My mum was one of 7, so there was a lot of support for her from her remaining brothers and sisters ... and for me from their kids, my cousins... 13 of them (I'm second eldest)... we all remain close even now ... sadly we lost our first cousin in 2018, she was 3 weeks younger than me ... 58... no age ... another to cancer of the oesophagus... life can be pretty ****...
I was 19 too but June 1980, unlike you though, he'd been ill for most of what I remember, mostly conditions from being a Jap pow. The hard part for me at the time was, I gave him cpr , the paramedics got there and said well done lad, you've just saved your dad's life, only to be told 2 hours later he had died in hospital. One weird fact we hold as a family, dad died on my youngest brothers birthday, mom died on my eldest sisters birthday, my one sister died on my eldest brothers birthday and the youngest brother died on mine.
My old man had a prior cardiac arrest when I was 13 but nothing in between apart from angina ... we had a walk of about 2 miles from our house to Filbert St and he would often have to stop and take a breather about half way ... I would try and stop him doing some physical work (we had an off licence) and tried to do most of the lifting e.g. packs of beer, pop etc from the wholesalers ... to no avail in the end ... but as he said ... if he couldn't live a life doing things he wanted / needed to do then he'd rather go ... the irony was that the massive heart attack that took him came after he had his regular afternoon kip ... my mother called up the stairs to wake him and he was attempting to get out of bed - we just heard this massive bang on the ceiling ... the paramedics said he wouldn't have felt anything...
