Tag: grief

The unfelt grief

I’m writing this because I want to express my own feelings, but also because I suspect I’m not alone in experiencing them. This is not easy to write.

My beloved dad died two and a half years ago. I have been vocal and prolific on Facebook, and on this blog, about how much I loved him and how much I miss him. All of that is true. However, there is another element of this that is possibly even harder to bear, and to put into words: the not grieving.

I was a ‘Daddy’s girl’. An only child. I loved my parents equally but I always felt I was more similar to my dad in personality; my mum was the softer part of us both, who held us all together by the very fact of her having a different temperament, a different make-up.

I watched my dad fade, gradually and cruelly, over a period of a few years. I could hardly bear to watch; to be there; to see it and not be able to help, or to change it. It was a devastating few years for us all, and the fact that I couldn’t physically be there for him, or my mum, more often was a source of huge guilt for me. I had no idea how to ‘be there’ for parents who were a four-hour drive away from my job. We visited when we could. I always left feeling heartbroken and crushed to see my dad fading before my eyes.

This went on for a few years. We’d visit and my dad would be ill at home, or ill in hospital. I found it almost intolerable. All my life, I’d seen my dad as big and strong and invincible, and seeing him weak and vulnerable broke me. It changed everything for me. It was agonising.

The fact that my dad was ill for so long made his death particularly shocking to me; I simply thought we had more time. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that was a good thing; I thought it would be several more years of my dad going downhill, being in more physical and mental agony, with the doctors having no solutions. I thought it was going to be grim and cruel. But I also thought I’d have time for more conversations with him, and I’m devastated that I didn’t. Our last chat was fraught, because he wasn’t in his right mind, and it breaks my heart. The next day, he received a parcel I’d sent, and he said that I’d sent it because I loved him. I hope he carried that knowledge with him.

The other inexplicable thing is that I never, ever consciously feel that I’m grieving. If you’d asked me to predict how I’d react to my dad’s death, I would have told you that I’d collapse, cry for six months and have a total breakdown. None of that happened and, on a day-to-day basis, I never missed a step. How can that be? I have struggled with this, but I’ve come to understand that I don’t feel the loss of my dad on a regular, daily basis because my mind hasn’t processed the fact that he’s gone. I simply don’t get it. I cried when I heard he’d died, and I cried at his funeral. But it didn’t feel real then and it doesn’t feel real now. I know he’s gone, but I don’t feel it’s real; my mind won’t go there. So I really can’t react in an intellectual way. Yet on an emotional, physical level, I feel it. I cry, unexpectedly, when I talk about him, even if I’m not feeling sad. I cry when I play music I associate with him. I cry when I watch a film I think he’d like. I am lost without him. This is for you, Dad. I love you. xx

A year without my dad

On this evening last year, I was messing around on Facebook and posting a photograph of myself, aged five, looking grumpy at a children’s party. I made some gag about how I’d been no more fond of socialising with strangers as a child than I am as an adult. And then I went to bed. I had no idea that when I woke up, everything would have changed.

Tomorrow will mark a year since my dad passed away. And the reason I’m writing this, other than to pay tribute to him, is because nothing in those 12 months has been how I thought it would be. If you’d asked me this time last year how I thought I would react to losing the man who, for 41 years, had been my hero, my rock, my mentor and my protector, I would have imagined a heavy, hopeless and debilitating grief and months of relentless tears. I would have told you that I would struggle to function, to cope with life after the loss. And if my reaction to losing my dad could be matched to how much I loved him, then that would indeed be the case. But I wasn’t counting on the mysteries of the human brain and the strange, otherworldly way that my emotions, threatened with devastation, would curl up into a ball and play dead to defend themselves – me – from the truth. 

That morning last June when I was woken by the call from my mum, my reaction was the one you’d expect from anyone who loved their dad the way I did. I howled like a wounded animal, I was physically sick, and I cried for the entire four-hour journey to my parents’ home. I remember that the tears almost didn’t seem to be part of me – they flowed and flowed beyond my control as I sat on the train holding my husband’s hand, and again when I saw my mum, and for the rest of that day.

They flowed when we visited my dad in the chapel of rest and when, referencing something he’d said to me just a few weeks earlier, I promised I’d never forget him. They flowed on the morning of the funeral when I stepped outside the house and saw the hearse with the coffin inside – I remember it made me feel as if I couldn’t breathe. They flowed as we followed behind in another car; when we paused outside my parents’ little village church while their friend rang the bells and his wife, who had been in the same profession as my dad, stood at the gate giving a salute; and as I stood at the lectern reading the eulogy I’d written, struggling to speak at the beginning and at the end, pulling it together in the middle and determined to do him proud.

But in the days between, and in the days that followed, a strange and, to me, unsettling cognitive dissonance set in. My brain knew that my dad was gone, but my heart and my emotions couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept it. And that’s how things have remained – which disturbed me at the beginning and continues to do so. I know that there’s no right or wrong way to grieve, and that everyone does it differently, but I also know that the way I’m reacting isn’t the way I’d react if I could really understand, emotionally, that I will never see my dad again. But I can’t, because it’s simply too big, too final, for me to imagine – and if I can’t imagine it, how can it feel real?

Me and my lovely dad. Photo by Claire Parkinson at Navy Frame

We lost my dad gradually, over a period of years, and I suspect that played a part in the way my brain dealt with the loss. I think I started grieving long before he died, and was then faced with a Catch 22 when he did die: when you’ve watched someone you love suffer for a long time, how can you wish them back to suffer some more? I’m certain that the deepest, truest part of my grief is yet to surface; that it’s trapped somewhere, in parts of my brain and heart that have gone into emergency shut-down, and that it is struggling, quietly beneath the surface, to break free – and that, once it does, I won’t ever be the same. And as dramatic and frightening as that sounds, I will welcome it – because until it happens, I won’t feel that I have given my dad the goodbye that he deserves.

That’s not to say that I don’t cry, or I don’t miss him, or I’m not bereft without him or angry that he’s not here. I cried this morning, when a busker I passed in the tube station played a few bars of one tune on his violin, then stopped and started playing one of my dad’s favourite classical pieces. I’ve recently started reading history books – something my dad did all the time ­– and I catch myself thinking I’ll ask him what he thinks about something I’ve learned, only to get that bone-chilling realisation that I can’t, not now and not ever. I also have those 4am cold sweats, realising that he’s really, really gone. But whenever my mind grasps that fact, it can’t seem to hold onto it. It’s there and then it’s gone, like a sudden thunderstorm – not a monsoon season that gives you a chance to get used to it.  

In the evenings, my husband and I regularly light a candle for my dad – I refer to it as ‘saying hello to him’. If we have to blow it out to go to bed, I’ll say goodnight to him too. If I’m struggling with anything in life, I often find myself asking, out loud, for my dad to help me. A week before he died, in our last conversation, he told me that I would feel his hand on my head, guiding me through life. And I’ve chosen to believe that, somehow, I will. That wilful part of my brain that won’t let me accept he’s gone is also allowing me to believe that even if he isn’t at the end of the phone, he’s watching over us from somewhere in the stars.

Recently I wrote about my dad in the glossy magazine I work for, and anyone who is likely to read this blog has already had the opportunity to read that piece if they wanted to, via my Facebook. But I don’t want to end this post without a tribute to my lovely dad. He was brave, honourable, decent, witty, clever, wise, kind, fair, hard-working, honest, fun and protective – the best dad I could have asked for. My mum and I adored him and it breaks my heart that after working hard all his life, he’s not here to enjoy his retirement. That he and my mum aren’t on a cruise right now, or sitting in their garden enjoying the flowers he loved, or visiting me and my husband so they can do day trips around Kent.

I think about him every single day. I imagine him watching over me, and I hope I’m making him proud. As Father’s Day approaches, I’ll be lighting a candle, thinking how lucky I was to have him, and raising a toast to the very, very best.

I love you, Dad. Sleep well. x