Dad’s son was a completely pompous idiot

Sometimes the most memorable and profound moments in your life are those that you would willingly give up all your worldly possessions to take back.
Having been blessed with parents who lived to a ripe old age, I spent an inordinate amount of time usually at the crack of dawn while suspended somewhere between sleeping and waking wondering what it must be like saying that final goodbye to a mother and father.

I’d seen it happen a million times on the movies and TV. Being an incurable romantic, I saw myself as the favoured son looking deep into my dying parents eyes, telling them how wonderful they had been, and listening to them telling me what a remarkable son I was to them. It was going to be a long moment of reminiscing about the wonderful times we had shared, of family and friends long gone, of happy, sunny, balmy, smiling days.

My mother went first when I was in my mid-fifties. She had been trying for about a year and a half to die, eventually calling all of her children about her and asking us whether we were praying for her to get better.

When we assured her that we were on our knees every minute of the day praying for her recovery, she snapped: Well, stop it, your prayers are swamping my prayers and I really don’t want to hang around anymore.

She went in and out of comas for months and we children stood vigil by her bedside to let her know, in her lucid moments, that we were there, that we would be with her when she died.

One morning, as the sun rose over the Natal South Coast sea, she woke, lucid and chirpy. We spoke about the silly things I did as a child.
She started giggling, then laughing and finally bordering on what sounded like something between choking and hysterics.

My sister came flying into the room with panic-stricken wide eyes. It took me about five minutes to convince her that my mother wasn’t convulsing, just laughing something she hadn’t managed for a long time, given her acute lung disease.

The story got back to my three brothers who have ever since regarded me as the sibling who had tried to kill their mother.
At the end, I wasn’t with her when she died, but playing golf at Sun City.

I was determined that when my father’s day came, I would be there to ensure that my dream of saying a proper goodbye to at least one of my parents would be fulfilled.

Six months after my mother died, my father, just a few weeks short of his 91st birthday and nothing really wrong with him, announced that as he had scored life’s equivalent of 500 runs he saw no point in going for 550 or even 600. He’d had such a phenomenal innings and anyway he missed my mother far too much to keep on batting.

He quietly and inexorably allowed himself to slowly slip away.
It wasn’t long now, we thought, as we gathered by his deathbed. I rehearsed what I would say the minute he became lucid enough to speak or at least acknowledge that he could hear me.

It was going to be the ultimate deathbed moment between father and son.

Unfortunately, I made a complete mess of it again.

One morning my father opened his eyes and looked straight at me and smiled. He lifted his hand and mimed the action of smoking a cigarette.
I was horrified, particularly as I had given up smoking just a few months earlier.

Bear in mind that my father had been chain-smoking cigarettes and his pipe since he was 12 years old. When he died, the doctor said he had absolutely no signs of being a smoker, let alone a heavy one. If he had given up in his sixties, quipped the doctor, he probably would have died by the time he was 70.

Smoking was one of my father’s great pleasures and here he was on his deathbed wanting the joy of one final ciggy.

What did I do? I leant forward and said: No more cigarettes, Pa, they’re bad for you.

He closed his eyes, shook his head sadly, and sank into a coma from which he never emerged.

A week later he died with all of his children at his bedside and me biting holes in my lips with frustration at being so unbelievably self-centred, stupid and inconsiderate as to deny a dying 90-year-old smoker his last fag. And to watch a father depart this earth thinking that one of his sons was a completely insufferable, pompous idiot.