Editors Note:
This week marks #PoweringKindness week. Amongst the charities hoping for the maximum amount of funding is The Marie Keating Foundation.
Regular readers will know our own Liz McHugh from her pieces on site every day and her very popular weekly diary “It Started With A Dress”. What you may not know about Liz is that she lost her father to cancer. It’s likely that everyone reading this piece has been touched in some way by the dreaded “C” word too.
Here, in one of the most personal pieces ever posted on Her.ie, Liz opens up about the battles she and her family have faced together. Then, we’re asking for your help to make sure other families have the support they need. We’re not looking for your money, we’re barely even asking for your time.
Just be kind, and make it count.
___________________________________________________
Liz:
It’s hard to know where to start. I never talk about my dad. Part of it is that I never know where to start, and another part of me has so few memories of the man that I keep them locked up, like hidden treasure. When something is rare it’s precious. They’re some of my most valuable possessions.
My dad was one-of-a-kind. He was funny, and smart. He always had the answers to all of life’s problems and his laugh was warm and deep. He used to tease us all, and there wasn’t a day where he didn’t call you by his pet name.
He was a man of routine. Up at 6.30, out by 7.30 and worked all day until he came home around 7pm. We used to wait for him on the bottom step of the stairs. For his key to turn in the door, to run up and give him a hug.
Being a plumper child, it’s not shocking I used to sit on his knee while he ate his dinner, looking for bites from his fork. A sup of milk was always passed to me from his pint glass. He’d watch my mam as she worked around the kitchen, or talk to my grandmother, his own mum, as she made a pot of tea.
The year my dad died, life was tough. My mum was seriously ill in hospital. All we really understood was that people only talked about her in hushed tones, and we knew it was bad when she lost all her weight.
Try explaining an auto-immune disease to a nine-year old, she won’t understand most of it. Watching her mum sit up in her bed, with the same weight of an eight year old clinging to her frame, it rang home quickly that we needed to worry.
Dad used to bring us to visit mum every Sunday. Monday to Saturday we were washed, dressed, fed, brought to school, given lunchboxes with his thumb-print in the sandwiches where he tried to cut them into triangles. He collected us from the school gates, and always gave me a hug. He teased my sister and me about how the church choir sounded like crows, but always sat in the second row to the left, right by our side. Smiling at us.
Or how he was so tall that he would come in to myself and my sister’s room, sitting on one bed and stretching his long, tall frame over the second bed. He would let us choose a book and read to us. Often insisting it was time for us to sleep when we would beg for another story.
For every Irish dancing feis we had our hair in curls, ribbons in our hair. I wanted to be on Broadway, so instead he brought me to drama classes. I’ll never forget the pride I had seeing him sitting, winking up at me from the front row in the local community hall when I recited my lines as Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
I remember crying that my mam wasn’t at home, that I missed her, and he would produce an iced caramel from his pocket. When he had to go into the office on a Saturday, he would bring us with him and have biscuits and a bottle of milk waiting in the little fridge behind his desk. A walk along Howth harbour and an ice-cream cone was his way of keeping us from under Granny’s feet while she would cook us a Sunday roast.
Then things started looking up. My mum was let out of hospital. It was taking some getting used to, but we all started getting back to normal. And Dad looked happy. He was so happy to have mum home.
The same man who was so happy to see mum come home was also dying – just none of us knew it. He was so busy minding us, keeping the family ticking over, being our rock, that nobody noticed that he wasn’t as hungry. That he was having pains in his stomach. I’m assuming he just put it down to stress, if he was thinking about himself at all.
I was playing in a friend’s garden when her mum called me to the door to tell me my Gran had phoned. I had to go home. When I arrived, I was told dad wasn’t well and was being brought up to Beaumont Hospital.
The next day my mam sat down across from us and told us dad had cancer. I don’t remember anything else from that conversation, other than her eyes were swollen from crying and she was wrapping her arms around us. She looked exhausted and we all knew she was trying to stop us from feeling scared.
Dad was going to have surgery, and then he’d be ok. He’d have to be. But he wasn’t. Dad never made it back out of the coma and he died less than a week later. And my heart was broken for the first time.
People have asked me before what the hardest part of losing dad so young. I used to think it was that he never made my Confirmation, or graduation. That he never hugged me after I got my exams. That he wasn’t there for my first day of college, or that when mam died, we would have done anything to have him with us to keep us from falling apart.
My dad will never see me on my wedding day or walk me down the aisle. One of the kindest people I ever knew will never hold my baby in his arms. I’ll never be able to go to him for advice, and the man I hope to eventually marry will never get to ask his permission for my hand in marriage.
But the absolute hardest thing is knowing it could have been prevented. If only someone had spotted the tumour. If we’d known to look. If he’d been thinking about his health as much as he was thinking about ours.
I can’t change my family’s past. I can’t take away that pain. But I can try and support a charity that help other families that face what I did in 1998. The same year Marie Keating died.
The Marie Keating Foundation are more than just a breast cancer resource. They keep the people at home, the families trying to cope with the emotional and financial stress of coping with cancer, and they give hope. I can’t help but wonder, if the service had been there, if he knew the warning signs, if we could have saved him.
And because I can’t live with regret, I’m laying this all out there. All I hope by doing it is that one day another family won’t have to go through the same heartache of losing a parent. That they’ll have gotten the service and support that wasn’t available when we needed it most.
Liz
To get involved, tell us about your act of kindness on social media using #poweringkindness and tag @MarieKeating or go to www.poweringkindness.ie – make sure to include a photo or video of your kindness if you can. The charity with the most kindness done in their name will win the largest share of the €130,000 prizefund. Let’s work together to make sure it’s The Marie Keating Foundation. x
