What I Learned from My Father Dying Suddenly When I Was 25

There was a saying my dad used to utter over and over again. “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” he would say, whenever I came to him with a grievance, trying to understand why someone had undermined me at work, or someone had broken my heart.

He was always there for me. Until suddenly he wasn’t.

When my mum rang at 7.35pm on 27 August 2015, he hadn’t been in the world for an hour. I had been busily making dinner. I knew that the time she was calling at was unusual. I knew by her tone that things were not OK. The words rang around my head, not landing properly. She could barely get them out. My knees seemed to buckle beneath me. I was totally alone. My boyfriend was away and no one was in the house. This only amplified the feeling that this couldn’t be true.

There are photos of me in Dad’s arms with his big bear hands clutching me so tightly. His hands are something I miss the most, their weight, like a paw on my shoulder. Sometimes, in moments of clarity, I almost can feel them there, in the moments I need him most. He was not one for small gestures. Everything with him was big and loud. He commanded a room and made sure to embrace every experience with an unfailing rigour and enthusiasm. That’s why his loss was so palpable. Going to a restaurant after his death felt pointless. However many friends or family were around us, there was always an empty seat at the table, an absence that was impossible to fill.

For much of my childhood, Dad was a dominant, boisterous, exuberant presence. He was always this way – constantly pushing us towards adventure, and seemingly allergic to fear. We went skiing almost every winter. I have such a striking image of him sashaying down the mountain – almost incapacitated with glee, pinching my cheeks when we got to the bottom of the slope, even though I was all of (a very grown up) 13 and mortified. “I knew you could do it,” he would say, after I’d moaned about trying to ski down the extremely steep black slope.

We’d then sneak off and get a hot chocolate for me, a mulled wine for him – co-conspirators always. Dad taught me how to swim, how to sail, how to set up a tent and how to ride a bike. In later life, he used to race sailboats around the UK for weeks on end, coming back ruddy-faced and delighted. Most of my best memories revolve around our kitchen table in a leafy north London suburb, surrounded by books and wine. Thanks to my mum, the place was the central hub for most of my friends throughout the years, drawn as they were to her cooking and hospitality and, in equal measure, to Dad’s stories.

Most often he’d have an anecdote about encountering some political figure or other during his career as a broadcast journalist. Janet Street-Porter once said he was “no spring chicken” before he was about to go live on air, and he never let us forget it. I’m sure he still harbours that grudge to this day. He would often hammer a point home to death while mum and I sighed and rolled our eyes. He could switch like that, and would be mercilessly unforgiving if someone crossed him. “Typical Scorpio man,” I would say. “Oh, enough of that horoscope bollocks,” he would retort playfully.

When I was a teenager, most of our arguments were about boys. He was baffled by my attraction to emotionally volatile boys who created utter chaos, while I ignored all the grounded, safe ones. He couldn’t handle the idea of me belonging to anyone else. I was his only child, and my pain hurt him profoundly. When I got unceremoniously dumped halfway through my gap year by my first love and called my dad in tears, begging him to come and collect me from my boyfriend’s house, he drove all the way back home with one hand in a fist on the steering wheel. I was devastated while he was silently furious – more so with me I suppose.

“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” he would say, forcefully but kindly, as I collapsed into tragic teenage tears listening to No Doubt’s Don’t Speak on repeat. In retrospect, he was probably more livid that he’d paid a £600 phone bill from Thailand that I’d racked up talking to said boyfriend almost daily. This was before Skype and Facetime, and that was the only time my sister remembers him being properly furious with me, shouting and swearing when the phone bill arrived. To be fair, he’d also forked out £800 on a ticket home when I’d decided a gap year in Thailand wasn’t for me. Suffice to say that being 18 and in love wasn’t my finest hour.

Later, when I got back together with said first love, much to the chagrin of... well, everyone, he sighed heavily whenever the doorbell went and my boyfriend came and collected me in his Fiat Punto. “It won’t last,” he would say. He was right, as it turned out, not that I ever let him know. I had wanted to belong to someone else at that point, to move on from being a grownup version of the golden child I had been. We were at our most distant throughout those adolescent years, as my sullen teenage self rebelled against the safety and security I’d been provided with. I was intent on creating chaos. Yet when, for example, he picked me up from an ill-advised rave I’d gone to, there was no judgment – only concern for the 15-year-old with pupils the size of saucers and a skirt the size of a postage stamp he was collecting from King’s Cross at 3am. “Let’s not tell mum about this,” he said gently, patting my knee. “Probably for the best,” I said smiling with relief.

When, a decade later, that call came in from Mum, I reasoned with myself that she was confused. People survived heart attacks. He was strong. He was my dad. He couldn’t just die. I had to get to him. The only way to get there was an Uber. The incongruity of using an app in my desperation only added to my feeling of being unstuck from reality.

Then I saw him. He was there, but not present. I was hugging him, but for the first time in his life, he wasn’t hugging me back. He would never be able to hug me back, I thought. It was when I looked at myself in the mirror after peeing (how odd that your body still functions, as if oblivious to the insane significance of what has just happened), when I looked back at that new, “after” me, that I realised I had entered a different place: one I never imagined I would occupy. But I was there nonetheless. Crisis was something that happened to other people. The disbelief hung in the air, sticky with ambivalence. And as I got visibly thinner in the weeks afterwards, my grief wore me like a mask; I was telling the world about it outwardly, physically, without saying a word, cloaked in my own mountain of bereavement. I indulged in the usual clichés one does to fill a void. I drank too much, I didn’t eat. I stared at my phone incessantly.

On the day of Dad’s funeral, I couldn’t sit still. My hand shook as I tried to straighten my hair. We made everyone wear colour; a mass of black would have seemed too bleak. “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” I thought, as I looked in the mirror before we left, before I drove his car and saw his coffin being held and carried into the service. I hope he knew how loved he was. How filled to the rafters the room was, full of people full of stories all about him. He would have loved it. I joked in my eulogy that it was the kind of audience he had always dreamed of.

Two weeks after he died, Jon Snow emailed my mum about Dad. “Nigel”, the email was titled. We both read it, weeping. “He was a crucial building block to making Channel 4 News what it is today. He was a quality man, and brought far more depth to what we do than anyone else at the time.” My heart swelled with pride. The more people got in touch, the more I discovered about the man that was Nigel Roberts. Outside of being my brilliant dad, he was someone who infiltrated many lives.

The fallout from death can be unendingly bleak; the “glamour” of the grief in the first few weeks slowly recedes and you’re left with the absence. As the people around you slowly get back to normal life, you feel you should too. You scrape yourself off the floor and go back to work. You gradually acclimatise to doing “normal” things, such as a food shop. You are stopped in your tracks when your memory plays tricks on you; you spot a figure in the distance with the same gait, same salt-and-pepper grey hair and you – for one split second – forget that it couldn’t be. It’s not him. We can never put into words how this type of sudden loss plays tricks on us, how the shock permeates and reverberates around your body for years. Without my father, there was an enormous absence, so huge and sudden, it felt almost impossible to talk about. I spent years numbing the pain and trying to put one foot in front of the other, but eventually it catches up with you. You cannot avoid the gaping chasm for ever. It just changes shape slightly.

Eventually, you learn to live with the loss. I learned that the best way to honour my dad was to embrace his gusto and enthusiasm for life, as I know with certainty he would have wanted me to do. Last week, an old friend of his sent me a YouTube video of him, introducing Metallica in the ’80s. He then trotted off stage in his usual dramatic fashion, wearing bright orange trousers and a leather jacket, naturally.

For that instant, he was there in his full glory, ridiculous, fun and so clearly in the moment. In this increasingly atomised world, being present almost feels like an act of resistance. One can never prepare for something this seismic, but you can learn to rebuild them within you, living as they would. Watching him glide off stage full of glee felt like a move towards hope and resistance. And if this year of loss and strife has taught us anything, it’s that belief in these will carry us through.