Your Stories

At 69 years old my father died. I was 27 years old and scared. Scared of the GP, scared of the district nurse, scared of my mother's grief and scared of my father's pain. And he was in pain and distressed and none of the family spoke about him as we watched this gasping, wretched man lying in a bed in the corner of our sitting room. And even now, 30 years later, I know now what I knew then. My father had a bad death.

The look in her eyes when she opened them and realized I was the one standing at her bedside to welcome her into the morning melted my heart every time. I believe my mother’s almost childlike look of joy on those mornings reflected a combination of happiness and wonder: happiness to see me, because that meant we would be spending another mother-daughter day together; and wonder – or perhaps relief – to be awakening to another day at all, because she knew her days were numbered. My eternally wonderful mother was terminally ill with metastatic lung cancer.

My husband was diagnosed with lung cancer with secondaries in liver and bones in June 2011. He died 1 December 2011. We hardly had time to accept the diagnosis before our lives changed on an almost daily basis. I became his full-time carer and he began to slip away very quickly.

My father died at the beginning of the year. He was almost 96, was ready to go and we had accepted that. In the past year he’d had five falls; on Boxing Day he fell again and broke his shoulder – I could feel the crepitus.