Sunday a week ago (March 4th) my father in law Brian Smethurst, died suddenly from a massive heart attack.

It was completely out of the blue. Only the day before he had come in and ripped out the skirting boards from the nursery and then me and him had gone for a few lunch time pints. In fact him and Elaine (Rachel’s mother) were just going out Sunday shopping, when he put his coat on and complained about a tightness across his chest. Elaine rang me at 11 to say they were in the ambulance going to Oldham Hospital, not to wake Rachel up (who had just come off a night shift at 9) and that she would ring me back when there was any developments. I carried on as usual doing my tidying tasks, but was worried witless. At 1pm on a particularly bleak rainy Oldham day Elaine rang back to tell me things weren’t looking good since Brian had been taken into resuss and to wake Rachel. We got our coats on drove to the hospital and met Elaine in the little family room they have in A&E. Five minutes later the Doctor and nurse came in to say despite best efforts he had died. Twenty minutes later we went to see him laying in state.

The funeral is this Wednesday, both our and Elaine’s front rooms look like flower shops. Without going into detail here its been the week from hell, both me and Rachel have been off work last week. We are all trying to get on with life, but there are occasions when the grief gets too much. I’ve spent a lot of time staring into space missing Brian.  More than a few tears have leaked out as well.

I’m going to miss the old lad. Despite keeping very much to himself and immediate family, and being generally grumpy about the rest of the world, he had an infectious sense of mischief and laughed a lot in a way that shook his whole body. He was also generous to a fault, in a way that many of our ‘me-generation’ could never comprehend.

Our family have a very stoic ‘get over it and get on with it’ attitude, but its going to be very hard comprehending life without Brian.

(For those of you that know Rach here’s her take on all of this)