I remember when my old man was going, I was out here in Germany and him home in Cambridgeshire UK and the last time I was over to see him before he died. The family going on constantly, "you can`t do this, can`t do that, and for gods sake you can`t say this and say that either"
My old man was military through and through. I walked into the living room, him sat there in his favourate chair, me stood in the doorway, and him not having any idea that I was coming over to see him.
"F*ck me dad, you look like shit!"
"Who the hell let you i?!" was all he said with the biggest grin on his face and fire in his eyes that the family had seen in months.
I made a cuppa and we chatted for hours, me getting angry looks from the family every couple of minutes.
The conversation went round and round all night with him coming back to "if it weren`t for the cancer, I`d only smoke myself to death anyway" as he would pass me his backy and papers, to roll him one with a big grin on his face.
At the end of us chatting all he said was "Thank you", and me I am like , "For what?"
"For being my son, and Not pretending that it will all be all right"
All he wanted was to chat, about life and death and the world in general. Just being normal without others pussy footing around subjects on Cancer and death because it made "Them" uncomfortable.
He never spoke about his time in the Military, all 22 years of it. But as a kid you noticed he was often not there and caught snippetts of info from the news or orderly room when the unit was out and about. But as I got older and joined up myself, you knew he had looked death in the eye on more than one occasion, and for this last fight all he wanted was someone who knew and understood, to have his back and laugh with him in the face of death.
The last thing he said that night was asking me "`ere boy, you got any change for the ferryman" The family getting hysterical that he was going to die there and then on the spot. That night he died in his sleep. And I have often wondered if he waited for us to see each other first. A couple of days later he was cremated. But I got to give him his tuppence for the ferry and a bag of Old Virginia for the trip.
My family were to busy packing him in cotton wool and doting him that they lost the old black humored stubborn old git before he even died. Enough to say that even at his funeral they walked all over his last wishes, and totaly ignored his last requests. Maybe one reason I have nothing to do with them any more.
