He was sent there by himself, without his hearing aids, in the middle of the night, simply as a precaution. It was awful for him, and a dreadful waste of NHS resources
There are good things and there are bad things. The trick is to enjoy the good things as much as possible and do everything you can to avoid making the bad things any worse than they need to be. Death is one such bad thing. In fact, I’m calling it: death is the baddest thing of all. So anything that can make it any less unbearable is worth some thought.
I wrote about my dad dying because, in the circumstances, I couldn’t apply myself to any other subject. I wasn’t sure this was the right thing to do. It was taking oversharing up to 11 out of 10 on the Spinal Tap amplifiers. And when I realised it had helped take some of my pain away, I felt something like guilt about being blessed to have a platform as great as this on which to share my thoughts when 99.9% of bereaved people have no such thing.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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