There's a first time for everything. Your first wedding anniversary. Your first child's first birthday party. Completing a year at your first job. Events that are memorable for all the right reasons. But not all such landmarks are happy ones.
My father died on 5th April last year. Losing a parent is one of the most painful experiences anyone can go through but for me it's exacerbated by having an almost photographic memory. I remember every moment from him being hospitalised last February until his death two months later. Being told he had terminal kidney cancer and the interminable meetings regarding continuing healthcare, all the way through to being told that the general doctor had misdiagnosed the cancer and that my father could go home - and him dying in that hospital bed three days later.
Every day I relive another episode. Asking why the word 'cancer' wasn't mentioned in his continuing healthcare notes, arguing with the oncology doctors, repeating verbatim what I had been told about the tumour, insisting on further scans and then the final realisation that there wasn't a cancer. Seven weeks. Seven painful, wasted weeks.
As my father died very late at night and without warning, I didn't get to say goodbye to him. I had to wait 13 hours before being able to see him in the mortuary. No one can prepare you for the sight of a dead person let alone your parent but it gave me the opportunity to get some degree of closure. Writing this now starts to bring back the weight of emotion I felt at the time along with the clearest of memories of how he looked. Had I not known he was dead I would have thought he was sleeping. It was the most peaceful I had seen him in many years.
I also relive my mother being taken to the same hospital with a chest infection, being in the adjacent bed when my father died. Her delirium and refusal to take medication. Being told late one Monday night that she probably wouldn't survive until the morning. She did. I even managed to get her into a care home where she lived for just five weeks until passing away last June. I have the reliving of those memories to look forward to.
There has to be some balance, some better moments to remember. Like my last conversation with him when he praised me for working with children, something he had never said before. And finding out three weeks after he died that he had been made a knight of the national order of the légion d'honneur. As a proud Frenchman he would have appreciated that. I received his medal and showed it to my mother at my last meeting with her before she died. The ladies around her were really taken with his award but my mother's delirium had returned and she barely acknowledged it.
Reliving all these moments has taken its toll on me. I have lived under a black cloud of depression for the past month or so, unable to share what I feel with anyone. I have to accept that nothing I can say or do will make any difference to what has gone but has the very real risk of damaging the relationships that remain.
Yes, there is a first time for everything and over the next few months I will have to relive both of my parents' deaths and their funerals. What I hope is that when the anniversaries return next year, the intensity will have started to fade a little.