The scenes of Danish footballer Christian Eriksen collapsing on the football pitch were horrific.

They brought back intense memories for me – and most likely countless others – as someone who watched a loved one ‘die’ from a cardiac arrest – only to be brought back.

Instead of a super-fit athlete in his prime, however, my dad was a 75-year-old alcohol-dependent man who was suffering from pneumonia and sepsis when his heart stopped beating for almost three minutes.

Earlier that day – a bitterly cold January morning – I had gone to check on him at his home in Linford as he had been unwell with a terrible cough.

I found him semi-conscious and gasping for breath. Like something out of a horror film his eyes were fused shut.

I dialled 999 and the paramedics arrived and whisked him off to Basildon A&E. I rushed over and had barely been at his bedside for 30 seconds when he flatlined.

Like an episode of Casualty buzzers went off loudly. There was almost like a ‘boom’ sound’ as his heart gave out, which still haunts me today. Within second literally every nurse and doctor on the A&E ward rushed in to help him.

I was ushered outside as they closed the curtains and began to perform CPR.

A kind stranger in a nearby cubicle came over and cuddled me as he could see I was alone (my husband had to be at home with our baby son).

My dad was divorced and my brother lives in Florida so I was my dad’s next of kin.

Just at that very moment my brother called to check on my dad. I tearfully managed the words, “I think he’s gone, he’s flatlined. They are trying to bring him back.”

I knew the chances of my dad being resuscitated were pretty much zilch. He had been told many times before the drinking was killing him. My brother, himself a biological scientist, could hear the beeping machines in the background. He knew it was most likely game over.

About 30 minutes later a nurse came in to the side room I’d been asked to wait in and told me they had managed to restart his heart at around three minutes. The relief was overwhelming. But they had intubated him, put him in a coma and he was later that night transferred to intensive care at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. It was still touch and go.

My dad ended up staying in hospital for six months. He was transferred back to Basildon but he kept relapsing. Three times I was called over to say ‘goodbye’ and three times he came back again. He always was a fighter. He had too much heart to give up.

This rollercoaster of hope and despair, however, took its toll on all of us – our family, my children and his friends. “If he survives this I’m going to think he’s immortal,” my brother joked.

My dad was extremely frail when he finally came out of hospital. He had lost so much weight he didn’t recognise himself in the mirror. He was a shell of the person he was before. But one good thing, he was off the drink.

We were all incredibly grateful for what the heroic doctors and nurses had done for him.

A few months later we went back to the ward he spent most time at in Basildon and took some chocolates and flowers for the nurses. He apologised for being such hard work and pretty rude at times (because of the alcohol withdrawal), but the nurses had grown to become genuinely fond of him.

My dad lasted about another two and a half years. He slowly but surely went back on the drink. At first I tried to discourage it but I gave in.

He tried but was unable to change. In his local shop they got to know me so well as I went in every day to get his food and drink, they affectionately nicknamed me ‘the vodka lady’.

Eventually he stopped eating and taking his medication. His body was giving up. When he didn’t want to watch Wales play rugby on TV anymore – his one true passion in life as a proud Welshman – I knew it was his time.

In November 2019 he was back in Basildon Hospital with pneumonia again. This time there was no coming back.

This Father’s Day will be the second one since my dad died and I still feel stricken with grief, but I know how lucky I was to have him for 78-years.

So, on Sunday I will try to think about the funny things. Like how friends in his local pub joked the crematorium would explode because of all the alcohol in his body.

How when I was driving to see my dad an hour after he died (I’d popped home to have a shower and he passed when I was gone) the theme from the 1980’s cartoon Dogtanian got stuck on a loop on the stereo. I couldn’t get the damn thing off.

It was midnight, stormy and creepy. I was going to say goodbye to my dead father and I had “one for all and all for one” stuck in my head. I’d downloaded the Lovejoy theme tune to play to him as he succumbed to the pneumonia (he was a huge fan of the show) but I’d also downloaded ever other TV theme tune ever recorded, it seemed.

I half-jokingly asked my dad one day if he’d seen a ‘light’ or a ‘tunnel’ when his heart had stopped.

I expected a frosty response, as he wasn’t the type to believe in the afterlife. But to my amazement he told me he’d had an ‘experience’.

“I was in the ocean and it was like a tropical paradise. The water was getting warmer and warmer and I felt so peaceful I really wanted to stay there,” he said.

This gave me some comfort and so when he did slip away at the end I played wave sounds to him at his bedside, hoping with every fibre in me that he was back in that same ocean – warm and at peace.