My dad died while I was working in a job I hated, in my first year of a doomed six-year relationship. I feel like I barely knew him as an adult man, although this was in part to my staunch refusal to make that transition from my teenage years. I clung onto my youth – whatever that resembled – tightly, and for a long time dreaded the binds of life that I was assured would follow. Strangely, however, I never dreaded depression. Even as I sat in my then-girlfriend’s car, parked outside Waitrose, crying about how much I hated working in Trust and how trapped I felt, I didn’t really consider a diagnosis for what I was feeling. When dad died, I was not necessarily in the best place, but worse – and eventually better – was yet to come.

I wonder now, what he made of me then. What hopes did he have for me, if any? I sensed his pride and his love for me and others was always palpable, but I draw a blank when I consider how I may have appeared to him. Did my attitude to my work – indifferent at best, emotional and angry at worst – confuse him? Or did he feel a certain kinship? I know that towards the final years of his life, he wasn’t happy in his work. The enjoyment of driving round countryside, farm to farm as a sales rep to a beloved sector, was replaced by a desk job as an assistant manager at the same company, as farmer after farmer sold up, retired and died. If I felt trapped in my first proper adult job (taking my stint at Cineworld out of the equation) only two to three years deep, how on earth did he feel, at the end of his working life, in a job he had no choice but to keep; wading in debt with a family to look after?

It’s unlikely that there’ll ever be an appropriate time to ask my mum what he was like behind the curtain of warmth, love and selflessness he presented to all of us. There’s a chance that the honest answer would be ‘more or less the same’, but I have memories that feel like they were glimpses of some of the demons that perhaps lurked behind – many too personal and some too speculative to share in this. I don’t know what I’d feel having traits, feelings or behaviour of his, that resemble my own, confirmed to me. Would it make me feel closer? Would it lift some of the responsibility or blame I feel for being the worst I can be? There’s a chance that it would make me feel all the more remorseful that I didn’t get to know him; that I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to make a proper connection while he was alive. But, like I said, it’s unlikely that I’ll get round to finding this out from mum, and so occasional speculations like this may continue on for a lifetime.

I wish he had lived to see me go to university, graduate, meet my future wife and get married but in all truthfulness, that chain of events is unlikely to have happened if he hadn’t passed away when he did. There’s every chance that the relationship I was in then – which was only months in when he died – would’ve disintegrated earlier if there hadn’t been such an emotional upset early on. It’s also possible that without the change that my dad’s insurance policy and widow’s pension brought upon us all, that my sister wouldn’t have gone to university – which was what gave me the kick up the ass to abandon the job I hated and do the same a year later. Also, without the influence of my then girlfriend, it is unlikely that I would have gone to live in Brighton and study at the University of Sussex; circumstances which led me to meeting my now wife. So wishing he could be here to share this reality with me feels redundant in one sense, as it doesn’t seem like it would have ever happened. I feel fortunate though, that I knew at least one side of him well enough to imagine how he would have reacted to much of what I’ve gone through.