When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone

My Dad ^{Grace Gould}

When I was younger Dad was an enigma to me. He was an exotic treat who would come and go, bringing us various trinkets and political-slogan T-shirts from his travels. He would come in, slam the door, and his energy would lift the house. On holiday we would cherish him. We would play games, hide Georgia’s teddy bears, devise elaborate adventures and cause Mum all sorts of anxiety.

After 2005 Dad changed. He returned home and became more grounded in our lives. For Dad and me this marked the beginning of a friendship. We divided life into two categories: things that amused us and things that did not. Georgia’s boyfriends occupied the former and everything in the latter was often ignored.

We found random topics to obsess over. I taught him to use BBM (the BlackBerry Messenger system) which he came to adore, bombarding me with hilarious stories or Kate Moss gossip.

He would come with me to obscure environmental conferences. We would go to the cinema and eat vegan Chinese takeouts at four in the afternoon. The funniest adventure was when Dad came with me to Glastonbury, in a purpose-bought parka. He camped for one night then booked into the nearest hotel.

Of course these years coincided with me being a horrendous teenager and I am sure these fads formed part of a Yoda-like strategy to bond with a younger daughter who could not name more than three Cabinet members, let alone a QPR player. But he made it work and we found our way to relate.

When Dad became ill he changed once again. He mellowed, his energy shifted from an over-excited bustle to quiet force. He channelled his intensity first into staying alive and then into learning how to die. Our relationship shifted too. Our irreverence for life was now directed at cancer.

I felt that during this time Dad and I became much closer. We spoke candidly about his death, his funeral, our future without him. He would talk about his insecurities, symptoms and fears. And when the time was right – and more often when it was not – we would descend into the ridiculous, joking about all the absurdities that came with cancer.

I do not think that I am the only person slightly terrified about how to live without Dad. He was the first port of call for so many. At Dad’s funeral, his close friend Noreena described how he used to sit holding court, with a constant stream of people coming to visit him for advice. Although I would never have dreamt of saying this to Dad when he was alive, he did have a fantastic gift for knowing what was going on, telling you what you should do and then reassuring you that if you did it, then everything would be OK.

Before he went to Newcastle he wrote Georgia and me each a letter to be opened only after his death, and gave us five rules for life. In his letter to me, he wrote: