New Home

Moving is a bizarre business, I always think about when I will feel natural in my new environment. I saw that Robyn tried to put an easter egg into the egg holder in the fridge, but it was too small, Terence did stuff like that all the time, stupid silly little practical jokes I guess you’d call them. I didn’t realise, how much of what I experienced and saw was the result of his actions.

Today I used the term ‘deceased father’ for the first time, without any consideration it just came out, it’s the first time, in my referencing him I’ve made that distinction. I’m doing pretty well I think, I’m not crushed by it or anything, it’s just remembering his eyes on the day he died, wide, like he was seeing something new and foreign, his face had lost it’s natural expression, I guess the last time he didn’t really understand the world around him it was when he was a young child, you don’t see any adults walking around eyes wide open trying to take in, and understand the world from scratch. He looked at me a lot, some things I’d like to know I guess, whether he retained his intelligence in the last week, whether he could still think, if he had the cognitive abilities as he did a few weeks before hand, god he died fast, just, disappeared, I remember thinking when Christine and Jill were here, that they might have rushed their visit since he’ll still be around for a fair while, he died less than a week after they left. It was, the day he had to go to hospital, when I arrived with him by ambulance, the nurses were very kind, praising me for looking after him in his condition, which I disagreed with, because there was my father, who couldn’t even talk properly now, so I said, pointing to Terence ‘Look what I’ve done.’ They said no I did well. At the time, I believed something false, that I was bringing Terence there to get better, they thought I brought Terence there to die, they were raising me for was for looking after him at home so close to the end. That, really hurts to be honest.

My big problem now is feeling sorry for myself, if I allow myself to feel sad it just snowballs until I’m a wreck, but if I keep it together, I can function fairly normally, not crippled with sadness.

It’s a peculiar situation, Terence didn’t want to go into hospital because he felt he wouldn’t come back out, in other words he would die there. This turned out to be true, but only because of this belief, the septicemia that look a hold of him a day or so before we took him in was what put the nail in the coffin, in an already weakened state having your own circulatory system filled with bacteria is reliably fatal.