Journey to solace

I felt privileged to spend every day with my father, and almost every night next to him, in the month leading up to his death. My father, Joe, had played a huge role in his community, and was loved and revered by so many. After his death, we had a six-day open-house wake, where hundreds upon hundreds of family and friends arrived to show their respect. The streets were closed and a guard of honour formed at his funeral.

While every step of this journey was so important to me, I actually hadn’t had a single moment to myself to take in the enormity of what had just happened. My father had died less than a year after Dot, my beloved mother, had passed away, and one day before Valentine’s Day.

I’d feared and dreaded my parents death since I was a little girl, right through my teenage years