Yesterday I received an email from my brother in Canada to say Dad had been taken to hospital. At the age of 88 (my dad, not my brother), this email wasn’t a big surprise. Over the last few years, we’d been scared a few times by his failing health. However, this incident was different.
Dad had been found on the floor of his apartment on Vancouver Island, confused, and distressed. There were also signs of blood on the floor. We are not sure how long he’d been there. It may have been a few hours or a few days. He was malnourished and dehydrated.
Probably at this point, you are thinking why was an 88-year-old man allowed to get into this state? Well, my father has lived on his own for decades and is beyond stubborn. He refuses any form of help and like many of his generation, he is a sly old fox, telling the doctor what the doctor wants to hear and has evaded assisted housing, care homes and all other forms of help. The fox even told the doctor that he didn’t want his sons to be told anything about his health. This has been a huge frustration to me and my two brothers.
Dad eventually lost his pilot’s licence, then his car licence but still refused to admit he needed care facilities.
To be honest, when the news came in that Dad had been taken to hospital I was relieved because I knew that he would now be getting the care he needed and would be in no state to lie to the doctors.
Dad and I haven’t had the closest of relationships. My mother left him when I was three years old and I wasn’t to see or hear from him again for 38 years. When I finally met him in August 2004 it was just for two weeks and I had no memory of him from those brief 3 years as a child. We met again in September 2005 for another two weeks while I was living in Spain. I wouldn’t see him again until May 2019 when I flew out to Canada for four days to spend time with him at his home on the island.
So in almost 60 years, I’ve only spent about a month with him. Despite that, we are strangely close and surprisingly similar in our interests, hobbies and nature. (I can be incredibly stubborn too!) Bizarrely we we both born in the same hospital.
However, the email from my brother made me realise that Dad’s condition was far worse than any of us had known or been told. So I suppose we should prepare for the worst.
I started to think about what I knew about my father’s life. Although we had only been in each other’s company for about a month, we had emailed regularly until a few years ago when he was unable to remember passwords for his laptop …… or where the book that he’d written them all down in was!
Luckily my father had also been an author and several of his books were about his early life, but there was much he didn’t talk about.
I wasn’t losing hope of him recovering but my thoughts did turn to his obituary. Out of the three sons, who would write it? Which one of us knew him best - certainly not me.
Then I recalled a conversation I’d had with my friend Alison. Over a coffee, she had brought up the subject of obituaries and asked “Why don’t we write our own? I mean who knows us better than ourselves?”
I had to agree with her. Why can’t we write our own? It’s not morbid, I mean we all arrange life insurance for our impending death. Many of us now plan our own funeral services, even paying for them in advance. Yet with our obituaries, it is left to a friend or relative to cobble something together at the last minute, but did they really know everything about us? My relatives hardly know anything about me, and my friends even less!
So let us tell the people at our funeral who we were - in our own words.
It may be too late for my father to write one so I’ll just hope the stubborn, sly fox makes a full recovery so we can get to know him just that little better.
Sorry to hear this James because even though you weren't close he is your father and you have inherited stuff whether you like it or not. If he can't write his own obituary could you compile something from his books as the next best thing? Just a thought.
Andrea