The sideboard is filled with cards, and the table is full of vases of white lilies, a flower none of us like. It’s beginning to feel like the front door is host to some kind of haunted letterbox, too; we can’t turn our back without another note arriving on the mat. Letters - handwritten on thick personalised stationery with a fountain pen - tell us that we must be devastated, that he was the very best of men, that he was stoic and silent in his illness.

My mother, my sisters and I go to register the death, then to the funeral director to choose the cheapest coffin and plan the cremation and memorial details. There may be hundreds at the service. We rarely stop laughing, giddy fools, while our mother alternates between fondly rolling her eyes and kicking us silent so she can give details of her husband’s birthday, their wedding day, the GP who cared for him until his death, five days ago.

In his absence, we are swearing a lot. It mostly makes our mother laugh.

August 26, 2014

I’m beginning to understand why I need to be here so much, at my father’s bedside. Having had 24 hours off yesterday to take the kids to meet friends in town, it was so hard - like underwater punches - to go back into his bedroom, to see his yellow skeleton head on the pillow, to hear his puffs. If I never leave the room, that disintegration isn’t quite so striking. I understand why people keep away.

The family doctor visits and makes an almost-comical face when describing his bafflement at his patient’s continued survival. It seems we all have to keep remembering how serious this is, even though it seems ridiculous, utterly unreal. Why are the nurses taking this so seriously? Why are there so many carers here? Why are they all treating this like it’s a *real* life or death situation? We are getting worse and worse at maintaining our poker faces. I don’t even stop my iPhone game when the nurses come in, now. But I have developed a horrible new fear, too, to match my horrible new habit: what if this really *isn’t* real? It’s all just makeup and camera trickery, and tomorrow he’ll leap out of bed and berate us all for not fighting for his life hard enough.

Soon, says the doctor. Soon.

August 20, 2014

Last night, after three days sitting mostly alone at my father’s bedside, I go a bit Bertha Mason. A phone call from someone infinitely more sensible than me stops me from torching the place, and tells me that while my father *will* die, we will all keep living. So we need to keep living.

This morning I wake up to pouring rain. By the time I’ve got my running kit on, it’s become a full-blown thunder storm and the rain’s coming down so hard I can’t see the end of the road. My mother forbids me from going. It’s all the fuel I need. I run away from the traffic and into the fields, and in the middle of one huge open field I’m already drenched and the thunder booms and it’s like a perfect Dawson’s Creek moment and I remember how much I liked being a teenager, for moments like this.

In the afternoon I get in the car for the first time since Monday and drive to the shopping centre to get shoes for a wedding on Saturday I’m glad to know I’m finally definitely going to attend, whatever happens. The teenage boy at the till asks me if I’ve been shopping long today, and I respond with a beaming non-sequitur that I’ve just come from my father’s deathbed. ‘I take it from your smile he’s OK, though!’ he smiles back at me, and I find that I’m smiling even more now, as I explain in way too much detail (Him: 'Right, if you could… just… put your card in… please…’) just how long they think he’s got, and that it’s just sheer magic to be out in the real world again. When the transaction is finished he smiles at me, properly, and wishes me luck, and I want to hug him and have him hug me and we would both feel total peace and that feeling would spread out from us to all the shoppers, out past the glass walls of the shopping centre, out across the country, out over the world, and all wars would cease forever, for good. But I take my bag and thank him and look away, not knowing how one deals with this precise situation.

August 14, 2014

Besides the family doctor, the only people in my father’s room are women. Carers, nurses, palliative teams; my mother, my sister and me turning him over in bed. Five of us today, daughters of mothers and mothers of daughters, cackling at his bedside at the thought of any man demanding a son. I try not to breathe in his smell of warm, rotting cabbage when I touch him or bend down into his lemon-yellow eyeline, attempting to interpret the sounds from his mouth. When we unbutton his pyjama top for the nurses to fit a syringe driver to his upper arm, I see that the skin on his chest is rolling hills, valleys between each rib and shadowed craters of collarbone dips. His upper body is all bone and wasted sinew, with binding muslin skin.

Mostly he doesn’t greet us when we come into his bedroom, only fractionally rolling his semi-open eyes. Dude, I know what you mean.

This morning, my mother brought me orange juice in bed and said he was the same as yesterday, peacefully sleeping. I told her I’d had a terrible nightmare that he was up and about again, and she asked if that wasn’t a nice dream, then we looked at each other and I rubbed my puffy face like people don’t do in real life.

August 12, 2014