THE TROUBLE WITH PAPER PLANES(94)

“She’s my best friend, Henry. I want to be with her till the end. I owe her that and I need it for myself. I need as much of her as I can get.”

He made my love for her seem paltry in comparison. I worried for him, how he would cope after she was gone. I saw him cry once, only once. The morning she died. I wasn’t there when it happened. He was. I’ve never seen such heartache as I did that morning. He was lost without her. She had been his anchor, and now she was gone and he was adrift. I was hurting too, but losing a parent is different to losing a life partner. For a long time, he looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself. I always got the feeling he was looking for her, like he felt he had just woken up from a nightmare and none of it was real. Like he expected her to come back to him.

We kept a close eye on him, Georgia and I. We visited often, took the kids around. He supervised my eldest when I was teaching him to surf. Watching my boy practicing pop-ups on Grandad’s old longboard, on my father’s lawn, was one of those family moments that ingrains itself into your heart. Four generations of Danes boys learnt to surf on that board. How many families get to say that?

He missed Mum. He didn’t have to tell me, it was obvious. Georgia started cooking his meals for him when he began to lose weight. We worried that he wasn’t eating properly. He was grateful for the food, but I don’t think it was enough. He needed more than food to sustain him. He needed a purpose. He needed Mum.

I felt useless. All I could do was watch as he turned from my father – proud, strong, capable – into the eighty-two-year-old man he was. I never thought of him as old before that. He was my father, my children’s grandfather, my wife’s father-in-law. A gentleman who always opened the door for a lady. A local legend with a strong dislike of footwear.

Other people would ask after him, about him. I’d say he was fine, doing well. ‘How old is he?’ they’d ask. When I told them, they would nod, smiling sympathetically, as if he was nearing the end of his innings. I didn’t think of him that way. I think I was in denial. You don’t allow yourself to think of the heartache, even though you know, somewhere deep down, that it will come.

He went downhill very quickly. At first, the doctors thought it was some kind of medication imbalance. He had the usual physical failings common of a man of his age. The body wears out, after all. We assumed it would right itself. He was in the right place, we told ourselves. The doctors will sort him out, then we would probably have to think about selling the house and putting him into a rest-home. He wouldn’t like it, we said, but there was no other way around it.

Then, everything changed. The doctors said he wasn’t responding to the treatment. He was getting worse. We should prepare ourselves. In a matter of hours, everything changed.

For the first time since Mum’s death, I was scared. And helpless. It was happening again. I cried. I was angry. I wanted answers. I expected to have more time with him, like we did with Mum. It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. We sat with him all through the day. When the kids finished school, we debated whether or not to bring them to the hospital. Georgia thought it would be good for them to say goodbye.

Dad was slipping in and out of consciousness, sometimes chatty, other times just staring at me as if he wanted to say something. His eyes, blue and so like mine, had always been expressive. I tried to guess what he wanted to say and answer him, reassure him.

Georgia and I talked outside his room. She told me we had to tell him it was okay to let go. She thought he was holding on for me, because I was having trouble accepting it. She was right, of course. I was having trouble accepting it. I wanted him to live forever. What kind of son would I be if I didn’t?

My heart felt like it was literally breaking, being ripped apart inside my chest. The one thing I could do for my father now was let him go, even though it went against every instinct I had.

Not long before I proposed, Georgia and I were going through a tough time. Mum and I talked on the porch, over coffee. I talked to Mum about most things. She was always honest and I trusted her opinion. Sometimes it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I could always trust that she was telling it to me straight. I told her I wasn’t sure that Georgia and I were meant to be together anymore. I knew she was fond of Georgia, and I don’t know what I expected her to say. I guess I expected her to tell me another story of when she and Dad first met, how things weren’t easy for them, either. I was wrong.

She told me about Emily, Dad’s first love.

Then she told me a story that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.