This may come as a surprise to people however I have some sad news.
On the 15th of May my father Derek Housego passed away from cancer. He was some 79 years of age and lived a full life. Obviously it is deeply saddening to lose someone who played such a significant role in my life. Once the ailment was diagnosed he survived for a following 18 months and underwent all range of therapies to help see him through. Up until the last day I saw him alive he continued to be an insightful guide to life and I feel fortunate to have experience my life with both my parents in it, many people don’t.
While I had so many updates to inform people of, which included a new track release I decided to leave this month as a dedication to his life. He was an acoustic guitar player an artist along with being a working professional senior civil designer commencing as a draughtsman and junior most likely. His last working position was aiding school children in maths which he began doing at retirement age. Oddly enough while I did quite well in maths and won a number of mathematics banking awards, I don’t recall the vast multitude of equations we learnt at the time. For me there remains some questionable matters in the whole educational process in regards to this. But this is not the place to delve into those matters.
Dad was always sharing his music interests with his friends and I enjoyed some of those artists however our tastes diverged as the times changed. The sometimes chaotic sounds of modern music didn’t really fit his tastes.
The experience of his last few weeks and months of life was upsetting at times due to the range of treatments he experienced and how he made his way through those. Modern medicine does not always seem to be what it is and sometimes it’s trial and error. I’ve experienced its developments as a butchering of my gum line which to me is still an outstanding legal matter. That said, and I might have mentioned this to people previously I’m going to leave you all with a bit of a dedication story for my site visitors. It’s just been one of those significant matters over my own life time which has always remained with me.
When I was a child I went to the picture theatre with my parents to see a movie “Tommy”, Friday night theatre was a treat people enjoyed. It’s a 70’s movie and at that time music was going in a lot of different directions I don’t need to go into all the details but Tommy is a rock opera. I’ll never forget the movie because it was so over the top for that time and my Dad bought the album. I just use to play it with the headphones on, singing to it at the top of my voice. I still know all the words to it which gives you an idea of the impact it had on me, it was so dramatic and most likely while I understood it, I might not have actually had a real insight into its meaning at that time of life, a young child. Thing is though, as I visually experienced what my father went through trying to live each of those days after the operation with machines the only thing keeping him alive, when it came to this months update in terms of what has been occurring this last month, his life and what he went through in his final days, the comparisons are just uncanny. The fact that Tina Turner one of it’s star’s died some two weeks later after Dad’s death, almost even spooky. I just thought of this movie and have included a link to the soundtrack and one of it’s songs. I still find the musician ship and messages it presented to the audience as significant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_gZtvNYLw&list=PLGM1XRI5-xobevOI6NP-SOH7plYWaMwhI&index=6
I don’t know that Dad would actually understand why I chose to go on about this when he life was full of so much more but it was something we all did as a family and it’s impact has been a lifetime of memories. I should probably mention that the Tommy album along with his Dire Straits album has been sitting in my record collection for decades now, I think you’ll find they are the only two I didn’t purchase myself.
So for now, it’s been a sad two weeks after his death and an emotionally depleting one in terms of all that was gone through in the lead up to his final day with us. I can’t begin to express all his life in this one tribute update but hopefully people will understand, I wanted a small tribute page and some time to express just 1% of all the things my father has been through his lifetime.
See you all next month after recovery from a very sad time in my own life.
Lipcrack