Dad's death and funeral
Aug. 5th, 2019 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackDad died a couple of weeks ago and the funeral was last week.
Death
Saturday night (Jul 15) Mum phoned to say Dad had a heart attack.
Coincidentally, Rachel and I had been planning a week away, so I was half way through packing anyway. I decided that it was better to finish packing, since an extra hour was unlikely to make any difference. Rachel was away, but Colin and Houseguest were really lovely at helping me get ready and arranging to take care of things in Cambridge.
I drove to the hospital in Worcs from there. There were some traffic and roadworks, but it was late enough there was not too much.
And we waited nervously overnight in the inner waiting room at the ICU. At first there was some mildly optimistic news, he was breathing by himself. Lots of people recover from heart attacks.
But by the time the consultant came on rounds early in the morning, things didn't look good. From the scans they thought a lot of his gut had died, and needed to be removed with surgery. But the chances of surviving surgery were very low.
The consultant and surgeon and nurses were very very helpful, explaining what the situation was, avoiding making things more difficult, being clear what the trade offs were. This remains true of everyone else at the hospital.
Surgery took quite a long time. He survived that, but there was clearly something else seriously wrong as well. Over the next two days, we got indications in various different directions. All the time the news was "he is really unlikely to survive, but even if it's a 10% chance or less, they'll keep trying, some people in that situation come through."
In the end, the picture emerged, that he'd had a cancer, a leukemia, which had made him tired and infection prone for several weeks before that, but not enough to ring any warnings bells with his GP. That led to the damage to his gut, which gave him a heart attack. Then all that together generally made him weaker and weaker, fought against by all the ICU machines doing... most of what his organs do. And we waited to see if (a) he'd recover enough to be able to survive even mild chemotherapy and (b) if the tests came back saying what kind of cancer/lymphoma/leukemia it was and if the sort of chemo it needed was sufficiently mild he might be able to survive it. But almost simultaneously the news came back that he was fading, and the treatment he'd need wasn't one he'd be able to survive, and then came the time to turn some of the machines off :(
And we all sat with him, or in the inner waiting room, for a while, and did some crying, etc.
One of his oldest friends came to the hospital, just about then, after mum had called her, even though we hadn't even known if she was in the country. And Rachel had managed to come up a day earlier and stay with us too.
In between
Rachel and I were off work anyway, so we spent some time with mum, some time with our friends we'd originally planned to see, some time when I went back to spend some more time with mum without Rachel.
I visited again the next weekend, and then the funeral was the following week.
Mum did amazingly well organising the funeral and a lot of other practicalities, and I and others helped when we could. Rachel was really lovely to me.
Funeral
It went very well, a lot of people came, and it was good to have them there. We planned an order of service that worked very well, and fit dad very well, which I wasn't sure what that would look like beforehand, but what mum proposed worked very very well.
We're all very, very sad. It is very very strange without Dad. But we are mostly coping well. Mum is working her way through practicalities. We are making sure to see each other fairly often.
Death
Saturday night (Jul 15) Mum phoned to say Dad had a heart attack.
Coincidentally, Rachel and I had been planning a week away, so I was half way through packing anyway. I decided that it was better to finish packing, since an extra hour was unlikely to make any difference. Rachel was away, but Colin and Houseguest were really lovely at helping me get ready and arranging to take care of things in Cambridge.
I drove to the hospital in Worcs from there. There were some traffic and roadworks, but it was late enough there was not too much.
And we waited nervously overnight in the inner waiting room at the ICU. At first there was some mildly optimistic news, he was breathing by himself. Lots of people recover from heart attacks.
But by the time the consultant came on rounds early in the morning, things didn't look good. From the scans they thought a lot of his gut had died, and needed to be removed with surgery. But the chances of surviving surgery were very low.
The consultant and surgeon and nurses were very very helpful, explaining what the situation was, avoiding making things more difficult, being clear what the trade offs were. This remains true of everyone else at the hospital.
Surgery took quite a long time. He survived that, but there was clearly something else seriously wrong as well. Over the next two days, we got indications in various different directions. All the time the news was "he is really unlikely to survive, but even if it's a 10% chance or less, they'll keep trying, some people in that situation come through."
In the end, the picture emerged, that he'd had a cancer, a leukemia, which had made him tired and infection prone for several weeks before that, but not enough to ring any warnings bells with his GP. That led to the damage to his gut, which gave him a heart attack. Then all that together generally made him weaker and weaker, fought against by all the ICU machines doing... most of what his organs do. And we waited to see if (a) he'd recover enough to be able to survive even mild chemotherapy and (b) if the tests came back saying what kind of cancer/lymphoma/leukemia it was and if the sort of chemo it needed was sufficiently mild he might be able to survive it. But almost simultaneously the news came back that he was fading, and the treatment he'd need wasn't one he'd be able to survive, and then came the time to turn some of the machines off :(
And we all sat with him, or in the inner waiting room, for a while, and did some crying, etc.
One of his oldest friends came to the hospital, just about then, after mum had called her, even though we hadn't even known if she was in the country. And Rachel had managed to come up a day earlier and stay with us too.
In between
Rachel and I were off work anyway, so we spent some time with mum, some time with our friends we'd originally planned to see, some time when I went back to spend some more time with mum without Rachel.
I visited again the next weekend, and then the funeral was the following week.
Mum did amazingly well organising the funeral and a lot of other practicalities, and I and others helped when we could. Rachel was really lovely to me.
Funeral
It went very well, a lot of people came, and it was good to have them there. We planned an order of service that worked very well, and fit dad very well, which I wasn't sure what that would look like beforehand, but what mum proposed worked very very well.
We're all very, very sad. It is very very strange without Dad. But we are mostly coping well. Mum is working her way through practicalities. We are making sure to see each other fairly often.
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Date: 2019-08-05 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-05 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-05 01:54 pm (UTC)I wish there was a way to make this kind of thing easier or better.
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Date: 2019-08-05 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-08-05 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-05 05:14 pm (UTC)It comes us all: I was, for a moment, going to say that nothing makes it easier; but actually, the people around us - friends, lovers, partners - actually, they do.
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Date: 2019-08-05 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-08-07 10:27 am (UTC)