The Next Room

It’s my dad’s birthday today – 83 years old – still going strong as I remember him, always the voice of reason and the go-to person for advice. I realise I speak about him in the present tense, because in my world, he’s still here, even though he passed away almost twenty-five years ago.

I grew up in a close-knit family, with a brother three years my senior and a sister six years my junior. The middle child usually gets the raw deal, but I didn’t, not where Dad was concerned. He never had favourites, loved us all equally, but he saw different characters in us, our idiosyncrasies, flaws, and qualities. He taught us so much throughout our childhood, and when we reached adulthood, he gave us all an opportunity to follow in his footsteps at the company he owned. I worked for him for a few years after leaving school, office work and typing letters, while my brother worked on the shop floor, and when my sister was old enough, she took a job in the office, too. But just before I turned twenty-one, I left the company and moved down south for four years, where I became independent and never looked back. Of course, I moved back up north again, being a Northerner through and through, and lived on my own for five years where Dad would drop by with a smile and a reassuring hug. He worried about me, but he brought me up to love life, to rely on myself, and to turn to him whenever I needed or wanted to. I guess you could say I was a bit of a Daddy’s Girl in some respects, and the box of Liquorice Allsorts I gave him on his birthday every year was never shared, except with me.

I think about him every single day without fail. Have done all my life. I look at his beautiful picture on my lounge windowsill and the other above my desk in my office, and even though I don’t cry so much anymore, I still find myself becoming emotional at the thought he is no longer on the end of a phone, or sat in his huge office with his antique bookshelves littered with encyclopaedias and reference tomes. I was told many years ago that I should let him go. But that’ll never happen. He might not be sat in the same space as me physically, but he’s here, and I know he always will be.

I have my own office now, have done for years. When he passed away and my brother and I cleared out his office at work, I inherited his antique desk and the black and white photograph taken of him when he was at his peak, along with a trophy he won for playing cricket. Material possessions, perhaps, but it means I have a part of him with me all the time. My family find it a bit maudlin how I won’t accept he’s no longer around, but you see, when he left us to live in the next room, the glue that held our family together went with him, leaving me a little insecure as I fumbled about in the darkness trying to find the last jigsaw piece. I thought I found it once; I didn’t. But then, nearly eleven years ago now, along came my husband, Jon, and when I look deeply into how we met, putting aside the introductions and the social media chats and the timing being on our side, it’s very clear that my life had been mapped out for me well before I was born – because if it hadn’t been for my dad’s love of the countryside, for walking, for taking our family on holiday, I would never have lived in Northumberland for the fifteen years I did and from there, I would never have met Jon. That’s another story, maybe for another day…

He did so much for me that really, I’ve probably forgotten some of it, but when I look back at the years I did get to spend with him in the physical, it makes me realise that I could never let him go because then I’d be saying goodbye to the part of my life that made me who I am today.

“Mind how you go, Dad.”