Burying My Father ; When His Father Died, Simon Mills Thought It Was the End of the Story. In Fact, As He Cleared the Family Home, It Was the Start of an Incredibly Poignant Voyage of Discovery

Summary

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mY DAD died in 2005. I got a call one evening telling me that he'd been taken ill and I drove up to Yorkshire from London, arriving at his hospital bedside to hold his hand and kiss his head as he took his final, oddly comedic, snore-like breaths.

MI hated leaving him there all bloated and puce with an uncharacteristic-snarl on his kind face. But what else could I do? He was 79 years old and had been felled by a massive stroke. These things happen every day.

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Burying My Father ; When His Father Died, Simon Mills Thought It Was the End of the Story. In Fact, As He Cleared the Family Home, It Was the Start of an Incredibly Poignant Voyage of Discovery

As dawn broke, my older brother and I drove back to Dad's house just outside Hull - the same house that we had grown up in, our family house for almost 50 years - and started to clear things up. Endless black bags were filled and we lit a garden bonfire for our father's stacks of extraneous, meticulously maintained paperwork. Neither of us had slept a wink all night but, high on the adrenaline rush of bereavement, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

It was my particular, horrible bad luck to find the bloody skid in the bathroom where Dad had collapsed, the damaged sink corner where he'd hit his head and the cu...

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