Remembering my father's passing

A refreshing night's sleep, waking to a clear sky and bright sunshine for breakfast pancakes which Clare had cooked by the time I got up. I had a dream in which I was being recruited to join a ministry team at a church in Cardiff which I didn't recognise from the image of it the dream presented. I appreciated the fact the team was interested in having me join them and dreamt I was fit and well enough, but had misgivings I couldn't identify about doing so. Does this echo the feeling that I now miss being an active contributor to the life of the church, since I had to discontinue taking services and offering weekly Morning Prayer and Reflection a month ago? 

The house needed cleaning, as Jorja wasn't able to come and clean for us this week. Having hoovered down stairs I put the batter on charge and detached the dust container for emptying. When I came to re-attach it, I couldn't work out how to do it. It's something I've done many times automatically, relying on visual and body memory. I needed Clare's help to do this. This is symptomatic of the way the medication is messing with my head, slowing down or disrupting completely habitual connections the brain makes.  It was most distressing and frustrating.

We drank our morning coffee sitting in the garden under the sunshade, watching bees and other insects visit the Potentilla bush, covered with scores of small yellow flowers - a reassuring sight. A gentle cooling breeze prevented the garden from being too hot for comfort.

At lunchtime, Clare cooked rice and ratatouille with added smoked salmon for flavour. Then we walked to the Summerhouse café in Bute Park for a cup of tea. The waters of the Taff are low due to the drought, exposing rocks in the river bed and pebble beaches seldom seen. I wonder how the river salmon will fare?

On returning home, I had enough energy and clarity to transcribe a few more pages of my 1974 Ulster travel diary. It records that my father and I talked on the phone on the 19th August, the night before he was due to go into the Heath hospital for the fitting of a pacemaker following a heart attack months earlier. He had another heart attack that night and was taken into intensive care in Llandough hospital where he died on the 25th.  The root cause, an untreated strangulated hernia, very much an industrial injury from a physically tough life for a skilled man. His expertise was working with steel haulage ropes, on which he wrote a technical book and had it published. A remarkable feat for a man who left school literate and numerate at fourteen, and illustrated the book with his own detailed drawings.

My journal detail is vague at this point but suggests we started for home a few days early due to his illness. June was there with him to the end. It wasn't easy to stay in touch with her for updates in those days, long before mobile phones. It all happened too quickly to say goodbye at such a distance, but I remember that he was apprehensive about surgery when we talked on the phone for the last time, fifty two years ago. He met his grand daughters, Kath and Rachel, but Owain, also named John after him, he never knew for he was born four years after his death.