Ok so I'll start off by saying this will probably go on a bit and most of you (assuming anyone does indeed actually read this) won't even know the person who is the subject of this post, but this is kinda for my own benefit. I think the word is cathartic, right? It's a subject I've never poured out on before but I've found that writing stuff like this helps me in some strange way.
20 years ago today my life changed forever; and as far as I'm concerned, I changed too. I got a phone call from my brother in the early hours of the morning to say my Dad had died of a heart attack. Although he'd had a heart attack a few years previously, this was at a time he was fit as a fiddle so it was pretty much out of the blue. He died in his sleep so at least he didn't suffer. He didn't deserve to suffer, he was a good man, the best, so the least we could be grateful for, despite him being taken from us so young at 69 years old, was that it was painless for him.
I don't believe in God so I don't know who to blame, but who/whatever is to blame, I hate it with a burning passion. Hate the fact that my Dad was taken from us so early. Hate the fact that despite him being such a loving, caring, soft hearted man who never swore, never said a bad word about anyone, always put others before himself, I could go on, he was robbed from my life way too soon. I know I'll be told that I should cherish the happy memories from his life and that I shouldn't feel bitterness about it, I get that, I wish I could feel that way, but even 20 years later I'm still struggling with that thought process.
You see the problem is, I'm not blessed with a great memory. I forget what I've gone upstairs for before I get to the top of the stairs, I forget what I did 2 hours ago, I have to rely on my phone to remind me of all kinds of stuff that most intelligent humans manage themselves. Having said that I can remember 5th November 1995 as if it was 5 minutes ago. I fell to my knees when my brother broke the news to me on the phone that day. I won't repeat it here but I remember the exact words he spoke to me, I can actually hear him in my head as I write this, I remember my short reply and I remember feeling completely numb. And I remember just feeling like someone had smashed me to pieces with a hammer. The pieces eventually got put back together but I'm not entirely sure they were put back together in the same order they were in before.
I'm 50 years old next year and in terms of memories, I remember very little from childhood. I have snippets forever planted in my brain, goals I scored (my Dad was usually jumping up and down on the touchline at that point, except for the week he upped the goal reward he used to pay me to 50p and I scored a hat trick!), fights I had at school, the time I got nicked for retrieving tennis balls from the railway line, you know the kinda things that would stick in your mind, but I remember very little about every day life with my Dad. I just have a general glow of warmth in my mind about him when I think of him. Don't get me wrong, we fell out over stuff, he could drive you mad with his absent mindedness on occasion, so he wasn't perfect but he was a proper old school fella who would do anything for anyone. A dying breed frankly.
So with this memory gap in mind, it came as a pleasant surprise to me a little while back when my Mum produced a set of diaries that my dad had kept from 1987 to the very night before he passed away. A daily diary no less.
I remember him keeping a diary but I'd forgotten all about it until they appeared. My brother had kept them for a while but though he'd tried to read them a combination of Dad's handwriting and one thing or another had curtailed him from getting too far with them. So I took them off his hands and started at 1987.
It's fairly mundane stuff in the main, I mean he literally wrote about EVERYTHING he did each day in there! But I loved reading it because I could hear him saying the words in my head. I have photos of him and one old wedding video that he's in that I can no longer watch as I don't have a video machine, but for some reason having his actual words that he wrote on a page, with a pen, no matter how mundane, is so much better.
As well as that, the diaries are also an amazing account of my life with him and others over an 8 year period, about which my mind was mostly blank about. Just boring stuff like me running him up to Sainsburys (more on that later), him helping me fix stuff on my succession of unreliable cars, me helping him shovel cow shit (manure, as he would obviously describe it in the diary!) into bag after bag in some godforsaken field in Essex for him to then cart home (in the back of my bloody car I might add!) to his allotment. As I say it's quite mundane to anyone else but to me it is precious. Because every new day/page I turn in that diary a new memory is brought to mind and I can't tell you how special that is to me.
I'm still working my way through the diaries, I dip into it from time to time I don't read them religiously like a novel. I don't have his last diary though. That still sits in the same place at my Mum's house that it sat the day he put it down, the night before he passed away. I'm not sure I could bring myself to read that to be honest.
I mentioned my Dad's absent mindedness earlier and my favourite diary entry so far was in among his revelations on 3 July 87...
"Alan took me to sainsburys with Vi's shopping list and when I got back I realised I'd left a chicken, 2 steak and kidney pies and some sausages behind!"
To add to the fun, he goes on to describe how he rang sainsburys, they kindly put the stuff aside and told him to come back up with the receipt and he could collect it. So back up there we trundled, with the receipt and when he got to the customer service desk he couldn't find the bloody receipt! It had fallen out of his pocket in my car where we eventually found it! Alls well that ends well anyway, the chicken, pies and sausages came home with us eventually!
If you knew my Dad this would bring a smile to your face, he was such a silly old fool sometimes but in the nicest possible way. Sadly (or not perhaps) I have inherited his foolish ways and am now growing into a similarly bumbling old fool. I forget stuff all the time and am accident prone beyond belief. It takes a special kind of patience to live with me I expect.
My life since my Dad died has been somewhat up and down. The downs have been pretty much all my own doing and I can't help but wonder if I'd have made better decisions had I still had his wisdom and mere presence in my life. I suppose that smacks of me passing the buck really. But I do think I changed as a person 20 years ago today and not for the better, despite wanting to do right by his memory and try to be the kind of Man he was. It's hard to admit it really but I've lost count of the times I've looked up to the sky and said sorry to him (which you may think is an odd thing to do for someone who doesn't believe in God or the concept of heaven).
Anyway that's enough of that.
These days, unlike the 80s and 90s we have tons of photos and filmed footage of our nearest and dearest on phones, social media and whatnot. I don't think people see the point of keeping handwritten diaries anymore and I don't keep one myself for that matter. But perhaps this has taught me that when you're dead and gone, despite the photographs and videos and Facebook memories and all that business, having something which that person wrote on a page, no matter how mundane, is a priceless thing to leave behind for your nearest and dearest. Even if it isn't a daily diary, just some thoughts on a page or suchlike, something that they can read and feel you coming at them through the ink on the paper. It's like you're living through that page. Make sense? I hope so...
