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 — it happened the same week my sister was diagnosed with cancer, and it seemed like the lesser concern until his doctor started listing risk factors prior to the surgery to put a pin and plate in.

He was surrounded by people in the hospital — friends and family who gathered to be there with him. And the nice thing about his final week — the one where it looked increasingly like palliative care was coming — was sharing memories with people. They gave us back parts of my father we’d forgotten as the dementia and Parkinsons got worse.

He was a brilliant man: smarter than me, and kinder, dedicated to the people and the things that mattered to him. A teacher whose final years were punctuated by former students getting in touch, letting him know the kind of impact he’d had on their lives. A principal who sought to change the way people taught, to improve the schools he worked at and support the people who worked alongside him.

He loved books and music and surfing, and when I first started publishing novellas he went out of his way to buy as many copies as he could to give away. A few years back he found a book of mine on display in his local library, and his joy upon its discovery meant more to me than any other feedback I’ve ever gotten about something that I’ve written.

It was my dad who introduced me to fantasy and sci fi — he often read The Hobbit to his classes as a teacher, and tricked me into reading Lord of the Rings when I was eight years old. He took me to see Star Wars and introduced me to Dune at a young age, first through colouring books and then through the novels.

He loved language and he loved books, and I would not be the writer I am without his influences, but that’s beside the point.

He was, more importantly, a remarkable father: always there when I needed him, always willing to let go and let me figure things out for myself when it was necessary. The first person I wanted to talk to when I was figuring out a big change or plan, and the person whose approval meant the most when a job was done.

His funeral is Thursday morning, and we’ll gather and remember him and celebrate his life.

I miss him immensely, and that is unlikely to change once Thursday is over.