Grief and what it is has taught me

Or why I tried to write a book about it and then gave up

In March 2020, at the end of the first week of lockdown, my dad died unexpectedly. I say unexpectedly but truth is that I had been harbouring a bad feeling for many years - a feeling that he wouldn’t be one of those people that reaches the kind of age that you brag about ( like when you get so old you use your age as a badge of achievement and announce it to strangers in the street ).

On the Friday morning dad complained of a pain in his stomach. He collapsed at home with my stepmum and stepsister and an ambulance was called. He had a ruptured aneurysm and was bleeding heavily inside. They tried to fix the aneurysm with an operation but he died on the operating table.

When I scroll through the photos on my phone of that particular day I wonder what was going through my head. What kind of person carries on their life as a normal whilst their father is dying? There are photos of the girls in the garden, laughing, later they’re leaping about in the front room eating ice cream, the news reports about Covid in the background (when it was a novelty and very frightening- lending a strange air of unreality to life - like it might be the dawning of the apocalypse). We ordered pizza. The girls went to bed late. I rang the hospital and the nurse said that my dad was doing well, and was about to go into surgery. I rang later, and a different nurse told me that he had in fact come out, and was recovering (this was a cruel case of mistaken identity). I went to bed. I was just falling asleep when my stepmum rang with the news.

Grief is and was a story that doesn’t end. This was the first lesson. Once someone you love dies you live with grief until you die. This is the mind fuck of it all. I spent that first year feeling like this pandemic thing was an irritating fly buzzing in the background whilst I tried to conduct my life as a functioning person. I worked from home. I took the girls on walks. I woke each day and told myself that my dad had just died. I did this again and again.

‘I won’t survive this,’ I said to my reflection one morning.

But I did. And then slowly, we came back to a life that resembled some sort of normality. I had a lot of hallucinations. I saw dad appear as I rounded a corner, sitting in a cafe, in a train station walking towards me, then disappearing at the end of the platform.

The grief of living in the world without him.

Sometimes when I spoke to strangers I’d tell them my dad had died.

‘It was very sudden. It was an aneurysm. He was an alcoholic.’

They stared at me with a puzzled expression. I thought that if I told this person then it would make it more real. I wasn’t aware that there is a death etiquette and we don't talk about it, not with strangers. I decided to channel my feelings into a book, into writing - I wrote 40,000 words about grief (I wrote another book too - I felt like the only way I could escape was through typing everything I was feeling). I sent it to a potential agent.

‘I’m not sure what this book is intended to be,’ she said in her reply.

‘I DON’T KNOW IF I WILL SURVIVE,’ I felt like typing back but didn’t.

I stopped writing. Nothing I wrote did this thing justice. The more I tried, the harder it became to articulate. This disappearance of someone who had always been there. He had left me alone and now I was the only one. Nobody would believe what we had been through.

I have written about the suicide of my step mum and baby sister before. Just after it happened, my dad and I flew to New Zealand together. We went to visit my dad’s relatives. Looking back I realise that my dad felt a lot of shame. It was incomprehensible. Inexplicable. Unpleasant. Shocking. His family, an ordinary, everyday family didn’t understand what had played out. Dad must have tried to explain my stepmum’s post natal psychosis, but nobody talked about mental health back then so we talked about how the climate was perfect in New Zealand instead. How it was just like England but better. How green the land really was. How it was perfectly understandable that people would choose to live here.

I was 15 and permanently attached to my walkman. I sat sullenly in the back of the car, and complained about the heat, the lack of anything to do, the vastness of the land wasn’t interesting, and just reflected a nothingness I didn’t want to see. I missed my friends. One night Dad lost his shit when I climbed out of the window to meet a friend of my cousins. This friend turned out to be my first proper boyfriend, and I got drunk and lost my virginity to him. This period of time signalled the beginning of my sprint from grief. Soon after I ran away to Amsterdam with a man twelve years older than me and threw myself into hedonism in earnest.

Dad and I never talked about this trip, but we returned to New Zealand again in 2007 and had a more peaceful time. We drove from Auckland to Whangerei and then toured some of the famous tourist spots. We stopped at beaches and took our shoes off and walked in the sand. Dad got attacked by birds because they thought he was trying to steal one of their eggs. We talked. We listened to music. There was this underlying sense that we’d made it, that we were stronger, mightier, a team that could deal with anything. We were proof that a life could be lived after something so terrible. The feeling I had sitting beside him in the rental car is a feeling I haven’t experienced since.

It is only in my dreams I get this feeling back.

We travel together, driving across New Zealand.

‘Nobody told me it would be like this,’ I say to him.

Dad looks over, his pipe hanging out of his mouth, a glimmer in his eye.

He is the most beautiful person. I will always believe this.

‘Nobody told me the love would keep going. How it wouldn’t stop.’

And the road ahead winds to the left, and right and he drives with the wind blowing in through the open window.