I haven’t posted much recently, as you may have noticed. This is because Christmas and New Year have been an absolute nightmare.

My father had been ill for a little while before Christmas. He was undergoing tests right up until Christmas. The doctors diagnosed early stages of Colon Cancer. This obviously upset us, but we looked on the bright side and thought it could have been a lot worse. The full test results came back on 29th December - the cancer was worse than originally expected and had spread to the surrounding organs, mainly the liver. We were told it was terminal.

After we received the news we spent the next few weeks “country hoping” to visit my parents as often as we could while trying to keep going to Uni and school. On Friday 13th January dad was admitted to Hospital to receive some treatment to ease his pain. He did seem to pick up a bit as they could do more to make him more comfortable at the Hospital, but we knew that things weren’t good. On the Saturday we managed to arrange for him to meet his sister and her husband who he hadn’t seen for years. It was something he’d wanted for a long time, and he managed to do it. This was thanks to Becca.

We headed home on the Sunday night to be back for Uni and school. We received a phone call early on Tuesday 17th to say that dad had deteriorated rapidly over night. We got packed and headed straight down to visit. Another call later informed us that he had passed away just after 8am. On the Tuesday we were informed of the death of Becca’s great Aunt.

The week passed very quickly with having to organise a mountain of things. It soon came round to dad’s funeral on Monday. A very sad occassion, however all went very smoothly and was well organised. A large number of people turned out to pay their respects from all walks of dad’s life. I was very proud.

Another trip followed to the North East for the funeral of Becca’s great Aunt on the Wednesday. Things started to catch up to me and I came down with rather nasty flu. Wednesday evening saw us back in Huddersfield and a chance to catch our breath. The flu lasted over the weekend and is still lingering about, just what I needed to top it all off.

So that was the beginning of 2006 for us, possibly the worst few weeks of our lives. It can only get better from here on in!

Jack Dennis Rooke : 20th December 1945 - 17th January 2006