I know all about the shock that comes
with that sense of leaden dread:
it’s all over now.
We’re talking definitive adieu:
no more chances for ciao.
I know all about the stages of grief,
but knowing won’t numb my pain.
Shock, anger and denial,
depression and then acceptance?
Yeah. But MY loss can’t be so contained.
OK. So it was expected
that any breath could be her last.
I’ve sat with her so many times
as I raked over gripes from my past.
But what I’m still sitting with now
is the contrast between life and death:
one minute her chest’s up and down;
the next she’s drawn her last breath.
There was calmness in that in-between moment,
with sounds of her last snores and sighs,
as I sat in my ambivalent seat
making heartfelt, what-if goodbyes.
It’s been fourteen years
since Fathers Day has hurt.
I have no one to buy a card for.
I let the day pass unseen,
my grief rarely overt.
My maudlin nature I abhor.
But today my tears
I cannot avert.
Some days I just miss him more.
My father died 14 years ago this evening: 10 minutes to 10pm on Thursday 11 March 1999. I don’t think there’s been a day gone by when I haven’t thought about him.
It’s worse in the early days, of course, when the thought flashes across my mind that I want to make that phone call to him to joke about something funny I’ve read in the paper or heard on the radio. And then I realise with searing pain to my heart that I can’t. Because he’s gone. Fourteen years down the line, the urge to speak to him is the same, and the pain of loss around his anniversary is almost as keen as when he first passed away.
I remember three months after he died, a so-called ‘friend’ said I should be over it by now. Be over what, exactly? The tears, the numbness, the inability to accept that such a mighty man had been snuffed from my life?
After the shock and all the fuss of the funeral and the sympathy cards, people’s interest wanes. Their life gets back to normal. But for a bereaved daughter there is no getting back to normal. There’s only the day-to-day getting through, and the renegotiating a life whose volume has been dialled down several notches. Whose colour is a few shades faded. Whose fabric of hope has been ripped to shreds.
So I don’t believe in ‘getting over’ grief. Yes, there are ‘stages’ of grief to be ‘worked through’ and the loss to come to terms with. Eventually. But I defy anyone who’s lost someone darling and dear to them to say that one day they’re completely ‘over it’.
Grief will always have a grip on my heart. But perhaps by remembering my sadness, by honouring my grief, I am keeping alive my father’s spirit within me.
Thirteen years ago right now I was whizzing to the hospital to see my dad who had just died. We’d only just him and been home a few minutes when we got the call.
It’s one of those moments that will always stick in my mind, for obvious reasons.
Question is, for how much longer will I stay stuck in that moment? Every year it gets worse, not better.
Why am I holding on? And why can’t I let go?
I want him to rest in peace. And I want to live in peace.
I’ve never understood widespread mourning for a public figure. Famous people die, and I think it’s sad, but I’ve never felt the loss before of someone I’ve never met, yet who has touched, inspired and enhanced my life in the way that Steve Jobs has.
I may change my skirt length, accent colour, heel shape, belt width or lipstick shade to suit the season, but there’s one thing I’ll never change, and that’s my Mac. I may have put up with a PC when I’ve had to, but its clunkiness, slowness and downright unsexiness has me sprinting back (yes, even in my high heels) to my thing of beauty: my Mac.
I secured my first job as a journalist on one of those square, tiny-screened Macs, which somehow made writing an article as an intern feel so
Continue reading
Tears streamed down my face when I read about a woman who had lost her only child chart her journey through journaling. This post is really worth reading on Life Goes Strong, entitled Writing for Life: How Journal Writing Helps Heal One Mother’s Grief.
Writing really was therapy in this case, for Tamara Thomas, and the process took her through the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance – and the tasks of mourning: to accept the reality of loss; to work through the feelings about that loss; to learn to live without the person you’ve lost; and to Continue reading
I was touched to read an article by the author of Parentless Parents, Allison Gilbert, about how writing about grief, loss and mourning had made her happier. Touched because I have also lost my parents (my father to cancer; my mother has dementia and no longer knows she has a daughter), and also inspired, because I could use my experiences to write so much more about healing after bereavement.
I wrote an 80,000 word memoir about my dad, eight years after he died. I got up at 6 every morning to write 1000 words of stream of consciousness. The process made me feelcloser to him, less afraid of my feelings, and resolute in capturing a piece of him that was lost forever. I had never planned to publish this memoir, but I know I can turn to it when I need to. And I have a sense of achievement: I have completed a memoir, even though I haven’t yet completed my novel.
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