A thimble of pineapple juice

The final few weeks of Dad’s life weren't easy; stating the obvious when describing the last days of a man’s battle with liver and bowel cancer, perhaps, but I feel like it’s worth saying nonetheless.

As Dad’s health had deteriorated considerably, the hospital arranged for a bed to be put in the living room because getting upstairs had become too difficult. District nurses came every day. He had been doggedly hauling himself upstairs for a couple of weeks, sometimes taking a couple of breaks on the way, and I organised for a bannister to be fitted to the open side of the staircase so he'd have something to hold onto as he Edmund Hillaried his way to the summit.

He never got to use it.

His greatest innovation during those last few weeks wasn't medicinal, however. It was discovering that a Lenor fabric conditioner bottle had exactly the right sized neck to have a piss in without leaving the sofa. Trust Dad to identify the market leader.

He turned sixty-one on 29th May 2020. The country was in lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. By that point, the cancer had robbed him of most of his appetite, so when he announced that what he really fancied for his birthday was one of my steaks off the barbecue, nobody argued.

Sarah and the kids came. Lisa and Lee. Holly and Lyla. Brownie and Daley.

We cooked. We laughed. We reminisced. Most importantly, we took the absolute piss out of the silly little fucker. Indiscriminately. It was magic.

As he got more tired, we started to filter out of the garden, and Brownie and Daley each got a watery-eyed handshake that evolved into a hug. I can't say with absolute certainty, but I think Dad knew that birthday mattered. That wasn't simply a birthday. It was goodbye.

There were another eight days after that. Eight days in which the cancer carried on doing exactly what cancer does. His appetite, already little more than a rumour, disappeared almost entirely. Every day seemed to take something else from him, so we decided to allow ourselves special dispensation from the COVID rules and allowed the grandkids to be particularly socially undistanced from Dad. It was the right decision, and I'll die on that fucking hill.

Things really took a turn towards the end of the first week of June, and we all started to be around the house a lot more.

At one point on the 7th June, Dad asked for a drink. Mum quietly asked whether he meant water… or alcohol. Not because I think she suspected he'd suddenly started craving booze again, and not because I think she'd have refused him if that's what he'd wanted. I think she wondered, without judgement, if now his brain was starting to shut down, he'd reverted to type.

After everything they'd been through together, if a dying man had wanted one last brandy, I suspect she'd have poured it herself. She just needed to know.

He wasn't asking for alcohol. He was simply thirsty.

For the last few weeks, he'd developed a real taste for pineapple juice. We'd run out and the shops were shut seeing as it was so late, but Mum happened to have a whole pineapple in the fridge, so I did what I always seem to do when faced with something I can't fix; I looked for something I could.

I remember trying to beat that pineapple into becoming something resembling a drink while making as much of a performance out of it as possible. Partly because making people laugh has always been my default setting. Partly because if everyone was watching me making a complete tit of myself, they weren't thinking quite so much about why we were all standing in that kitchen at nearly midnight on a Sunday in the first place.

I got about a thimbles worth of juice out of an entire pineapple in approximately 43 minutes of Hall Of Fame Bellendery. Still, we had a laugh...

By then, Mum had discovered that the best way to help him quench his thirst was to dip a toothbrush into a glass of water and hold it to his mouth so he could suck the moisture from the bristles, so that's what she did.

Sarah and I stayed with him through the night. Mum hadn't really slept for days, so at one point Sarah persuaded her to go and lie down for a while. Sarah sat with Dad instead, holding his hand as he flitted in and out of consciousness, and I laid on the sofa next to his bed and drifted between sleep, and listening to his breath.

Sometime during the night, in a brief moment of lucidity, he looked at Sarah and quietly said,

"We're all good now, love."

Given that they hadn't always seen eye to eye, I think they both knew exactly how much those five words meant.