November has been a REALLY difficult month.
I have felt pretty low. Not my normal self. And as well as feeling physically under the weather I’ve also felt emotionally flat too.
We are approaching the first anniversary of my dad’s death. One year and seven weeks ago, my dad, ‘Silverstone the Great One’ as he liked to refer to himself, went into hospital to have cancer removed from his lung. The prognosis was good.
The operation went well. He came out of the operating theatre upbeat and asking for newspapers and an iPad. He was keen to get back to the bridge table and he did not see being in a hospital bed as an impediment to that. 24 hours later they had to reopen his lung. The medical reasons for this now escape me. Four days later he had a heart attack.
I had never considered that my dad might die. And I had no idea that this was the beginning of the 7-week cycle, the back-and-forth dance between hope and despair, that led to his eventual death.
‘Silverstone the Great One’ survived the first heart attack. In his remarkable joy at having got another one over on death, he reached for the phone and called everyone he knew to share his joy and his love. And, of course, to impart a few of his best one-liners. My heart overflowed to hear his voice.
Respiratory arrest came next. He couldn’t breathe on his own. Various efforts to get my dad breathing for himself followed. He was given a ‘hood’ to support his breathing. That didn’t work. So they put him on a ventilator. That didn’t work either. After too many days on the ventilator it was decided that the only thing left was a tracheotomy: a hole surgically cut in his throat with a breathing tube fed through it. The tracheotomy took away my dad’s ability to speak.
Then came the second heart attack. His ribs were broken as a result of that one.
Even after the tracheotomy and the second heart attack, there were days when we felt hopeful. My dad managed to speak to us with his eyes. In those final weeks of his life, I fully learnt the truth behind the saying ‘the eyes are the window to your soul’. And what a soul ‘Silverstone the Great One’ had.
This is a very long way of getting around to why I’m telling you about my dad. The reason I am sharing the story is because although I feel heavy with grief, I am also full of gratitude. The gratitude helps. It helps me to celebrate who he was, and to continue to see him in my response to the world around me.
I was lucky enough to have had my dad until he was 80. For my first 50 years I was at the receiving end of his effortless optimism, the endless bank of witticisms quips and quotes, and his unusual philosophical approach to life.
‘Silverstone the Great One’ passed on some of his character traits to his four children. He taught us to be guided by our own principles, beliefs, and values. He taught us that it was okay to questions authority – but he saw no value in the lesson on how to temper it with fitting in, so we never learnt that. We learnt by watching him that the rules do not all necessarily apply to us. This may go some way in explaining why as children my siblings and I didn’t often get invited to the parties of the nice well-behaved children.
My dad was a spiritual and intellectual giant. He just was. He didn’t try to be. It wasn’t that he was unimpressed by money or status; he simply didn’t notice it. He rarely told us what to do, and he rarely judged. He never went out without egg on his jumper, and he genuinely believed that no-one looked at your shoes. And we grew up in a state of perpetual anarchy and chaos.
It was unremarkable to him, and therefore to us, that he played bridge for both Scotland and England, and that he was internationally famous within the bridge world. To him the fame and the plaudits were irrelevant; simply not worth remarking on. He loved bridge, he loved playing, he was very good at it, and he won a lot of competitions. It was, to us, just a thing Dad did. Some dads played golf at the club down the road. Our dad just happened to be flown to America or China to play bridge. Only as we moved into adulthood did we really realise how amazing – and amazingly, genuinely modest – he was.
My dad had many gifts. He had gifts with words, with numbers and with cards. He was rarely directive, incredibly understated to the point stories and anecdotes were more like codes. There was often a secret layer of meaning in the tales he told us. He never interpreted his stories for us. Instead, he told the story and allowed the dawn of meaning to arrive in its own sweet time.
He was a man of songs and sayings. I am so grateful for every single one of them now. This hasn’t always been the case. Whenever I hear one, or I am in a situation where a ‘dadism’ springs to mind, there he is filling up my present. One saying we all associate with him is ‘the goodies always win’. When I was young, I interpreted that through the very narrow lens of whatever film we happened to be watching. Justice would be done. It was his way of calming me down. It’s only now, when I think of him and who he was, that I realise what he was really saying was that goodness is its own reward.
I feel grateful that even now, almost a year after his death, I am still learning lessons from his words. The goodies do always win. This winning though isn’t about justice being done. The dawn of meaning is only just breaking. I think my dad was telling me that the goodies always win because they are always doing good. And doing good is its own reward, whatever the outcome. We do good because it is right to do good.
Gratitude needs to be expressed in words and in action. So, this blog is my way of expressing my gratitude to the world. Thank you to my amazing dad ‘Silverstone the Great One’.
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