Blearily waking up from a nap in January this year, I saw I had over 30 missed calls from my younger sister, Charli.
I immediately called her back. That’s when she dropped the bomb: She had just seen on Facebook that our father had passed away in the early hours of that morning.
I initially felt numb, which then gave way to sadness and anger. I spent the next two days pacing the house, howling in pain.
We knew this day was coming – our dad had been diagnosed with the terminal lung disease pulmonary fibrosis eight years previously.
But Charli and I had decided to cut out our dying father from our lives for good in 2020.
It was a necessary move for both our sanity and our mental health, and I didn’t regret my decision. But I was torturing myself with thoughts of him slowly suffocating as his disease progressed; and wrestling with the overwhelming guilt that he’d gone to his deathbed believing his children didn’t care about him.
For the first 15 years of my life, we appeared to be the perfect family unit – a mum, a dad and two little girls.
But being under the same roof as my dad was akin to living with Jekyll and Hyde: Being called a ‘f*****g cow’ as he booted my backside into the bedroom or being told, the day before a school trip, to ‘f**k off and not bother coming back’.
Working as a bus driver, my dad once stuck his finger up at a group of girls he took to school. The next day, the ringleader stuck her hands around my throat and threatened to murder my entire family.
My mother spent most of their 20-year marriage trying to coax my father from the brink of self-destruction. Sometimes he would take off in the middle of the night, with my mum following behind because he was threatening to go and ‘top himself’.
The final straw for my mum came in 2006 when Dad went to his GP claiming he was suffering from terrible headaches and he was rushed to A&E for an emergency CT scan.
By the time my mum arrived at the hospital, it became clear that he had faked the entire episode. It was that day, she says, that any love that she had left for my father died.
My father did not take the news of them splitting up well.
One night while my mum was out, he told my 13-year-old sister that the next time he got drunk at the pub, he was going to come back home and rape our mother.
He found a girlfriend to take care of him – who would later become my stepmother – but once he moved out in 2008, his erratic and selfish behaviour seemed to escalate.
It wasn’t uncommon for my sister and I to come back home in floods of tears after spending time with him.
I would often have to hear from relatives and acquaintances about how he had been bitching about me, including the time he told someone on his bus that he didn’t love me.
If we ever confronted him, we were punished – sometimes in the form of not seeing us for weeks on end, or by purposely giving one sibling Christmas presents and nothing to the other, or inviting one child to his wedding yet banning the other.
I spent most of my early adult years continuously falling out with my father – but in October 2017, we found out he had been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, which usually only affects people over the age of 70.
My sister, my mum and I were devastated, as my father was then only 56 and it sounded like he wouldn’t even make it to Christmas.
I hadn’t been speaking to him at the time (for about a year or so) but I rang him once I found out. In light of the news, I was willing to put aside everything that had happened.
We rekindled our relationship. Dad acted very nonchalant about his diagnosis – he didn’t really seem to take it seriously (at least around us) and refused his doctor’s request to give up smoking because, as he saw it, he was already going to die anyway.
Our relationship continued until March 2020, when I uploaded a picture of my mum, nan and sister on Facebook and he wrote a comment underneath it along the lines of ‘if only the devil had cast his net’.
Although it was probably meant as a sarcastic joke, my sister finally snapped.
Charli had always toed the line with him, but she’d got sick of him constantly sharing Facebook posts that were clearly aimed at both of us – including one about how he was no longer proud of his daughters.
After his comment under my Facebook picture, she told him not to bother coming to her wedding if he was going to be like that.
He just put the phone down on her and the next day started posting more Facebook statuses aimed at us – so we decided to block him.
In fact, we made a collective decision to cut him out of our lives for good.
We didn’t inform him of this decision, which had been years in the making. We had tried countless times to explain to him how hurtful his behaviour could be but he would either get angry or dismissive.
I felt anxious about his reaction – but I felt relief, too. I had eventually accepted that, although I loved and cared about him, he was never going to change.
He would still find ways of trying to contact us: Ringing my mum’s house phone and messaging my sister’s friends.
He tracked me down on TikTok and bombarded me with messages, including a quote about how I was not to come to his grave once he died.
But when he did die, to my surprise, I did not regret my decision.
People are often quick to point out that you only have one father or mother – yet they rarely stop to think about what that parent could have done to cause their offspring to completely sever all ties with them.
Nonetheless, in the days that followed his death, I felt like I was drowning in a whirlpool of complex – sometimes irrational – emotions.
Underpinning it all was anger; that people might think we got what we deserved and most of all, that no one had bothered to inform us so we found out via Facebook.
The hardest thing for me was the lack of closure – we have no idea if there was a funeral or whether he was buried or cremated.
Although the waves of grief have somewhat subsided, I still find some days difficult – I often struggle to keep an objective head when sentimentality starts to creep in.
I have to accept the fact that my father was neither a martyr, nor a villain – he was, however, a damaged individual who was completely incapable of providing the father-daughter relationship that my sister and I rightfully deserved.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
MORE: I was taken on pre-date ‘errands’ – by the fourth, I knew I had to run
MORE: I was 18 when my mum made me an embarrassing offer
MORE: I couldn’t wait for our cinema first date – then porn started playing
