'My dad was one of Covid-19's first victims'

In 2020, I was 18-years-old and living in Basingstoke with my dad Lee.

We had the greatest relationship and I always said he was one of my best friends.

Just four months into that year, he became one of the first people in the UK to die with Covid-19.

My dad, who had no underlying health conditions, was crazy about sport, playing cricket for Basingstoke and North Hampshire.

If I, or anyone in my family, ever needed advice or a chat - it was always him we would turn to.

And as Dad's condition deteriorated he was still caring for me.

When he got worse, I called 111 twice but because it was still early in the pandemic, no-one really seemed to know how to handle my dad and his condition.

Having been admitted to hospital, my dad and I said we loved each other.

They were the last words that we ever spoke to one another.

Over the next two weeks, my grandparents and I waited, believing that he would be able to recover and come home.

But his health continued to worsen and he was placed on a ventilator.

I spent that fortnight completely on my own, due to restrictions at the time which prevented mixing between households.

Looking back on that time, my grandad Leon remembers hearing that his son's condition was not improving.

"We got a phone call about five o'clock in the morning from a doctor saying that he's not going to make it," he says.

On that day my grandparents walked with me to the hospital but due to restrictions,all three of us weren't allowed to go in, so I went in by myself.

It was there that I gave the hospital staff the green light for them to turn my dad's ventilator off.

On 9 April 2020, my dad, Lee Nurse, died at the age of just 43.

Afterwards, I walked back to my house with an orange bag full of his stuff.

I got back home and saw my granddad pacing back and forth. When he saw me, he knew.

"Everything went out of my body, it was like I'm dying with him there and then," he tells me, five years on.

My dad had been admitted to hospital the same day that my grandad was discharged, having been treated for pneumonia.

The two never got to see each other one final time.

Just myself and a handful of close relatives were able to attend the funeral but hundreds of people lined the route of the procession.

Many wore their cricket whites and raised their bats in memory of their great friend and teammate.

My grandad remembers it as a "fantastic send-off".

"It's amazing that day the people turned out - that made me so proud," he says.

Five years on, all of the memories and pictures I have of my dad are all I have. Without those, I would be lost.

"Time will never heal for us, never," my grandad says, adding: "When people say you've got to move on, what do they mean by that, moving on?"

In the four years since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, it feels as though its victims have been largely forgotten - like there is a collective amnesia amongst people trying to forget the dark days of lockdown.

In March, right at the very beginning of the global pandemic, when my dad caught Covid - we didn't know that black men were more likely to catch and die from the virus than almost any other ethnic group.

Retrospectively, statistics from early in the pandemic showed that black people in England and Wales were nearly twice as likely to die from coronavirus then white people.

The National Covid Memorial Wall, near the Houses of Parliament, has proven a good way of remembering my dad, and the roughly 220,000 people who lost their lives to the virus.

The un-official memorial consists of a wall adorned with almost a quarter of a million hand-painted red hearts - each with the name of a person who died.

My family and I try and visit the volunteer-managed spot as much as we can, making sure to find my dad's heart.

Although his time at the crease ended five years ago, Lee Nurse's 43-year innings lit up the world around him and for that, he will never be forgotten.

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