Your favourite day

I decided to post on this blog when important occasions occur.

Today is your favourite day of the year! You felt that this day should be more celebrated than Christmas cos this was the day that freedom was given to all Christians all over the world.

Without today you would not be where you are!  You always made sure everyone in your community new that it was a huge day for Christians by putting up celebration posters on your window.  Wow, the window must look bare now. Everyone will know you are no longer there cos your window is empty.

Today is an important day, and I wondered if you did anything different on days like today up there?  It would be so nice to be able to pop up and take a look around but I guess once you go there you don't want to come back.  I wish you could come back for day visits every now and again, but then they would be too little and too often. I miss you xx

A final goodbye

I feel strong enough to face each day now as you would have wanted. So this is my final goodbye. I miss you terribly and feel I've lost one the most important people in my life! I love you xx

New sight Dad!

Hey Dad, this is my final post as I feel I have said everything that I needed to get out of my system. I feel this weekend that I turned a corner and so I thought I would use this post to mention sight.

Firstly I knew that you had very strong feelings over organ donation and I expressed those feelings to the intensive care staff and unfortunately the blood infection had affected your organs and so the only thing that could be used were your corneas. Amazingly thanks to your wonderful gift a man in Yorkshire has gone from being blind to being able to see. How amazing is that!!!  I feel so thrilled with that.

The other aspect of sight is from my personal point of view. I have a different outlook on life now that you are gone. I have changed I feel it. I am no longer afraid to say how I feel and to do what is best for me and my family. You cannot go through an experience like this without it changing you.

And so I have come to the end of this phase of grief. I have had 5 weeks of despair and anger and now I feel like my vision is becoming clearer and my head is coming out of the clouds. No doubt I will visit lots of negative emotions every day but I feel like everything I felt trapped in has been emptied out and I am ready to move forward in my life. I love you and will never forget you. every moment of the day you are in my thoughts but I have to make the most of this precious gift of life that you played your part in giving me.

So onward and upwards dear dad, onwards and upwards. Til we meet again, keep a place for me xxx

A great weekend, not that you missed out.

Hey Dad, I have returned from my adventure to the Charcot Marie Tooth conference in Conventry and would have had so much to tell you if you had been here.  The one thing I know is that to you it's completely irrelevant as you don't need to think about cures and treatments for CMT but I know you were a huge supporter of what they do.

I actually enjoyed myself! I really did. I was really apprehensive about the weekend, cos if anything was going to drag up all this grief, it would be talking about the one thing that was our common thread, the bit that went wrong in the four of us, but it was OK! Actually it was more than OK, it was a breath of fresh air. There were plenty of people who had lost loved ones recently and we sat and chatted about you all like one big therapy session.

I really need to take a leaf out of your book and just be me!  I mean there is nothing essentially wrong with the real me so why does she hide so much? I have come back from the conference with more work and sold a lot of choccies so that's always good.

This situation that I have found myself in is not ideal, heck it's not even comfortable, but I am determined to come out the other side a better version of me!

I am really struggling with church right now as everything reminds me of you, and I find it so hard seeing the same faces week in week out and answering the questions over "how i am". Not sure how to change that one, maybe I just do nothing and work on the real me.

One thing that does keep bugging me is that I keep, for a split second, think you are still here and within a few seconds it hits me you're not; those are the hardest moments. I wish you were still here cos life would still feel like it did xx

We should have been on a plane now

The last thing I remember seeing when I cleaned your living room was your white board that kept a list of all your important dates.  The bottom one read: April 17th USA two weeks.

Then you got ill and while you were in hospital we made the decision to postpone the trip. I'm not sure if you could hear me when  you were on the ventilator but I told you we'd do it when you got better.  All you friends in the USA were so upset at the news you were ill and were praying.  I felt so guilty for postponing the trip because everyone else couldn't go, but I couldn't go with you.

My thinking was that if you did recover and at this point there was less reason to assume you wouldn't, you would be in hospital for a long time and then needing a lot of rehabilitation. I couldn't even think about taking a trip in the middle of that.

And now I have to make that trip at some point without you. The rest of the gang will be there but with a vital member missing. How do I deal with that Dad? You'd tell me to "just get on with it".  I have amazing memories of our last trip together, even though you created riots wherever you went!  So I thought I'd share some with the readers as well:

You and Arran pretending to be great at croquet

We had lunch with the bears

eight hours on a plane could make anyone look like this

the USA make it bigger, make it badder!

You found a thrown

sneak a few of the grapes you picked

It really was this big (pity it was plastic)

Friday funkiness with Dad

This was the song you sung to me time and time again, you loved singing it in your fake country accent lol! Good times. I can look back on this and smile, thats something !!

People keep telling me...

Hey Dad,

People keep telling me that you were an inspiration, that you were a breath of fresh air, someone who told it like it was, please or offend. I keep hearing people say that you lived every day for God and that you did everything asked of you and so you had run your race, earlier than most, but none the less you had completed the work set for you.

Everyone misses you, many wish you could come back. There's no one to take your place and I guess never will. That's what happens when you live your life in such a way that it affects everyone around you! And I think that it's not until a person has gone that this is really known. Depending on how you live your life, depends on the size of the hole you leave. Well you my dear dad, have left a massive hole. Me and the boys have a giant hole following us around and many others feel the loss of you not being here.

So I thought that this would be a great tribute to you: