My dad's death during the Covid crisis means any hope of reconciliation is gone

So my father died last night. Well at about 8pm yesterday evening to be precise. My mum rang me shortly afterwards to tell me. He was 80 years old.

Despite his age it wasn't COVID-19 that got him but boring old pneumonia. It was probably just as well though because COVID would have got him anyway. He was easily in the most vulnerable category you see.

Besides being 80, he was living in a care home, he had failing eyesight and significant breathing problems. He also had Alzheimer's.

My mum said that the care home rang her two days ago because he'd asked to speak to her. She hadn't been able to see him for the best part of three months because of 'this blessed lockdown'. It was to turn out to be their final conversation.

When he came to the phone she said he wasn't making a lot of sense and even asked her what his own name was. When she told him, he replied: “Ah yes, that seems about right.” I can imagine him saying it too.

I'm glad she got to speak to him though. The next call she got from the care home was from one of the staff telling her that her husband of 59 years had been taken to a hospital in Yeovil and wasn't expected to live for much longer.

It's the third time he's had pneumonia. This time when she saw him he was asleep and attached to a ventilator. She spent most of yesterday sat at his bedside with her granddaughter Janice* - both of them wearing masks.

Throughout that time my father didn't wake up once. Eventually my mum, who is herself 79 and has been shielding since early March, said to Janice that she was tired and would like to go home. She told me on the phone later that it 'seemed silly' sitting there when he wasn't even aware of what was going on.

Janice dutifully drove her home, but terrified her grandfather would die alone, she drove back to the hospital straight away and was there when he breathed his last.

Janice is an adult in her mid twenties, but it's still a tough situation for someone so young and facing her first family bereavement to have to deal with. I'm grateful to her that she made the effort she did.

So where was I while all this was going on?

Well I was in lockdown in Wales about a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. I'm not blaming Wales or the Welsh government (or even the English government) for failing to reach my dying father's bedside. The truth is I've been estranged from my father for 16 years – ever since he objected to my divorce from my ex-wife, the mother of my children (and his grandchildren).

We hadn't spoken once in all that time, although I've stayed in regular touch with my mother.

He sent out an olive branch about a year and a half ago. He told my mother he would be 'willing to forget all that's happened' if I would help them.

By that time they were in a pretty desperate situation. Both in their late 70s they were still living in the farmhouse on the Somerset Levels that I grew up on.

Things reached a crisis point when my mother nearly died after accidentally driving into one of the water-filled rhynes that bordered their land. My father was then admitted to Weston-super-Mare Hospital (yes, that one) after falling down the stairs at their isolated home.

I think I was my parents' last hope as they battled to carry on living independently in the middle of the moors. I didn't immediately refuse my father's plea for help, but I asked my mum for time to think about it. I took too much time, it turns out. My father was soon admitted to a care home on doctor's advice. Helped by Janice and Janice's boyfriend, my mum then sold the farmhouse and bought a smaller, two-bedroom property near Shepton Mallet.

It meant she had neighbours she might be able to call on in a crisis. She could also visit my sister, who is visited daily by carers, who lives in a town nearby. My father was initially installed in a care home in Burnham-on-Sea. But when my mother moved he was moved too, to a place near Shepton.

The new place meant a slight reduction to the £900-a-week care home fees my mother was having to pay to have him looked after.

Her big worry, apart from the lockdown restrictions, was how much of the family savings pot was being eaten away by my dad's care costs. Part of the reason for her moving was that she could sell the farmhouse for substantially more than the cost of her new cottage. Even so, with the legal fees and agency costs that always accompany a house move, she wasn't left with much and it was rapidly diminishing every time she paid his care bill.

The care crisis in this country desperately needs tackling. It doesn't seem fair that my parents' final years should have been blighted by money worries when they had saved hard all their lives to avoid such an eventuality.

To be honest, my initial reaction when I heard my father was dying was one of relief. It meant my mum's financial situation had been resolved.

In a curious way the coronavirus situation may have helped to prepare my mother for my father's death. When he moved into the care home she initially travelled to see him every day. But when she saw him he behaved abominably, swearing at staff and begging to be taken home, so she had to reduce her visits. Then when Covid-19 happened she stopped her visits entirely to preserve her own health.

She wrote to him while the care home was on lockdown and she spoke to him on the phone two days ago (as I've mentioned). But for a woman who had spent every day of her married life with the man she met as a 16-year-old, it was a novelty for her to spend some time away from him.

My father has never been an easy man to live with. He was insecure and resented the attention she attracted from other men.

When she was younger, my mum had been a model and turned heads. He was terrified she'd leave him and somehow thought being beastly towards her would persuade her to stay. As a result he ruled every aspect of our lives. He wouldn't allow my mum to take a job or drive (until she forced the issue). Every day she'd serve him with a cup of tea at 8am and cook his meals. We didn't even have a television

On the upside, he bought her horses and agreed to move to the remote Somerset farmhouse she wanted.

Despite all this, I know my mum will be feeling bereft at his death. It is funny how the tables turned and she was the one who got to call the shots once he was admitted into a care institution. But nothing was funny about having to watch the rapid mental deterioration of a man who has always prided himself on his intelligence.

Like many men of his generation he didn't go to university. But despite this he was well read and had cultured tastes in music and art. What enabled him to build a comfortable life for his family was a supreme talent as a commercial artist.

It meant he could retire when he was 35 after selling the book company he set up with a work colleague.

He was a good father too. Although strict, he was always interested in his children's hobbies and development. And because he was at home for most of my childhood and I had only one sibling we had a close relationship. But because I was afraid of him I never went through the teenage rebellion phase that most children go through. My first break from him came after I married and we had a dispute over a deposit he was going to pay on our first home. We patched that up a few years later but the second estrangement turned out to be final.

There's a part of me that would have liked to have put our relationship in order before his death. I imagine us being reconciled and spending time together. So part of me blames this coronavirus lockdown for taking away my chance of 'making things right'.

However I know that I am kidding myself. The speed of his mental deterioration meant that by yesterday it was far too late for such a development. The deathbed reconciliation I pictured in my mind's eye was only ever a pipedream.

I'm glad in a way that he wasn't mentally alert when he died and that the end when it came was a swift one. My one fear is that he might have gone to his maker fretting over the fact that one of his children wasn't speaking to him.

Having spoken to my mum I don't believe this was the case though. I think when he died his thoughts were far away from me. Instead he was agitated that he was no longer living in his old house in the Somerset Levels. He feared hospitals and doctors and being ill. But in the end he couldn't remember his own name. And when the end came he wasn't even conscious. Maybe now he can finally rest in peace.

*This name has been changed to protect the identity of the person concerned