Happy Holidays? NOT.......

Nice Christmas and New Year?

I hardly any where to start with this one….

I feel sorry for anyone who had the misfortune of bumping into me after the holidays, as when they uttered this question with a smile, I was forced to either lie – “quiet really”. Or take a deep breath and tell the truth…………. My father in law died on New Years Day 2009. Not for him a rainy Tuesday in February, or a windy Thursday in December, no, a day that will always be remembered and never mixed up with any other. John Kenny aged 76 years of age collapsed and fell on 17^th December and for a week he was on a drip with the usual health improving medication until he took a turn for the worst and it all went pear shaped. He basically stopped improving, he began to sleep all the time and couldn’t eat, because he couldnt swallow every part of him began to shut down, after discussions with doctors at (No) Hope Hospital, it was decided to ensure he was in no pain they would administer Morphine by drip, over a 24 hour period. This was inserted on 26^th December, by 27^th we thought it best to get the local priest to give the last rites, (strangely comforting for an old non believer like myself) hugely beneficial to the family and I believe john who was by now unconscious. We were told one maybe two days, but tough as old boots even to the end (the dreadful black eye he had received when he collapsed was healing better than I have seen on anyone!) he just lasted and lasted; the ward ran out of morphine and had to send out for it. On the morning of the new year he was checking out, by the time Hubs and the rest of the family got their he had been gone maybe 20 minutes, I know mixed with the terrible guilt of not being their when this happened there is grief as painful as a stake through a heart .

Meanwhile back at home and fairly unaware of the finality of it all I had prepared a roast dinner with the idea that my mum in law could come and have a decent meal, she had been surviving on hospital canteen fare which is fairly grim and non too balanced. At around 2.00pm the Kenny’s came back and drank various quality whiskies and it didn’t matter than all the shot glasses didn’t match, MIL ate the roast dinner ravenously and in a state of shock and everyone else had sandwiches. We passed tissues round and whilst everyone else thought of new beginnings and 2009 we were in our own little bubble of grief knowing that for the previous two years John had been suffering from Dementia and didnt always know who we were made this no easier to accept, something had ended on a day when everything usually begins.

In Memory of John Kenny, my father in law (who came with me to audition for supermarket sweep at the Midland Hotel in 1995, and once made me a poltice from soap, sugar, bread and milk which removed a small nugget of glass deep in the sole of my right foot) R.i.p John Brendan Kenny