I had to rush him to Rawene Hospital. (Who knew places like that still had their own hospitals?) When we got to the emergency department and they gave him some morphine and started to ascertain if they could sew his thumb back on, I got a call to say my dad had died. He just passed away sitting in his chair.
See? What a week. Now I am writing this on the morning after we farewelled my father with a party at the Elbow Room. We didn't have a funeral. We had a party at a bar and my cousin, Sven, a talented musician who was in a band called The Checks, sang some songs.
I wore Miss Crabb and sequinned stilettos and fell over. So, just a regular night for me, then. But it made me think. Human beings can't understand anything they haven't experienced. Actually, now that I have written that, I think it is probably not even true, but last week I had not experienced losing my father, and now I am changed.
Maybe everyone feels like that when they lose their father. Although my dad was also an exceptional person, a passionate and fiercely intelligent man. He died, aged 84, after he had had a series of strokes, so the last few years of his life were pretty grim, especially after he lost my mum. But even though things were hard at the end, Dad lived a very meaningful life. Mum and Dad would have been married for 60 years this year. During their long marriage, they had a bath together every morning. I used to think everyone's parents did that until a friend came over and observed me talking to both of them through the bathroom door.
"Are they both in there?!" While in the bath - they would be in there for hours - they talked about politics and what they had read in the Guardian, which they got by airmail.
Dad was a neurologist, a dedicated doctor who cared deeply for his patients. He was radical in some of his ideas about medicine - he believed your emotional state influenced your health before many mainstream doctors shared that view, and advocated alternative therapies such as acupuncture.
Dad had great integrity and a profound social conscience. He saw the evil of apartheid, growing up in 1950s South Africa.
He could be infuriatingly rigid in his beliefs, but his values were unwavering. Dad was passionate and loved chocolates and roses and maths and jazz. He was a talented painter. I found out other things I hadn't known about my family from the speeches about Dad.
Apparently some of our forebears were hanged at the Slachter's Nek rebellion. One of them was hanged and didn't die, so guess what? They hanged him again.
Dad said: "You come from a family of rebels." Dad taught Steve Biko at medical school. He learned Zulu. He was a risk-taker in some ways, a puritan in others. But he invariably had a deep distrust of the Establishment or authority. He did not believe in conformity.
I found him embarrassing when I was a child but now I think he was wonderful: it is better to be ridiculous than be boring. The thing that Dad's dying has made me realise is that you need to constantly try to be aware and not just do the same old stuff because everyone else is doing it.
Sorry to be banal, but this bears repeating. If you are reading this and your dad has not yet died, please stop. Right now. Just for a moment. And question why you are doing what you are doing. In honour of John William Hill. Thanks.
Anyway, my friend's thumb is now shorter than it was, but healing. And I am healing too. Hamba kahle, Dad, from the Xhosa dialect. It means "Go well".
