THIS DAY CHANGED ME. FOREVER.

MONDAY MUSINGS - How February holds new meaning now

I had promised to tell you about Michael this week.

But I’m pushing Michael back another week. Because I needed to write something else this weekend that was just occupying my mind too much for me to write about something else.

So I hope you’ll come back next week, so I can tell you about Michael.

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I live alone, but every Sunday I make a roast, I even have a summer roast variation.

I make enough veg just for me, then me and the cat eat the chicken during the week, and then I make bone broth with whatever is left.

So, you see, making a Sunday roast, just for one is actually perfectly reasonable.

Yesterday morning, I prepped the veg for my roast and simultaneously made some vegetable soup for the next couple of lunches. As I watched the curled peel of potato skin drop into my bubbling pot for vegetable stock, I felt a sense of Deja vu.

As I say, I do this routine pretty much every Sunday, of course it feels familiar? But then it hit me that on this exact Sunday last year I had performed this routine with great precision and well ahead of schedule. For no other reason than I had woken early and had a productive morning.

I’d also changed the bedding, hoovered and put a wash on.

As I took my phone off charge, I looked down to see a message from Mum.

“He’s gone. I was just with him, but now he’s gone.”

I don’t think I really read the rest. I knew it meant something, but I also didn’t know what it meant.

But I knew it meant something.

I FaceTimed her, and she was sobbing.

It did mean something.

On Sunday 2^nd February 2025, my dad died suddenly. One minute there and the next minute gone - in the chair in the care home where he had been living for just over two months. My mum had been with him moments before he became unresponsive. As she put the key in the door to return home she got the call.

“He’s gone.”

There’s so much more I could say about this day, but I’ll save that for my Dementia Diaries, which one day I will get round to editing and sharing.

But the one thing I will say today, when I feel it the most strongly, as I come face to face with this day again, after another trip round the sun.

This day changed me. Forever.

In the most profound, intricate and visceral of ways.

It it the strangest sensation, where there is both burden in the pressure of the weight you have carried and the load you have shed.

The last time I saw my dad alive was on Boxing Day 2024, so six weeks before he died, but he had Facetimed me following this visit. I work full time and he is 2.5hrs drive away from where I live and I didn’t know when I would next be able to visit, so I tried to spend some time alone with him that day. I actually got him on a good day and he was patient and pleasant (mostly!) and he showed some level of affection toward me. This was in great contrast to the day before when my mum and I had gone to see him on Christmas Day and he was incredibly horrible and difficult to us both, and then put his head down on the table and fell asleep.

We knew this would come, but we also never saw this coming.

I saw him for the last time on Sunday 2^nd February 2025, after the life had left his body, and two men stood outside with a trolley and a burgundy cloak waiting to take him away.

He felt warm, and none of it felt real.

I found myself strangely gesturing a pat on his lifeless shoulder – as if to say, what a bloody shame you just couldn’t see the joy in life and made yourself happier. What if everything just wasn’t so difficult all the time, because you saw it all differently? How much happier you could have been Dad.

He dreaded the prospect of being weak and feeble, he never could face his decline. He never believed ‘these things’ would happen to him. He offered no flexibility or adaptability and lay stubbornly within ‘his ways’, until he was ready to attempt to discreetly distance himself from ‘said belief’, never to be mentioned again as this was now erased from all existence in his mind.

Somewhere within that shoulder pat, I felt a deep sadness for him that he never experienced that feeling of true freedom from anger and frustration and regret, and now he never will. He perhaps didn’t deserve my sadness, but I felt it, nevertheless.

I think this is the feeling that still continues to tug on my heart strings every time I think of my dad. The sadness that he never had the openness to allow himself to experience real joy and happiness, and sadly that meant he inflicted that on most others around him too.

It feels like a year that has gone very quickly and it all still feels so fresh. For something that I can state as having ‘changed me, forever’ – I can’t say I’ve really changed too much in the last year. I think a lot of the last year has been about loss, shedding and stillness. I truly felt the stagnancy of the last year, time stood still to enable me and my family to roll with the punches.

Whilst losing my dad will likely be one of my most significant losses that I will experience in my lifetime. I cannot deny I have also gained from this loss.

I gained personal and professional perspective.

I gained strengthened relations with other members of my family.

I gained a deeper understanding of my own family dynamics and the ability to speak freely.

I gained the freedom to be unapologetically myself for perhaps the first time in my life, without judgement or consequence.

From a professional perspective in relation to my role as a palliative care nurse, this experience has given me a deeper understanding, and a more empathetic perspective.

Because my role generally ends when someone has died, I never had the opportunity to experience and understand the level of ‘death admin’ each individual requires, how funerals are planned, how grief is navigated within the complex families I have supported up to the point of the death of their loved one. I didn’t even really know how to go about getting the death certificate, and how many people will require an original copy! My dad’s death was also referred to the coroner due to the sudden nature and this added further complications to the already complex and highly emotive time after the loss of a loved one.

The death of my dad will make me a better clinician, it will allow me a richer insight, and I hope this will feel apparent to my patients and their families, so I can better support them.

Initially, my dad never really understood my choice to become a nurse. But I can genuinely say I know he was proud of what I achieved in my nursing career in the end. He made this known to me, which wasn’t like him. I know he was proud of me for getting a second degree in my 30’s and getting through those 3 years when I faced some great problems in my personal life alongside juggling studying, placements and working as as bank HCA to pay my rent!

I do know he was proud of that. Even when he couldn’t really remember.

I started off saying that I haven’t really changed much in the last year, and that the time that has passed feels quite stagnant, but the more I actually think about it, perspective, understanding, acceptance and professional development are actually huge positive changes.

I read somewhere that yesterday 1^st February – known as Imbolc – is the start of Celtic Spring.

Imbolc is the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. Representing renewal, purification and hope, as Winter begins to loosen it’s grip.

A grip was loosened deep within my soul that day last year. Sadly, my dad dying on or around Imbolc did symbolically mean that without the harshness of his ‘wintery’ nature, roots could be established and new growth could flourish and bloom.

And that’s where I am at – one year on. Strengthening my roots, standing tall, allowing myself to bloom and to thrive without the harshness of winter or those who make us feel oppressed.

Free from judgement, richer in perspective, stronger in my bones and my character.

I am only ever more determined to see and feel the things he never would have appreciated.

A year on.

I still think about him every day.

I still feel angry with him most days.

My family feels stronger and more connected without him here.

I often battle with the guilt of favouring the freedom.

I survived a lot last year.

Sunday 2^nd February 2025 changed me, forever.