One humid evening at the height of a Queensland summer, I was brushing sand off my two young boys after a day on the beach when my phone rang. It was my mum in the UK with tragic news. My dad had received a shock diagnosis. He had cancer in five places and only had weeks left to live.
I bought a ticket on the first available flight and took off early the next morning. My children, three and five, remained in Australia with their dad, who would have to take time off work to look after them. I’d only ever been apart from them for a night or two. I would have eight days at my dad’s side. After that I would somehow have to say goodbye, knowing full well it was the last time I would ever see him.
In my cramped economy class seat, I tried to imagine my dad in a hospital bed, surrounded by chemical smells and medical gadgetry. I couldn’t. He belonged in the hills and mountains with his ice axe or skis.
For the thirty hours of the journey, I wondered where I would find the strength to get through this. How could I visit my dad in hospital without breaking down? My dad was born the year the Second World War began. Like many of his generation, he rarely showed emotion and hated it when others did. Somehow I would have to hold my grief in check.
Since I moved to Australia fourteen years ago, I’d only seen my dad for a few weeks here and there. My parents had flown out to see me last year. I’d been saving for air tickets for me and the boys to visit them that summer, with a very different sort of trip in mind.
I was lucky, I reminded myself. So few people get the chance to say goodbye.
It was zero degrees when my plane landed in Manchester. There was frost on the tarmac. I hadn’t seen frost for years. I shivered as I waited for my baggage to arrive. I’d packed the warmest clothes I owned but it wasn’t enough. When I arrived at my parents’ place, my mum lent me my dad’s fleece. It smelt of him. Comforting, but at the same time it made me want to cry.
I caught the bus to the hospital with my mum. My dad blinked when I entered his cubicle, as though he wasn’t sure if he was seeing things, then he broke into a huge smile.
I tried not to stare at his bony shoulders in his hospital gown. He’d lost so much weight. Gently, carefully, I hugged him. His frail body seemed half the size it used to be.
“How long are you over here for?” he asked.
“I fly back next Tuesday,” I said.
I saw him calculating how many days he had with his oldest child. How long until our final goodbye.
We skirted around the idea of his death, careful not to refer to it directly, and instead shared happy memories of the past. My childhood camping holidays; the precious ski trips in my teenage years which sparked my dreams of becoming a snowboarder.
The visit passed so quickly. I could only stay for half an hour. After that he grew tired.
“The doctors want him to eat,” my mum told me that evening. “To keep his strength up.”
We shared a wry smile. For the last twenty years it had been the opposite and she’d had to ration him.
I gathered together the most calorie-laden food I could find in my parents’ kitchen. Butter, dark chocolate, digestive biscuits, nuts and raisins. I crushed the biscuits and melted the mixture down to make chocolate biscuit-crumb cake.
My dad ate a little the next day but probably only to keep me happy.
The following day, remembering how the solid texture was hard work for him, I took raspberries. He’d always loved raspberries and used to grow them in our garden when I was little.
“I thought you needed some vitamin C,” I told him. “Good for your immune system.”
His bark of a laugh said it all. There was no helping his poor immune system this time.
His frail fingers picked raspberries from the box, one by one. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve eaten all week.”
I took him raspberries every day after that. There was, after all, nothing else I could do for him.
Always that terrible sense of the clock ticking. We talked over each other sometimes, in our hurry to say all we wanted to in the little time we had left. Sometimes the clock ticked so loudly it killed the conversation, but it was enough to just be with him.
I took some old photos in. My dad as a young man on a spiky summit in battered climbing boots.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
He couldn’t remember; the pain medication had fuddled his usually sharp brain. But his face creased into a smile at the next one. “Oh, yes,” he said. The first time he’d taken us to the Alps: me and my sister with big, bloody grazes on our knees.
His death was the elephant in the room. Neither of us referred to it. I sensed very strongly that he didn’t want to talk about it. And neither did I.
Every day, he checked how much longer I was staying. His feigned nonchalance as he asked the question nearly broke my heart.
On the second-to-last day, his bony hand rummaged through his little stack of belongings for paper and a pen. Trembly letters formed in his terrible handwriting, made even more terrible because of how his hand was shaking. Big hugs and kisses to all.
He handed it to me. “For the boys.”
Tears ran down my cheeks. I pressed my lips together and held my body rigid, desperate for him not to see. My silence must have given me away.
“No tears,” he said sternly.
I clamped my eyes shut, fighting for control.
“I had a good life,” he said.
Even now, I look back in amazement. His pain was clearly intense, despite his effort to hide it, but he somehow found the strength – the graciousness – to say that. It was clear as well that he believed it.
He’d worked long hours, but every chance he got, he headed to the hills – the Lake District, the Peak District, Scotland and the Alps – with my mum and a wide circle of friends who shared his passion for the outdoors. Yes, I decided. He had had a good life. And that offered me a small comfort.
Not daring to speak, I tucked the paper into my pocket. I show it to my boys now and then. From Grandad.
On the last day, we didn’t say much. What could we say? I’d lain awake the previous night, wondering. I couldn’t tell him goodbye. I just couldn’t. I would tell him: “I love you,” as I hugged him, I decided. But I would say it quickly, then hold my breath a moment, or I might let out a sob.
All too soon, my dad lay back against his pillow, exhausted. The ticking clock grew deafening.
“I should leave you to rest,” I said.
We stared at each other. The moment had come.
“No tears,” he reminded.
His bony hands gripped my shoulders. Our final hug.
“I love you,” I said.
He gave me a peculiar little shake that told me so much more than he could say out loud.
Head down, I walked out of his cubicle. Out of his ward and out of the hospital. Along the road to the bus stop, every step taking me further away from him. Turn around, screamed the voice in my head. Spend a few more precious minutes with him while you still can. I hadn’t had nearly enough time with him.
But if I went back in, I’d have no way of hiding how upset I was and he would have hated that. Besides, it would only prolong the agony. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s never enough time.
Numbly I ate dinner with my mum. That night I thought of my dad in his hospital bed just ten kilometres away. So near and yet so far. Soon it would soon be ten thousand kilometres and it may as well already be ten thousand because visiting hours had finished for the day, and my flight took off early the next morning.
I would never see him again. I curled in a ball, wracked with sobs.
When my taxi pulled up at Departures, I wanted it to turn around and drive me to the hospital for one last visit to my dad. But my young children needed me. They’d been sick while I was away and my little family was in chaos. I couldn’t leave them any longer or their father might lose his job.
My mum’s expression was fierce as she pulled me in for a hug. We couldn’t go to pieces. Not there. We had to hold our sadness in and let it out in private, in careful controlled bursts.
My dad passed away three weeks later. I cried; of course I did. But his words rang through my head, biting through my grief. “I had a good life.”
Three months after his death I got the idea for my thriller SHIVER. I’m not religious or superstitious, nor was my dad, but sometimes it feels as though SHIVER came from him. A last gift – and a life-changing one. My book deal allowed me to leave an unhappy marriage and support my children while working from home as a full-time writer.
Losing my dad changed my outlook. I no longer sweat the small stuff. When my time comes, I hope that I, too, can look back and say: I had a good life. Time is precious. Follow your dreams. My dad inspired me in death, just as he did in life.
SHIVER by Allie Reynolds is out now, by Headline books.