42) The middle of the night phone call nobody wants. 15th July

 Lying in the boat, trying to get comfortable on the sofa which transitions to something which looks, vaguely, with a good imagination, like a bed, but feels like a heap of bricks where you can fall down the gap between the 2 sofa cushions, I was trying to get to sleep. I had more or less dozed off. My daughter, Robin was next to me as my other half had 'given up trying to sleep on the bloody thing' after the first night where he kept rolling downhill into me, giving me about a foot of space and various bits of his body parts warming my back during the night and Robin, being the kind soul she is, offered him her bed. She had also picked up on my edginess after the last rites text of 2 days before.

1.48am, my phone rang.

Shit!

The darkness of the boat lit up with the Ski Sunday theme tune ringing loud and proud.

I knew!

I knew then what the call would be. The call everyone dreads and the call I had been anticipation for over a year - when will it be? What will it say? Who will I get it from? I was about to get those questions answered. 'HOSPITAL' my phone said - I'd programmed the number a year back as all calls from the whole hospital come from the same number.

I knew.

'Hello, I this Izabelle?' said a young, gentle, female voice.

'Yes' I said, scrambling to my knees on the bed to hear her better. Robin leaped up from her sleep to hug me. In the quiet of the boat she could hear everything. We hugged, we listened.

'It's the staff nurse from ward C7, I'm so sorry but Dad has just passed away!'

And just like that, he was gone.

She told me she was at the desk outside his solo ward, where he'd been for the past 3 days and she'd noticed his breathing had changed so she went in to see and he'd gone.

What now? What are you supposed to do when you're 4 days from your car by boat and about 40 miles away, its 1.48am. Even if you were to get a taxi at that time I didn't know where to look for one or if the marina would be open. Not only that but there was also a 3 hour drive home on top.

And he was already dead.

Robin and I went outside - it seemed the right thing to do - we grabbed our quilts and sat on the front of the boat, in the pitch blackness of the English countryside night, with a million stars reflecting off the inky water. We sat, we hugged, we cried.

We stayed there for an hour, then went back in and watched the dawn rise through the window. It was a sunrise my dad wouldn't see. He'd never see any dawn ever again. 

And there was nothing I could do.