‘Dad told me he was sick about a week after my eighteenth birthday in September. He sounded optimistic, though he didn’t seem positive. Over the next three months his condition will get worse. He had already stopped working by then, but now he will spend nearly every day in bed, and Steve will take time off university to look after him. The school he worked for will put out a newsletter and then the messages of support will start flowing in. Luckily, I have left that school to go to a sixth form college thirty minutes away.
In five years’ time, when I try and put this story onto paper, I’ll think about how I wasn’t really present in those final few months. I was physically there, but my mind checked out, unable to process what was happening.’
You can read the essay, in full, here.
Jon Paul Roberts 
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