The end is nigh.

Professor Gumby

 7 weeks since diagnosis. 7 little weeks that have felt like 7 years. Every time we have made plans, something else has malfunctioned and we’ve had to change them. Now is no exception. The plan was to get him moving again after the pelvic fracture and although he’d still be paralysed from the waist downwards, an extra little treat courtesy of the spinal tumour compressing the spinal column, we could get him home, set him up in the living room and carry on our chaotic existence with him in the middle of it, issuing orders and chatting to the dog. Then, at the very end, he wants to go to the hospice and die there.

Except that once again it’s all gone tits up.

Mum just rang from the hospital, his breathing has deteriorated and they’ve had to tranquilise him. The ward says they’re going everything they can, which means they have no idea whether it is the end but they suspect it might be. She’s going to ring me from the ward before 11 to let me know how he’s doing and during the night if I need to come in. Tactful code for ‘if he’s going to die soon’. He didn’t want to die in hospital, he wanted to die in the hospice and if this bastarding disease denies even that tiny kindness I will be utterly fucking furious.

The doctor is coming to see us at ten am tomorrow, assuming he isn’t dead by then. Quite what they’re going to say is a mystery because I fail to see how they can enlighten us beyond ‘he’s got raging lung cancer and everything is shutting down’. We need to find out whether we can get him transferred to the hospice for treatment.

I’ve never seen anyone die before. He’s my dad and I feel like I should be more hysterical, he’s 58 for fuck’s sake and this whole thing has been utterly gruesome but I’m not, I’m calmer than when his legs stopped working and certainly calmer than when we first got the diagnosis and d’you know why? Because he’s gone already, there’s flashes of him, the way he’s trying to take care of us all, a flash of humour that breaks through the drugs and the pain but the everyday dad we had is disappearing day by day and I’ve already started mourning him. That first bit of grief, the one where it’s all so new and freshly painful, I’ve done that bit and moved onto the steady ache. I don’t doubt that it’s going to get so so much worse when he does die but I can see now that wanting him to stay longer is selfish, it’s for my benefit and not for his. Every day something new fails and hurts, I can’t ask him to stay longer if he’s ready to go now because I don’t want him to be in pain and I wouldn’t want to live that way. I wouldn’t expect my dog to live on in this condition, I can’t expect my father to do so jsut because I don’t want to let go.

In our family we don’t talk much about emotions. Ever. Not big ones, the ones that matter. The other day Mr V advised me that if I can’t say the things that matter to him I should write them down and so, fortified with wine-based courage on Saturday I did just that. I wrote down all the things I was thinking, what he meant to me and how much I thought of him. I put the letter in an early father’s day card and nearly didn’t give it to him but in the end I handed it over and told him to read it when I left. I’m so glad now that I did, that he won’t go with no idea that I thought he was a great father and without knowing that I’ll do my best for Mike and Mum when he’s gone. It was a hard letter to write because how do you write goodbye to someone you thought you’d have another 25 years with? Someone who shouldn’t be going when you’re 31? You shouldn’t have to because cancer shouldn’t take down good people but yet somehow it always seems to. Clarey’s mum, chaz’s mum, Katie’s mum, Andy’s dad, my dad, all wonderful, funny, warm people who’d do anything for you and only one whose disease didn’t turn out to be terminal.

Cancer is fucking hideous. It really is. If I can ever find some way to get rid of this fucking abysmal disease I will do it. I know that some of you have experienced this but I hope that none of the rest of you do because it’s bloody horrendous.