Remember With A Smile

In 2007, my stepfather was diagnosed with a Grade IV Glioblastoma multiforme brain tumour. We were told immediately that it was inoperable, although he was able to undergo intensive radiotherapy and a single course of chemotherapy. He was given “six months to two years”, and died on Saturday 1st March 2008.

We held a humanist funeral on Monday 10th March 2008, when he was cremated in a woven bamboo coffin. My mother and sister cycled behind the hearse on their tandem trike. He entered the chapel to Don’t Worry, Be Happy and left to Monty Python’s Always Look On The Bright Side of Life. People were laughing as they left, and we felt it was exactly as he’d have wanted.

This is the eulogy I read for him during the service.

I don’t have many childhood memories, but many of those that I do have all have one thing in common: my dad.

One of my first memories is sitting in the driveway at home, upset because the stabilisers had been removed from my bike. I hadn’t quite grasped the concept of balance – some might say I still haven’t, but I was even worse at five years old – but I was supposedly too old to use them. He arrived to find me in tears, and on hearing what had happened, he put the stabilisers back onto my bike for me so that I didn’t have to be afraid of riding it.

When we lived in his cottage in New Mills, I would spin around in his black leather chair, lights dimmed, listening to Chris de Burgh’s A Spaceman Came Travelling over and over.

There’s a photo of me in our living room, stood at the top of Mont Blanc, aged eight. I’m clutching a sheet of ice and have a big grin on my face; I’d just asked if I could take it home for a souvenir and everyone within earshot who understood had cracked up laughing, him harder than everybody else. I had no idea what I’d said that was so funny, but I laughed anyway, because what else can you do when everyone around you is in splits of laughter?

Earlier that same day, we’d been sitting in a crowded lift room waiting to get to the top of the mountain, and in a moment of boredom, I started singing Frére Jacques to myself; he joined in and soon the entire room was singing with us.

He was so easy going; walking around the house singing. One evening, my mum and I were eating strawberries in the kitchen, and he came downstairs after a bath and stepped in a strawberry that I’d dropped on the floor. It squished between his toes, but he wasn’t angry, or annoyed: he laughed, of course. We still joke about it as the tasty cure for athlete’s foot.

He taught me so much, and together, we taught Elizabeth to crawl, and later, walk. He showed me how to use a camera, and when I began studying photography in 2005, he gave me his Olympus OM2 and all his lenses. When I was 14, I said I wanted to go abroad and practice my French, so we cycled around France together, and he stood on Champs-Elyées in the glaring sun, keeping a space for me at the railings so that I could watch the Tour on its the final laps of Paris, and tracked down the Postal Service team bus so that I could meet Lance Armstrong.

When I left home 18 months ago, he got up at 6am and drove me to Derby, spent the day helping me to unpack, then returned home, only to drive back again a few days later when I was taken into hospital with abdominal pain.
Six months before that, he took two days out of our holiday in Pembrokeshire to drive me 100 miles from Manorbier to Cardiff so that I could get a train to Derby for my university interview. When I got off my train back in Cardiff that evening, having found out I had a place on the course, he ran at me with such excitement that he nearly bowled me over.

Nobody ever asked him to, but he loved me and treated as though I were his own daughter, and for that, I love him. He pushed through this last year with the words of Lance Armstrong: “If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or fight like hell.”

Even at the lowest points, my dad remained positive, and I’m certain that that is what kept him going as long as he did. I know that he wouldn’t want us to be upset and when I remember him, I want to remember all the good times we had together, how happy he was and how happy he made us. He asked me to read this Navajo Prayer for you all;

Grieve for me, for I would grieve for you
Then brush away the sorrow and the tears.
Life is not over, but begins anew
With courage you must greet the coming years.

To live forever in the past is wrong
It can only cause you misery and pain.
Dwell not on memories overlong
With others you must share and care again.

Reach out and comfort those who comfort you
Recall the years, but only for a while.
Nurse not your loneliness; but live again.
Forget not. Remember with a smile.

Originally written in March 2008.