addictive - "Wellll, if you're gonna be getting back on track when the turmoil's over anywayyyyy..."

Mmmmm...Sundaes. Lots and lots of sundaes. Single choc, double choc, double choc fudge, double choc fudge with chocolate stars, then banoffee sundaes, coffee sundaes, strawberries and a shitload of cream sundaes. Honeycomb sundaes, caramel sundaes, every-goddamn-thing-imaginable sundaes, and I wanted them all. I wondered about getting a kind of double, inverted glass dish, and pouring one sundae on top of another, to make a kind of sundae sandwich, then setting up two more either side and making a kind of ice cream viaduct, and eating my way through the many flavours of sundae available.

"Can I get the bill, please?" asked Ma, and the ice-cream architecture in my mind collapsed, and melted, and flowed away, and I was saved, one more day, from my own instincts.

That all said, everybody is right, with their soothing words and certainties. We bury my dad three days from now....Nope, still seems perverse and surreal, and like he should come in any minute and wonder what all the fuss is about...but once that's done, it's straight on to the Night Hike, and when we come back, I'm thinking of going back to a world of Perspex Boxes and Exercise. It worked before, and it can work again, and at least I'll be starting with a 3.some-odd stone head-start on the first time. Perspex Boxes seem to be the way for me - I'm sure Aristotle would be disappointed, and frankly so am I. But a failure of integration can clearly still be a success in terms of the impact it has on a lifestyle. So Perspex has to be the way to go.

Salad Days

There are days...like the day before yesterday...when the connection between Ma and I is unmistakable. We went to a Chinese buffet, and her first plate was an enormo-platter, a practical Vesuvius of rice with just a little curried goo and buggerall else. Apparently, when she was pregnant with me, all she'd eat was pasta, rice and dessert.

Thanks, Ma.

Likewise of course, my last plate of the night was an enormo-platter of what we here in the Welsh Valleys call half-and-half - half rice, half chips (fries if you really insist), with a kind of  curry sauce to delineate the boundary between carb and...erm...carb.

Like I said, thanks, Ma.

Then there are nights when I can't help but wonder whether I was actually born to this woman at all. Nights like last night. We all went out to the local Harvester, mainly, if we're being honest, because they have an unlimited salad bar.  Ma ordered her main - fish and chips - and then disappeared like a shot to the salad bar. After pronouncing that she'd chosen the wrong dressing, we all told her to go back and change it.
"Nono, I'll eat this lot, then I'll get more," she said. And she did. Geraint popped away from the table to answer a phonecall, and when he came back he peered at Ma's salad bowl.
"What are we on?" he asked.
I looked up. "Gotta finish your Main salad before you can move on to Dessert salad," I muttered.
"Ah," he nodded. "I wondered...See, when they dreamed up the 'unlimited' salad bar, I don't think they thought they'd ever come up against someone like you," he said, grinning at Ma as she munched her way through some unpalatable vegetation in a honey mustard dressing. 
"Certainly not in Merthyr, anyway," I added, looking around at the reassuring degree of Thursday night lardassery grazing at tables all around us. 
Ma shrugged, crunching on a piece of onion.

We eventually steered her out of the place, but not before she'd at least had her Dessert Salad. I think personally, she'd have stayed for Coffee and Cigars Salad, and possibly even Brandy Salad if we'd let her. The woman's addicted to raw vegetables, I swear.

Oddly enough, if you fast forward to right now, with me sitting at the kitchen table, Ma just made a round of coffees.
"Anyone want anything? Kit Kats? Cookies?"
"No, I'm fine, thankyou," said d. "How about you? D'you want something?...A small bowl of salad, maybe?"

Sadly, no-one understood why I just spat my coffee across the screen of the pet rock that is our iPad...

Big Sweater Days

As we work tirelessly and relatively frantically towards my dad's funeral on Wednesday, it's weird to see how thoroughly he was, and is, the real Disappearing Man. I've spent days disconnecting him from the life support of connection to the outside world - magazine subscriptions, coin collections, membership organisations, pension providers and the like. Today, Ma and Geraint are down the garage, confronted by assorted metal oceans of what, though undoubtedly useful and meaningful to Dad, are to the rest of us, without his skills in the world, Utterly Bleedin' Useless. They've just rung a scrap merchant to take some of this assorted metallic detritus to, and given away a chest freezer. As you do...

Part of this general getting-of-space-to-breathe is also a sort of clothing giveaway - clothes that he bought before shrinking under the weight of illness, and never put on in the most part - Ger's got a jacket and shirt, and at the moment, I seem to be inheriting sweaters. Big comfy winter sweaters. While it's not entirely beyond me to whinge, along the lines of "Oh sure, give the fat fuck all the comfy sweaters!", this would probably rank as the Stupidest Whinge of the Century, biology and fat fuckery being what they undoubtedly are, so I'm absolutely not going to bother. Fact is, right now, while it's not exactly Big Sweater Weather (except in the mornings, when it certainly is), these big comfy sweaters are something of a not-exactly-God-send. A Deathsend? No, that sounds monstrous. What I mean is, I'm pretty grateful for them. Not, as I said, because I'm a shivering little snowdrop, all cold and unprotected against the Arctic blast, but more because my body is re-assuming a kind of Weebloid, or at least Wombloid (Non-Brits, look up the Wombles - even on this blog if you like - for this reference) shape, and it's good to have something fairly formal-looking that once belonged to a good tall man. Tall men and short fat fucks have a lot more in common than people might assume. If it has to cover a greater area vertically, there's at least a reasonable chance of it working to cover an expanded area horizontally too.

All of this serves to strip away the layers of surreality that have been surrounding us for weeks now. Wednesday is Just There, like the heartbeat of a big throbbing creature, threatening to swallow us up. The Order of Service for his funeral came across to us today. I've given the details out myself, time and time and time again, and yet somehow, they haven't seemed like A Real Thing...you know, that will be Happening To Us. But it is. I'm wearing his sweater - not as a loan till he comes home, but as a kind of woolen inheritance, because he never is coming home.

Going away now, to take some good deep breaths in and out.

Through A Full Glass Darkly...

There is a truism about the Welsh that takes some understanding.

When I married d, we had some Americans over for the wedding. It was really something to see these fine, good, generally rather lovely people...meet the Welsh.
The Welsh, like most Brits...enjoy a tipple or twenty. The Americans' jaws slowly began to sag in amazement as they watched the Welsh at play and celebration, downing pint after pint of ale, and bottle after bottle of wine. Some of the Americans still look back on that day and shake their heads in a kind of bewildered admiration, wondering where the Welsh put all that alcohol. And of course, how they managed to do it again without missing their mouths.

Another part of the truism concerns this house. My folks' house. When d came over to live, she'd done her drinking decades ago and was by this time fairly abstemious.

Then she met my folks' liquor cabinet. It took a little experimentation - and I mean that in a vaguely creepy evil scientist way - before my folks found the drink that she would call hers. Madeira's the one. (Any Flanders and Swann fans, knock yourself out!). d has long half-joked that she daren't stay over at my folks' house any more, because she'll be absolutely rat-arsed for a majority of the time.

This week, I have to admit, the same has been true of me. Since discovering a new cider on the day of the Pontypridd walk, I have found myself more and more partial to a pint or two. This of course is godawfully catastrophic in Disappearing terms. I have to wear my Master suit on Wednesday, and perhaps oddly, we bought it when I was about 17.5 stone. My sole real goal this week is not to be entirely back to that weight by the time I slip into it Wednesday - for Dad's funeral...although somewhat sweetly, I remember pulling the Master suit on for the first time and think I looked like the bee's bollocks in it, so hopefully, it'll still look alright as we say our soooooo-not-final goodbye.

Here's hoping anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a pint of cider with my name on it...

Making Enchoiries

Let me stick a hand in the air, first of all, and say today was for Disappearing shit. Went home to the flat for a bit this morning, and decided, quite deliberately, to have chips from the Fountain Fish Bar for lunch. The way you can tell it was deliberate is that I came home and told everyone, rather than hiding it and disposing of the evidence.

Still I say, this week will turn out to be better than last week. It's just that this week hasn't really started yet.

This evening, I got a kick in the arse from Fate.

Since we started planning to come home to Wales, I'd had the idea of doing a thing.
What I didn't want to do was the obvious thing - which in my case would be to join the local am dram society. Quite apart from anything else, it's now run by a guy I used to know as a teenager, and whose life I schemed to...well, not to put too fine a point on it, to fuck right over more than once. And while I have a couple of friends who are in the am dram society, I've sort of done that when I was a kid. Going back to that seems not to be something that appeals to me. What I did think about though is something terribly, terribly grown-up. I thought about joining a choir.

In fact, I thought about joining a very specific choir. The Dowlais Male Voice Choir.
The Dowlais Male Voice Choir is famous. I mean....world famous. Has been for decades - it's even mentioned in Dylan Thomas's acme of Welshness, Under Milk Wood.

A guy called Chris popped in tonight to commiserate with Ma and console with her on Dad's death. He'd known Dad from the Masons. As he made to leave, he mentioned he was going to choir practice, with the Dowlais choir. A handful of questions later and I was in his car. I listened to the choir practice, and knew I'd like to be among this band of brothers. I'm going again Sunday. They're putting me into Top Tenors to start with. This will be too high, I guarantee you. But it won't matter. I can't wait to be a part of that wall of adjustable sound.

How grown-up is that?!

List-o-Vision

Today was...interesting. Interesting in the kind of way that having bamboo shoved under your fingernails is interesting. We were expecting to be able to get Dad's death certificate today, but got a call at 8 to say that that wouldn't be happening, as the death had been referred to the coroner.

Take one cricket bat. Apply to the day, liberally and with speed.
We had to go and visit the coroner's officer, to discover that the cause of death is not listed as annnnnnny of the multitude of things from which Dad was actively suffering in the weeks leading up to his death, but in fact was something called an intercranial haemorrhage. That's a brain bleed to you, squire. A brain bleed probably, but not by any means yet conclusively, suffered as a result of one of the falls he had while in the hospital.

Sigh...
We all had a bunch of other stuff to do too, so we went our separate ways. I popped back to the flat to do the weigh in.

As predicted yesterday, the results of this week of Ease Eating were dreadful.

17st 0.25

Guaranteed, it'll be less than this next week. I'll be back in the 16s next week. No really, I will.

The rest of the day has been lived in List-o-Vision. It's a slightly anodyne process, writing someone out of the world. It's a big long list of all the financial connections they made while they were alive, where you have to call up all the other ends, and tell them that the person has gone, and things need to change. That's what I've been doing, on and off, for the last 48 hours. Tonight, out of the blue, Geraint suggested that, as he had to drop an invitation in to a house in Pentrebach (a little way down the Taff Trail), we should walk it. So we did.

Jeepers, I'm out of practice. It was barely a five mile round trip, but I found myself wheezing like a grampus by the end of it.

No, really, I'll be back in the 16s this time next week. I have spoken, dammit!

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.