(Illustration: Seascape by Shirley Palmer: used with permission)

(This part of my story was very difficult to write; if you are recently bereaved, it might be best for you not to read this chapter)

Joan, my older sister, had left college now, and had already started supply teaching at her new school, Western Middle, as ‘Miss Appleby’, before the summer holidays, so she was based at home.

That same summer, Bob was a leader once more at Bellingham International Camp, and so was she, so my mother needed my help, as dad was very ill indeed. He was paying the price of working with this hazardous material, like many before him and after him?

Industry happened to be like that; in coal mines as well as the shipyards and factories. Workers were expendable, and health and safety obviously wasn’t a priority, as far as the bosses were concerned way back then.

Over the course of that year at weekends, I helped out with dad, giving mam a rest, and once or twice, when dad and I were on our own, I would ask him to pray to God with me, for his help and for healing. Dad wasn’t what I would call a practising Christian. With a sad smile, he would dismiss my suggestion.

I read in a magazine one day, about a man called Harry Edwards, who was described as a faith healer, so in my naivety, without telling anyone, I wrote to him asking him to pray for my dad. I got a letter back from him asking for a donation of money for the sanctuary he had set up. We had very little money way back then, as my dad wasn’t working by summer. So, I sent this man all I possessed, ten shillings, by post. My dad didn’t get healed and I found out later that this man was a spiritualist or a psychic or something like that. I hadn’t realised that, and I was very wary now of that kind of person. So I didn’t bother him anymore; that avenue for healing was closed.

Each weekend, towards the end of that college year, I would hear my dad crawling round the bed, sometimes in agony, desperate for relief from his pain. Pain management, with carefully controlled doses of Morphine, which are common now, wasn’t practised then. I couldn’t bear to hear him suffering, I don’t know how my mam coped or how she got any sleep.

Also, unlike today, people were not told they had cancer. I don’t know why, but in those days, people were not told how seriously ill they were, and the families weren’t put fully in the picture either. Mam was not told just how ill dad was until about three or four weeks before he died!

Joan only found out when she came home and found mam and Aunty Gladys, dad’s sister, in tears, as they had just been told at the hospital that dad was dying!

I was unaware of this, and still praying for his recovery. I wasn’t told that his illness was terminal, it was kept from me as long as possible – because Mam wanted someone to be “normal” around dad.

Towards the middle of July, my mam suggested that I try to find a summer job to help out with finances at home. I certainly didn’t welcome this suggestion one little bit, I’ve got to admit. I worked so hard at college, through the week, I was in need of a break. I thought I would just support her instead at home with dad being so poorly. So when I protested, she told me what she had already told Joan; that my dad was in fact dying. She told us both that we mustn’t tell him this, or even mention the word the C word. Cancer. ‘He mustn’t find out!’ was what we were told.

I felt like I’d been hit by an express train. I was speechless, devastated, and I suddenly felt an overwhelming guilt, for making such a fuss about having to apply for a holiday job.

I just had to get out of the house right there and then, besides I couldn’t let my dad see my red eyes, he would have guessed straight away that I’d been crying.

I left the house and made my way down to Tynemouth, to the coast by bus, trying to conceal my grief, and I walked slowly along towards Whitley Bay.

I stopped every so often to gaze at the sea, and became more calm as the waves broke onto the shore and washed over the sand. I stayed down there quite a while, until I was ready to go home more composed, my tears all used up. 

We are so fortunate living here on the north-east coast, to have the sea so near us.

Then on the 20th July 1969 man landed on the moon.

On the news, on television, a shadowy white astronaut was seen bouncing on the moon’s surface, having already made one giant step for mankind, while my dad was preparing to take a giant step of another kind, in leaving this world behind.

I remember the day, dad summoned us all upstairs, just before Joan went to Bellingham camp as leader, because he wanted to speak to us altogether at his bedside. He told us he had something important to say.

He told us that he knew he was dying, he knew it was cancer, and I foolishly interrupted to object to what he was telling us, thinking that we still had to keep the fact he was dying from him.

He turned to me, raising his voice, and said sternly, “Will you shut up and listen!”

I'm close to tears now as I write this.

I had interrupted the most important speech of his life with that stupid charade of silence we’d been told to play out.

When all was still again, he spoke his important last words to Joan and me, with the saddest of faces, “I know I’m dying, and I’m asking you both to look after your mam! Promise me, you’ll both take care of your mam!”

His last wishes and thoughts were for her, his sweetheart, the love of his life. It was heart-breaking.

We both promised we would, and we certainly have done over the years, although there have obviously been times in her life when she had to face life without us by her side: when we were away studying at college, or working as teachers in schools, or even when we both got married, but we were never too far away from her side, ever.

Years and years later, when I confided in Joan, about the pain, that my dad’s last words to me had been angry ones, she said, “No they weren’t his last words! What were his words, his last words?”

I whispered, “Look after your mam!” She replied, ‘and you’ve done that more than me, if you think about it, when I wasn’t able to, because I was in ministry as a priest looking after other people.”

Her words were a great comfort to me.

On Tuesday 29th July, Joan was sent for from the camp, and she and Bob came home straight away.

Joan and my nana were with my dad when he died. Mam and I were physically and mentally exhausted, weeping downstairs, and then Joan came downstairs to tell us, it was all over.

We were consumed with grief, all three of us.

I’m sure that Mesothelioma was the word that was written on his death certificate, lung cancer. No sign of asbestos could be traced, and yet look that word up today, and it is usually linked to asbestos exposure.

It was on the day my dad died, that my faith in God died too!

How could a so called ‘God of love’, an all-powerful God, allow my dad to suffer as he did? ’ I asked myself. ‘Why was he so silent? Didn’t he care? ‘Did I not pray hard enough?”

One of dad’s funeral hymns was ‘Come let us sing of a wonderful love, tender and true,’ but it was my dad’s love for us that I sang about, certainly not God’s.

I looked out from my bed that night up at the stars, and decided for the very first time, that God didn’t exist, it was all one big con! There was no-one out there at all listening, there was no heaven or hell. Hell was here on earth when people were hurting, suffering and dying. These were my thoughts-then!

I had prayed long and hard and God had let us down badly, he had failed us all!

I washed my hands of this unfeeling, uncaring, indifferent supernatural being, there and then. At nights when the darkness closed in, I was gripped with fear once more, just like I had been after my granda died.

I had had great faith, and could take comfort in the fact that Granda was old and probably ready for death! But now, I couldn’t be comforted, for my dad was so young, only 46 years old, and he had fought his illness so bravely, but ‘Death’ had won the battle.

And so I lost my faith utterly and completely! I entered a long dark tunnel of anger and grief. In losing the God of my childhood, I had also given up on hope of an eternity for those who had gone on before us. There was just nothingness, life was pointless.

I was in that tunnel for three whole years, but I kept it well hidden.

Did my dad die a Christian?

I hadn’t thought so, but a few months later, my mother and her brother, my Uncle Bob were chatting together at the table behind me. He had visited my dad shortly before he died, and I overheard him telling her, that my dad had asked him to say the Lord’s Prayer with him before he died!

So in his final hours of life, my dad had asked for prayers after all, just ike the thief upon the cross, who in his last few moments had asked Jesus to remember him when he came into his kingdom. Jesus had replied to that thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise!” (Luke 23. 42-43)

Overhearing my uncle tell this story to her, comforted me somewhat, after all, I had always begged dad to pray. So those prayers had been answered! But my heart was stone cold by then, and I remained lost.

After my dad’s funeral, my mother, nana and Joan went off to Seahouses, for a much-needed break. Obviously ,they wanted me to go with them, but I felt I would rather come to terms with my grief better by staying with Bob and his parents while they were away.”  

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* When I wrote this chapter of my book about my dad, in July of 2020, mam’s health had really deteriorated at the age of 95, and she seemed to be losing her grip on life. Her physical body was still just bearing up, but it seemed as if her mind was beginning to take flight to a higher plane. We only hoped and prayed that when her body failed her and closed down, that it did so, peacefully and swiftly, without pain, and that we could be allowed to be by her side at her end.

This would be such a blessing, we thought, in our Covid 19 infected world, for many others were dying alone in pain, with no family or friends beside them, and perhaps only a nurse to hold their hand, Visiting loved ones in hospital was strictly monitored, sometimes forbidden altogether, when a relative had Covid.

I wrote this a few days later:

“Incredibly, my mother died on the very same day that my dad did. Mam on July 29th 2020, and dad on July 29th 1969. Isn’t that incredible? Of all the days she could have gone, this was the day. All our prayers were answered though, that she would have her family with her when she died, that she wouldn’t die in pain, or as a result of Covid 19.

She died peacefully in bed. Joan had been the designated visitor all that week in hospital, armed with a lap top so the three of us could ‘Face Time’ together. And I was allowed to spend her last night with her, by her bedside, when her time was near, and I was with her when she died.

We all miss her so much. Thank you, mam for your ‘constant’ love and support.

It’s strange, the name ‘Constance’ was actually what my granda had wanted to call my mam when she was born! It would have been an apt name for her, for this was her nature throughout her life.