Wednesday last week would have been my dad’s 69th birthday. We lost him on the 13th October to all sorts of complications due to lung cancer. Today is father’s day in the UK, and social media is resplendent with tributes to amazing dads. It warms my cockles. It also makes me sad for those out there, and I know a few, for whom father’s day can be very painful. Those whose fathers weren’t amazing. Those whose fathers were absentees, or abusers, or worse. I’m lucky enough that my dad wasn’t any of those things. My dad was awesome, and I miss him.

I’ve been dreading this week for some time. It’s been there, on the horizon for a while now, like knowing you’re going to have to clean the oven at some point. I thought his birthday was going to be brutal, that I was going to lapse back into the awful despair I felt when we did lose him. Wednesday came, and I was sad, but it wasn’t the utter bottomless pit of misery I was expecting. I think perhaps because my dad was never a birthdays man. To him it was just another day. We did some fun stuff for his big ones – I remember dangling out of the bedroom window when I was ten, tying up a ‘Happy 40th Birthday’ banner we’d made for when he came home – but he was a typical Black Countryman, who played this sort of thing down. I probably would have done what I’d done every year for time immemorial and bought him a really shit film on DVD. He loved a shit film did my dad. His biggest bugbear was ’too much talking.’ He preferred the 80s and 90s classics of the Stallone and Schwarzenegger heyday. So, guns, explosions, perhaps aliens, maybe a plot? He also enjoyed a good war film, and a spaghetti western. There was always some guff to buy him. What he really enjoyed were the inappropriate birthday cards I’d pick out for him, which he’d snort at, and say: ’ta, args.’ ‘Args’ was his nickname for me. That or chickenshit. He loved his nicknames as well. Uncle Geoff was always ‘Tool’.

His birthday was never a big deal, and because of this, I think the grief was as underplayed as he would have liked. Living 130 miles away, it wasn’t practical for me to go over there during a pandemic, so I had to settle for a WhatsApp message from my brother, who’d attended his grave with my mom and a nice posy of chrysanthemums, which he loved.

Claire’s brother-in-law lost his father last week as well, after a long fight with Parkinson’s. Drew, and Claire’s sister, Emily, lived with us for a while, and we’re all really close. I knew Jim too, he was a lovely, and kind man, and I knew he was proud of the warm, and friendly soul that Drew is. I’m utterly devastated for him. For me, at least when dad was at his most sick at the end, he was still pretty sprightly, and talkative, and as mischievous as he’d always been. Parkinson’s is a cruel and isolating illness that slowly robs you of the person you knew.

I’m sitting upstairs at the moment tapping away this miserable diatribe, while Claire is downstairs chatting with her family over Zoom. I’m normally there as well, Mike is my dad too, basically. I’m usually conducting a hastily cobbled music quiz. Today though, I needed a little bit of time to just sit and remember the old man. I shall probably go down in a bit and say hello. I had a few ideas for this post, but it’s just turned into a bit of a brainfart. I’ve got no clever learnings and advice on grief. I’m shit at it. I think everyone is. It’s one of those awful processes, like cleaning the oven that you just have to get on with and do till it’s done.

Happy Father’s Day to the good ones.

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