This day last year repeated over and over in my head. Crippled by grief, by regret, by guilt. Wishing I had an hour, a measly hour to talk to you before that bastard disease took your brain.
This morning walking the fields with the pigs and the dogs. The sun shining in a deep blue sky. You would have loved it here. You loved being outside.
Dad, I woke this morning before 4am, about the time I left you last year, to get some sleep. I didn’t think you were going to go so soon, but you did. You never woke up. You never had that lucid few moments you hear some people have. You took your last breath with your youngest children holding your hands.
I got the call before 7am and we raced back down to the nursing home. If I could now have that hour with you I would tell you…….
There isn’t a day or a part of a day that I don’t think about you.
I see you on the beach every time I see the sun’s long shadows on shells.
I think of you when the wind is onshore or offshore or rippling on the tide racing in on sinking sands.
I saw you in the stars last night through the bathroom velux and then this morning I read the poem on your memorial “I am the soft starlight at night”…….
I think of you on cold frosty nights. “It’s perishing”, you would say as you felt the radiator.
I think of you when I see old men with their backs to me wearing beige coats and flat caps.
I think of you every time I walk the dogs. “Let them off the lead to have a run”…..
I think of you every time I see some “dirty looking eijit” driving on the beach. You’d have gone mad at that.
I ask myself so often – where are you? Can you see us? Do you know what we are all doing?
Do you know we miss you? And.
Does this get any easier?
Uppedsticks with Pigs 