Vale, Terry Ball
Last Monday, I turned forty-two and my father went into palliative care. On Tuesday night, he passed away. I stayed offline for a bit after it happened — no blogging, no real posting to social media beyond reading all the condolence messages, no checking my email unless there was something funeral-related coming through. I felt very out-of-phase with the world, and the grief felt very raw and new. It would be wrong to say that we didn’t see this coming — my father had Parkinsons, growing dementia, and issues with his blood. He’d survived a heart attack, back in 2011, and a few trips to the hospital for illnesses that disrupted treatment for his ongoing issues. A few years back, I wrote an entire essay about my father and what he meant to me and the inevitability of this day. It still caught us by surprise, when it finally happened. He went to the emergency room with a broken hip