Dad

Tomorrow it will be a year since an aneurysm tore Dad's heart apart.

I am still tender, still miss him, still struggle sometimes to deal with my own conflicted feelings about him. No big surprise really.

Today I choose to remember the last time I saw him. It was a good day but I didn't know that he would be dead the next. He had come for lunch. My mother was holding a charity bridge tournament and he fled some twenty ladies who would be there for the day. We had such fun, he and I. Talking intensely as we always did. Subjects as varied as the global recession, wills and estate planning, running a professional accounting practice, birds, gardening and family stories. He reminisced about Great Uncle Cecil who was never quite right in the head as a result of spending three days stuck in a tree in 1910 with a pride of lions eating his horse below him. Back then Zimbabwe was still largely wilderness!

We talked also about his will. It seemed on his mind. He made his wishes clear and wound up by asking me to look after my mother. I didn't think about it much. Mum and I had never been really close and so I imagined that my sister can do that bit and I'll do the money. Easy promise to keep I thought.

As ever that's not what happened. My sister decided to leave for England and left me to look after Mum in the broadest sense of that word. Not that she is helpless for she is fit and strong at seventy nine, but she needs time and attention as we all do. Astonishingly a year later we have learned to like each other, and to have fun together. Yesterday we laughed and laughed at the antics on Os the eight week old kitten Small came home with last week.

Here is perhaps one of Dad's final gift to me. A relationship with my mother that is worth having and which I am beginning to treasure.