For my dad
My dad died last week.
I have been trying to write this for days and every time I open a blank page I close it again. So I am just going to write it.
Six months of bladder cancer. Six months of doctors giving hope and then taking it back. Maybe the operation is possible, maybe it is not. Maybe this hospital has a solution, maybe it does not. You ride the wave up and down enough times and you stop knowing what to feel. You get good at nodding.
Then my brother called and said dad was getting worse and I should come home.
I walked in and I could not believe what I was looking at. He was in his bed, weak, barely any blood left in him. He looked like someone had already started the process of saying goodbye without telling the rest of us.
The doctors talked him into going to the hospital. My dad is stubborn in the way only Italian men of a certain age can be stubborn, so this was already a small miracle. We called a private ambulance and off we went.
If you have never been in the emergency room at Ospedale del Mare in Naples, I envy you. Picture Dante's Inferno, but with fluorescent lighting and the faint smell of disinfectant that does not quite cover everything else. Sick people lined up in beds, most of them left to wait. Doctors who seemed genuinely put out by the existence of patients. Every so often you would hear someone screaming, not in pain, but in pure exasperation after sitting in that waiting room for twelve hours or more with no update and no end in sight. In the two days we were there, I watched security get into at least two actual physical fights with people who had simply had enough. The kind of place where you understand very quickly that if you want someone to notice your dad, you have to stand next to him and refuse to become invisible.
So that is what we did. Me, my brother, and my mum. Two days and two nights. One of those nights I spent standing because the hospital did not have enough chairs. Not a metaphor. Literally no chairs.
On the morning of the second day, my dad went into a coma. My brother was the one with him. If he had not been there, the doctors would not have noticed. That is not a dramatic exaggeration. That is what happened.
My dad was moved to a code red room. We stood outside and thought that was it.
It was not it.
They came out and told us he had stabilised. Then they told us we had a choice: leave him there to die, or bring him home.
My brother walked into that room and asked my dad, directly, what he wanted.
My dad said he wanted to go home.
The ambulance on the way back turned out to be run by people who were, to put it plainly, bad. They kept asking for more money at every turn. At some point we realised they had stolen my dad's wallet.
We stayed strong. There was no other option.
My brother and his wife took over from there. The hospital sent us home with nothing. No care plan, no guidance, no "here is what you do next". Just a man in a critical state and a front door. So they figured it out themselves. They learned how to do IVs. They learned basic nursing. They turned our home into something that worked.
And then something strange happened.
My dad got a little better.
Not well. Not cured. But better in a way that none of the doctors had predicted. He talked to us. He laughed a few times. We had two more weeks with him that we were not supposed to have, and every one of those moments is now something I will carry for the rest of my life.
It was worth every sleepless night. Every argument with a doctor who could not be bothered. Every moment of fear that the small improvement was just another false hope about to be taken away again.
He died at home, in his own bed, surrounded by his family.
My brother is the reason any of that happened. He asked the hard questions. He made the hard calls. He learned things he should never have had to learn. I do not have words big enough for what he did, so I will just say: hero is not too strong a word.
As for the broader lesson, I have one, and it is simple.
Do not get sick. And if you must get sick, do not end up at Ospedale del Mare in Naples, where the institutions will meet your worst moment with rudeness and indifference and send you home with nothing.
We did the rest ourselves.
We always do.
He was generous and grumpy and had the biggest heart. He loved maths, logic, general knowledge. He watched quiz shows on TV and screamed at the contestants when they got things wrong, as if they could hear him. He spent an unreasonable amount of time doing sudokus and crosswords.
I hope wherever he is, they have good puzzles.