Rambling thoughts on my Dad's anniversary

My grief is like water. I'd known it l my life in puddles and even deep plunge pools but never like this. Now it feels like walking in the lake district. You can be walking along for a bit of a way with no water in sight, but sooner or later you know you'll come across it. Sometimes a little stream, sometimes a loch so big you can't see the end of it. Sometimes it feels like a quagmir-ous swamp; cloying, claustrophobic and deeply unpleasant but then again, sometimes it feels like crystal clear waters; replenishing, nourishing, beautiful. Its like rain too. Too much and you wish it away, not enough and you want it back. I get anxious when I haven't felt that deep grief feeling for a while;  Like I'm letting him go, like maybe it's not a big deal after all, like maybe he wasn't important. Then i feel like I'm letting him down. Then I stumble upon another Lake and I'm clean again, safe again, grieving again. Dad's back!

It's the end of May 2018, Dad's been dead less than a month and I still have to keep checking with Matt that that is in fact, a fact because I've spent my whole life worrying that my Dad was going to die and sometimes now it feels like it might possibly just be one of those familiar lifelong nightmare thoughts. Matt assures me, sadly, that its true, he is as gone as my worst fears suggest. It's been sunny for weeks. Ludicioursly, gloriously sunny but tonight is a raging storm. I've never heard or seen anything like it. I lie in darkness but for the intermittent sheets of lightening, clutching my unstirrable, sleeping baby and watch the sky light up and the rain fall heavily and I tell myself a story that the thunder is Dad trying to break back through from wherever he is. Banging against heavens wall, which separates us tight as a drum. Crash, after crash, after crash comes as he tries to get back through. "Come on Dad"; I will him on. I know, if anyone can do it, he can. After hours he finally gives up- but not for long.  He's back again at the drum wall the next afternoon, determined to give it one last shot. Now there are lots of us gathering in a conservatory, watching the sky light up. Are we all waiting for Dad to burst through? It feels like it. That time my grief was a rainstorm. 

My grief is water but my Dad wasn't. My dad was the burning sun. Bright and bold: Everybody loved him. You just felt better when he was around. "Never mind the grey skies, you make them blue". 

It's two years today since I last saw him. Two years since my brother and I went, like children to the nurses station at the hospice to ask them if it would be ok for us to go to work the next day. Never saying the words "will he last" but communicating them nonetheless. They told us they couldn't give us those answers. I mean, of course they couldn't. I knew they couldn't but I asked anyway. I wanted someone to be the grown up for me- to tell me what to do but I had to decide for myself. I was the grown up. So, I went to work and I never saw him again. He died while I was teaching 7 and 8 year olds to sing "The circle of life". I answered the phone, heard the news and then told my class the surreal truth. One of my little pupils, an espeically naughty, wonderful boy called Max told me it would be ok because my Dad was with the angels now. If anyone else had said that I'd have been sick to my stomach with the unbareable cliche but I decided to melt and believe Max. A pretty big step for an atheist, but I've learnt it was a lot easier to be an atheist when I wasn't so desperate to see someone on the other side. Now i just say I don't know and hope for the very best. I ordered a taxi, had a group hug with my class and let them sing the song at me. They sounded great. A month or so later that sweet, complicated little boy Max' own mother died and I told him the same thing back- about the angels- although I'm not sure I said it with his conviction.  Life can most certainly be tougher than it has been for me. Theres nothing tragic about losing your elderly father when you're 32 I know that. I am so grateful for the many years I got to know my Dad and for the many years of interesting, varied and love filled life he lived. 83 years of gratitude and appreciation no matter what he was going through. He was born into terrible poverty, in the middle of The Depression and not long before a world war. He lost his Mum and his wife long before it was fair (life is many things but never, ever for a second fair) and yet he shone joy into this world every moment he could. 

My Dad was lucky to have 83 years but it still wasn't enough. Not for me. Not for him. I think If he'd have lived 150 years he wouldn't have happy to leave all this behind. My dad liked to repeat things. Like every single time someone said anything at all about books, he'd wait patiently for his moment and say " I read a book once" (A joke because he was the most prolific reader of anyone I've ever known)  or if anyone mentioned dreams he'd say "I had a dream last night I was eating a big marshmallow" and wait for all of us to say "and when you woke up your pillow was gone". Something else he always repeated to me, always in exactly the same way, I can hear him say it now,  every time he lost a friend or heard of someone famous dying he'd say, "Why do we have to die, eh? Why can't we just go on living." His life was long but it was too short. Towards the end, before he'd been told it was the end but maybe not before he knew, he stopped being interested in the tv or books or sports fixtures. I think, looking back, it had all started to feel sort of, beside the point. Better to look out of the window. Better to be present and watch this world that even the oldest of us only see for such a short while. Better to stop filling up our time: Better to just be. It's hard but I'm sure this is the key to life. I keep thinking of it in lockdown. trying to learn from it. I always thought of my dad as a bit of a daft bugger- turns out he was the wisest of us all. 

Dad and me in the water (no. not metaphorical grief water- just a swimming pool)

Dad just back from the hospital after diagnosis. Hows that for loving life to the end