Harry Leslie Smith February 25, 1923-November 28, 2018

"As long as there is sentience and an ability to be loved and show love, there is purpose to existence."

Harry Leslie Smith February 25, 1923- November 28, 2018

You think you are over it and that time has built up sufficient scar tissue that the wound of grief can’t hurt you anymore. But then the anniversary date for the death of a loved one comes. It’s like running into your ex at a party- who you haven’t seen since a bitter break-up years ago. You are reminded of the before times, and it hurts because the past is irrevocable. History; can never be mended. It can only be remembered as a warning or a solace.

On the 27th, four years ago, an ICU doctor spoke to my dad at his bedside.

 “Things don’t look good,” said the ICU physician after conferring with his notes. The doctor then turned to you and said, as if you were a contestant on a game show whose remarkable winning streak suddenly ended. “Harry, I think you did well to live to ninety-five. You were even supposed to be in Paris this week, for a conference on refugees. You’ve had a full life. I am afraid; however, you aren’t going to return to Paris. You are extremely sick, and if I continue your treatment at best, you will be in a long-term care facility for the remainder of your life.”

“End it,” you whispered. The doctor responded, “you made the right choice. It was a pleasure meeting you.” I Stood with Harry

After the doctor left the room, I apologised to my dad for letting him down by not saving him. He didn’t speak. We just held hands. It was a moment of unspeakable sadness. Our love for each other, our relationship as father and son- as well as being the best of friends was in a few hours about to end forever. When my dad fell asleep, I left his  room and tweeted

12:39 PM · Nov 27, 2018

It's mortal.

Afterwards, I returned to our apartment to fetch some things. I wanted to make his voyage towards death more comfortable. I picked up a favourite blanket, a picture of his wife when she was young and brought some beer to wet his lips before extinction eternally parched them.

I didn’t want his death to be like my brother Pete’s a complete cluster fuck.

Peter encountered a series of mishaps in the hospital -exacerbated by his mental illness- which made it difficult for him to deal with life-threatening health issues. After he had a lung biopsy to determine how calcified his lungs were from pulmonary fibrosis everything  went pear-shaped for him. The procedure didn’t go as planned and Peter was placed in an induced coma. It was done under the belief putting Peter on a ventilator would give his lungs sufficient time to heal from the trauma created by the surgical procedure.

However, weaning Peter off the ventilator became problematic. Each attempt ended in dismal failure, and Peter was left gasping for air and terrified from his inability to catch his breath.

After a number of failed attempts, Pete through sign language, as he had lost his ability to speak, told his wife he wanted to die.

On Pete’s last day of life, I asked him if his mind was made up to die. I said if it wasn't- I’d advocate for this change of mind with the doctors.

“You always had my back.”

Pete indicated by nodding his head he wanted me to fight for him.

I returned to our family members waiting in the ICU lounge. I told them Peter wanted to live, but outside of you, dad, everyone was resolved it was his time. I felt like Henry Fonda in the movie 12 Angry Men, except I capitulated too easily. I only debated the merits of Pete living for less than five minutes. I Stood with Harry

No, I was determined my dad wouldn’t die like Peter in chaos, regrets, discord, and so much familial dysfunction.

After the doctor had signed the order to administer the morphine to make you sleep, a nurse came in with a syringe. At that moment, I received a video from Owen Jones. It was of him and Labour party supporters chanting your name and crying out “hip, hip, hurrah.”

After I played the video for you, you clapped your hands and whispered, “that’s it.” And then you spoke no more, forever.

Your breath, through most of your dying, sounded vigorous and determined. I imagined you as a marathon swimmer pushing through the dark icy waters of the English Channel. At one point, I believed you would wake after beating death in the shadowlands of your subconscious and give me such a bollocking for agreeing it was your time to die.

But you did die, and after you stopped breathing, the two-way interchange of love between us disappeared into death’s vacuum. When you stopped breathing, and the light flickered out from your eyes, like the flash from a 1940s photographer’s bulb, your body resembled a marble relief of a medieval saint.

Two hours later, I climbed into your bed at home and wrapped myself in your sheets that still had your scent on them. As I fell into a dreamless, melancholic sleep, I believed nothing would feel as bad as this again in my life. I was wrong because cancer and covid proved equally devastating and created other reasons to mourn the loss in my life. I Stood With Harry

But in the grieving for my father and then my own physical diminishment through cancer when Covid locked downed the world, I used that time to assess and sum up my dad’s life and my own. In the first year after my dad's death, I returned to the road to revisit  many of the places where he had spoken or advocated for refugees to continue his Last Stand. When cancer came for me in 2020, I wrote a book about how the work my dad and I did during the eight years between Peter’s death and his was about finding a path to preserve the history of our working-class family. All the books, the tours, the podcasts, the speeches, and the interviews were more about our love for each other and those that had been in our lives than anything else. Did we tilt at windmills during those last years? Yes, we did. Did we change anything in the world? Probably not, but it was worth the bloody try. And during it and after it, nothing fucking else mattered but that love we had for each other.

November in my hemisphere always ends by dying in the dark of winter’s approaching footsteps.

Soon, it will be 2023, and I dread the year to come because I think it will be as violent and unpredictable as a drunk on the lash. Discord sown through plague, fascism and a cost-of-living crisis will bloom into war in every corner of our civilisation. The phrase Fin de Siècle comes to mind. Admittedly the era that is now fading into a twilight of greed wasn’t great. Yet, it afforded us at least the illusion of hope that ordinary people could alter the flow and contain tyranny. Even if hope is as scarce as affordable rent during this cost-of-living crisis, we must persist in holding onto hope. Hope keeps us human. Hope engenders empathy and kindness and the will to resist as well as combat tyranny. There is joy in being alive my dad knew this because he had seen his fair share of grief. To continue to live, we must be prepared for the great battles ahead of us. Or as, he said:

Hope is as absent from society today as cash is to a pauper’s wallet because a populism fuelled by hate now smoulders. Everywhere we turn it feels like optimism has been eclipsed by a world we don’t want to recognise as our own. Despair is in the breath of our words because we are frightened.

Over my nine decades of life, I’ve known despair but never hopelessness.

My hope for a better tomorrow for everyone in our country doesn’t come from our military victories against fascism. It doesn’t come from Churchill’s defiance or the words of present-day politicians. No: the source of hope that has carried me through decades of existence comes from the collective will of my generation in 1945 to beat our swords into ploughshares and harvest a just society through the erection of the Welfare State.

My hope has always come from the humanity, kindness and intelligence that inhabits the majority of people who reside on our shores. It may seem dormant now, but it will rise again because those sparks of decency that built the NHS, gave affordable housing to each and every one of us, and provided free education to all, are in each Briton alive today – because you are the children and the grandchildren of my generation. If we did it before, then we can do it again. Harry Leslie Smith- Guardian, Essay 2016

Thank you for reading this. As Elon Musk is running Twitter- I have no idea how long the platform can survive. It is why I put together on substack the Tweets from the week my father lay dying in a hospital in November 2018. I want to preserve all those thousands of tweets made on the Harry’s Last Stand account because they speak of a time and a place when we could have stopped fascism. It is his history, my history and your history in many ways too. Your solidarity with me as a subscriber to my substack is so appreciated.

Take care, John.