The day I started to design the bad day stickers that ended up in Emma Calder's Moody Days sticker book, I was feeling really fed up. Also I was thinking about my father who had died some seven years earlier.
Bad Day Stickers
This is the piece of writing that triggered the stickers off.
On bad days I think of the saddest things like the day my father died for instance. (I also think of my own mortality.)
I had been sitting in the hospital for about four hours my father had very bad pneumonia and couldn't breath without an oxygen mask. He hadn't spoken once but, then he said, “I feel so sad.” Those were almost his last words.
Then the nurse came and asked me if I wanted the priest to come. I didn't know what to do, so I said: “Yes” even though we were not religious.
The priest stood by my father and my father opened his eyes and said, “Oh fuck.”
And those really were his last words. I knew then that getting the priest had been wrong.
Two hours later he was dead it was exactly 9.20pm.
Later I slept.
I began to fall
and fall.
Then a dull thud.
He had landed somewhere.
When I woke up, I went out to the shopping centre.
Somehow I did what I did.
But it was odd, my feet didn't touch the ground and my head was up to the roof.
Floating home out of my body.
Then to the hospital to pick up his things.
The grey plastic bag with his shoes, wrist watch and old clothes.
I know it's still down the garage somewhere.
