For reasons that I don’t totally understand, I went to university and never wrote a dissertation. I did a practical module at a local theatre and wrote a short essay about my time there. It turns out that these things can’t be avoided. And ten years later, I appear to have written one: on grief.
This post is, in many ways, a response to a post (a riposte!) I wrote two and a bit years ago, about grief, at Christmas, but really, about grief. It was written in the direct aftermath of my dad, Michael, dying in September 2016. In truth, filling the internet with my thoughts and details of my personal life fills me with dread. I am a pretty private person on the internet and something about the volatile nature of the way that people communicate and exist online scares me. So, there is a preamble to this which runs something along the lines of: this is written from my own life experience, with its own biases, prejudices, values, beliefs and ways of seeing the world. I mean to speak only for myself, about things as I see them.
In truth, I write this for myself. I write this to better understand things, as I go. The things, being grief. But I publish it on the internet, in the hope that it connects. And I hope that it does. I hope that my experience overlaps or chimes with someone else’s, somewhere, if nothing else, to tell us both that we are not alone.
I’ll start with a passage from Olivia Laing’s astounding book ‘The Lonely City’:
‘Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings- depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage- are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails […] We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity’.
So I suppose I write this in a gesture of solidarity, in solidarity with a community of people who have lost, who are losing; in solidarity with grief.
So, herein lies a summary of what I know about grief, 2.4 years after the event. The event being my dad’s death. Although that’s a false beginning, because grief is something I, like you, have dealt with (or not) my entire life-long. But it’s something I only started really considering when my dad died, or actually, a little earlier, as he was dying, as it became clear to me*, in December 2015, that he probably wasn’t going to get better.
Many forms- Grief takes many shapes. I am mainly talking here about a specific grief, because it has been the largest in my life so far, and, as the adage goes- in the specific is the universal. But things aren’t that neatly divisible, so I am also talking about a whole heap of griefs, that belong to me, that I share with others, and that belong to others. Like every other human on this planet, I have, and will continue to, experience it in many forms: I have known people die old, I have known people die young, I have known people get ill, I have known people recover, I have ended relationships and had relationships ended for me, I have lost people temporarily and permanently to mental health struggles, to addiction, I have seen people I love lose their hair, pregnancies, I have lost cats that were as dear to me as my brothers, I have lost money, jobs and hats on buses. Like all of us, like anyone who has lived, things haven’t worked out in the way that I had imagined. There is no hierarchy to grief. If you are human, you have lost, you have grieved. So, welcome to the club.
Shards: *I say clear to me. That’s already a misrepresentation. My dad’s illness and death never have been, possibly never will be, I don’t know yet, clear to me. I experience it in shards and fragments, moments of understanding, moments of not at all. I’ve quite often thought that when I’ve spoken about my grief with others, I’ve seen reflected in their facial expressions, a more fuller understanding of what I am going through than I can manage. That might sound strange, but from within a life-changing loss, perspective can be difficult. Let me be more honest than that; I have no perspective, no total managing of the thing. I suspect it’s too large a thing, my brain would implode, or short circuit, or my legs would stop working. I can manage it in little sips at a time, the same way I can handle a Martini. And that’s ok. If you make a habit of drinking Martinis in one, you really will lose control of your legs.
Memory: Not only the way that I conceive of my dad’s death, but the actual memory of the last three years, including his year-long illness, is in mosaic. There are small things that I forget- like when I had a 10 minute argument with a doctor about not having had my last smear test, despite her showing me my own medical records that said that I certainly had- that I had it in December 2015, the same time at which the full extent of my dad’s terminal diagnosis became clear. To anyone who has ever had a smear test, they will attest (ahem), that whilst in fact being completely fine, it’s not an experience that is easily forgotten. I rang my mother to explain my frustration, who duly pointed out that she remembered me going to get one. Fuck. I owe the NHS an apology. Then there are big things- like some of the final thoughts and parting wisdoms of my dying father. Because of the nature of his illness, we had a few moments across a year when we thought it was it, and it turned out not to be. But my memory of a really important moment at what we thought was his death-bed, was his saying to us, ‘be kind to each other, be kind to people, have the most fun you can’ and then, as we sat around him, streaming tears and snot, his sitting bolt upright and with a glint in his eye, insisting, ‘don’t look so sad’. My eldest brother and his wife remember him saying ‘go and see things, places. Do as much as you can’. I don’t remember that bit. At all. And in a way, maybe it doesn’t matter- as with all things, you take what you need, you hear what you want to. But my memory from across the last three years is at best potted, at worst, fucked. And that’s trauma for you- your brain literally wipes sections of your memory, the good bits too, in a protective mechanism. Maybe that’s why I can only see things to do with dad’s death in shards and moments of clarity. So, my advice to anyone who is going through a grief or a loss. Write shit down. I have kept daily journals for the last five years, so everything I have experienced exists, should I ever need it again.
Making it fit- About a year after my dad died, my mum decided that, after we’d each of us chosen what we wanted to keep, it was time to give his clothes away to charity. I remember quite soon after dad died, it might have been the same day, I can’t remember (see, memory), sitting inside my dad’s wardrobe, staring up at the inside of his jacket sleeves, at the empty space left behind. I remember shutting the door and bawling on the floor of the wardrobe, amongst his jackets and trousers. I remember my brother coming to find me, opening the door and coming to sit with me in that wardrobe. Or maybe he hauled me out with some jumpers. I don’t remember. Both my brothers wear my pa’s coats and gloves now. He protects them from the cold. And I’ve felt a little left out. I have a woollen grey coat of his that I sometimes put on when I need him, but I can’t wear it out because it’s far too big for me and wearing it, I look like I collected the wrong coat on leaving a party. But, then I had an idea- I can get my dad’s coat remade, tailored, to be the most wonderfully fitting coat I have ever had. And grief is a lot like that to me. You’ve been given a coat that’s made of grief, and it sits around your shoulders and hangs off your body. And you can choose to walk around in it uncomfortably, looking like the person who picked up the wrong coat, or you can have it altered, tailored, to be the most fabulous, and meaningful thing that you’ve ever possessed. I don’t want to define myself by my loss, nor my father by his death, he was many things before, and is many things now, but I do think that going through it has, in some way, been the making of me.
The floor- When I’ve been overwhelmed by grief, my bum has hit the floor, even when there’s a sofa, or bed, or some other far more practical place available, the floor is where you’ll find me. There’s something about the ground, the hard, cold ground that I find endlessly comforting; you can’t get any lower, you can’t fall off of it, it has physically supported me in a way that at times I have really needed. There’s a beautiful scene in series one of Catastrophe where Sharon is given some news about her unborn baby and, in the middle of a supermarket, lies down on the floor. Right there, in the fruit aisle. I remember seeing that scene and thinking that it was the most accurate representation of grief’s relationship to the body that I have ever seen. So, my advice to anyone experiencing grief: hit the floor.
Resilience- I am made of substances infinitely stronger than I knew, because I have been on the floor, and I have pulled myself off of the floor. You don’t know the strength of something until it has been tested. And I am particularly interested in the place where strength meets fear. I feel fear, an awful lot. I fear that I don’t have a pension. I fear that I might not get to have children. I fear that I don’t understand GDPR properly. I fear the evolution of that funny looking mole on my left arm. I fear Trump. I fear that my hairline is receding. I fear that I will lose the people that I love. I fear more illness, more dying, more death. I remember when I was younger, at a distance, knowing people whose parents had died, or hearing stories recounted from someone else, who knew someone who lost someone. And I remember thinking with utter horror- I couldn’t survive that- that would undo me. I was 14 years old, and top of my priorities were distressing my school bag to the right shade of cool and inventing new ways to skip PE. And I wish every 14 year old the same freedom, even though I know that it cannot be so. And in a way, I was lucky. My dad became ill when I was 27. Died when I was 28. That’s a lot more time than lots of people get. But when I was 14, I don’t think I ever understood that the people I love will certainly die. At some point. Sooner or later. And it has happened. And I am not undone. Things have been shattered and I have pieced them back together, differently than before. At 30, my life looks very different to the way it did at 27. I have had to make some big decisions, decisions that have terrified me, but that I have made nonetheless. And, as it turns out, solid decisions. Directing plays. Starting a company. Living alone. Being single. And I have done these things whilst also crying in cafes across South London. My point is, strength means different things to different people, and that’s a good thing, long-live difference. But if you have ever made it off the floor, from the floor, you are doing brilliantly. And if you haven’t made it off the floor yet, you are also doing brilliantly, because you are brave enough to stay put in the face of not knowing- have a stretch, ask someone to bring you a cuppa down there- at some point you will get up and things will move forwards. When you are ready. The reforming of my life in the last three years is my experience alone. But the impetus to make those scary-but-ultimately-solid decisions have certainly been made from an understanding of my own resilience- in grief my materials have been tested and I have discovered that they are far stronger than I had assumed them to be.
Time– I remember someone saying to me at my dad’s memorial service, ‘don’t you let them tell you that it gets easier with time, it doesn’t’. And I fully believe that was that person’s experience of their own grief. But it hasn’t been mine. For me, time does help. Think of the coats. At first all I could do was weep into them. Then I was ready to, with the rest of my family, give some stuff away. Then I kept one and let it hang in a wardrobe for a year to wear sporadically around the house. Now I am getting it altered to fit me. That took me over two years, and I’m talking about a coat. But my experience has been that it does get easier with time. When my dad first died I was haunted by memories of his illness, the things our mind and body do when are we no longer in control of them- images would flash into my mind at any given point in my waking (or sleeping) day. For the first 6 months after my dad died, here’s how a conversation functioned for me, my unspoken thoughts are in italics:
“Hello, My dad is dead I’d like to pay for an adult swim please”
“Certainly, and would you like to hire a towel?”
“No thank you, my dad is dead, I’ve brought my own”
“Perfect. That’s £4.50 please. Would you like to pay by cash or card?”
“I don’t care, my dad is dead. Cash please”
“And that’s 50p change. Enjoy your swim”
“Thank you, it doesn’t matter, my dad is dead”
Now, two years on, there are days when I forget that my dad isn’t here anymore. Not that I think he’s alive. I just don’t think about it. I am running a business. Or filling in an arts council application. Or haranguing a local cat. Or reading a book. Or going for a walk. Or at dinner with a friend. I remember my dad now less in his illness and death and more in the times that came before it. Time has helped, it has changed things, my grief no longer permeates every conversation or thought in the way that it did in its earlier days, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come striding back at times, a great hulk…
My body- There are times when, like the feeling of sudden nausea that runs up my spine before I think I’m about to be sick, grief has crept up from nowhere and nothing and overtaken everything else. I have sat in a café, suddenly overwhelmed and overtaken by it. But, here’s the thing- I’ve also had a cry in said café, a cup of tea, a proper breakfast and, as quickly as it has come, it has passed. I call them ‘grief attacks’. And what surprises me is, when I feel that akin to nausea feeling, I think fuck, that’s my day busted– I don’t have time for this shit, but, having accepted it, having let it come, it often passes as quickly as it arrived. It’s like one of Scrooge’s ghosts- bong, bong, bong, goes the bell, the ghost appears, it tells Scrooge something he needs to hear, and then it fucks off again, as quickly as it came. And I survived it. It happened, it passed, it’s over. What surprises me is how much the patterns of time and my grief live in my body. An anniversary is a good example- on the anniversary of my dad’s death, we make sure our family are together. At the exact time that he died, I also sit with my mum in the room where he died and light a candle, and, like the good Quakers that we are (she is, I’m just lumping myself in for redemption purposes), we sit in silence. For about 30 minutes, sometimes more, we just sit there until it’s time not to sit there anymore. But, last year, on the evening prior to his death-anniversary, I was absolutely overcome by grief. That evening before the anniversary I experienced one of the largest grief attacks I can remember. I howled. And I couldn’t piece it together, why now? Why not tomorrow? And then I realised, at about that exact time two years previously (7:30pm), I had said goodbye to my dad for the last time. I wasn’t with him when he died in the early morning of the following day, my mum and dad were alone together, which has always felt fitting to me- it’s how they began their lives together and it’s how they ended it. But my body knew. The memory of my last goodbye, my last moments with my dad alive, is stored in my body. And my body knew that it was time to mark it.
Perspective– I have been thinking about death a lot. A lot. Maybe even more now than two years ago. Two years ago I was doggy paddling, head above water, surviving. Now I am living. Things shift. But death pervades in my thoughts and experience of life. It might sound morbid, but I don’t experience it that way. I am sort of fascinated by it. We are all going to die. And, what’s more, we’ve no idea when, how, or in what circumstances. But what a driving force I find that to be. This is it. No dress rehearsal. We get one shot at this thing. Which doesn’t mean (to me at least) that we must do everything, to the maximum, right now. I’ve tried living like that, like I’m standing on a platform that is on fire, and the result was that I stopped being able to breath properly. I wouldn’t recommend it. But it does mean that I’m now constantly assessing what it is that I want to do with the time that I have. Where I’ll invest my energy, what I’m willing to put up with, what I’m not. What is of value and what is a distraction. What I really give a shit about versus what I think I should give a shit about. And me oh my, I don’t have this down. I get distracted, I waste energy, I waste time. And ain’t that life. But I am far more aware than I was of the singularity of this experience. I don’t believe in reincarnation. I believe that we live on in the way that we have affected one another, in the way that we live in one another’s thoughts, understanding and memory. But that reminder- when I die, will this matter, when I die, will I regret having wasted this time, this energy, this decision? That has, and continues to be, a wonderful thing.
Growing things– I have spent a lot of time thinking about grief, about illness and death. And for sure, there is an argument that says I have spent too much time thinking about it. But I do recognise this, that in all the time that you are grieving, time and life moves on and forwards. Life is really happening, right now. And I think there are times when I have missed that. And maybe it relates back to those shards that I spoke about earlier; when something happens that completely re-orientates the life you have lived, when it shatters, the experience of putting it back together is…. Well, it’s impossible. And that’s the point; you aren’t putting things back together as they were- you need to reinvent yourself. I am irrevocably changed by my loss. I am not the same. But I am also not static. I am dynamic and growing and different, but different is good. It’s tempting to see life as before loss and after loss, but that’s too simplistic a paradigm. Things were one way before, and they are new and different now. And the difference is the living thing to focus on. So, to help with that, I grow things. I create. Whether that’s plays, stories, blog-posts, plants, cats, pictures, meals, children- grow things. In grief you are surrounded by loss and death, but there are things growing in the cracks that the disruption left behind. My nieces and nephews have learnt to walk, to speak, to draw, to tell jokes (mainly at my expense), my Chinese money plant is blooming, I’m pretty sure that the cat that hangs out (and shits all over) my garden is pregnant. There is life in the gaps. And actually, by being honest about those gaps, by bearing the ‘accumulation of scars’ as Olivia Laing puts it, what beautiful salves and fillers have been offered and given by wonderful and generous human beings.
Intention– people say the wrong things. All the time. Me included. I think words are important- I like language and I like accuracy in language, and I do not like it when I, or other people, say the ‘wrong’ thing. That is my failing. But in the wise words of my mother- what’s their intention? Grief, death, illness is an endless tangle of uncertainty and mess. We will all fuck it up, because, in the face of death, no-one knows what they’re on about. No-one knows what to say, when to say it, how to help. We’re all just scrapping around, doing our best. But I’ve learnt over the last few years to be less afraid of getting things wrong, and a less harsh recipient of ill-judged advice; if someone is trying to help, if that’s their intention, then that’s what matters. I try to focus on why someone is saying something, or attempting to say something, rather than the shape that it forms.
Blame- I caveat this section with this- my intelligent mind knows that what follows cannot be true, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t seemed that way. There have been times that I have felt in some way responsible for my father’s death. That I should have been able to do something or spot something sooner to prevent it. When he helped me move house for the umpteenth time that decade and said ‘I think it’s time you started using a removal service’. Because he was tired of lifting and heaving things and forcing desks up too small staircases. Tracing time back, I know that the little tumour in his brain was probably starting to take hold at that point, and so I have thought to myself- if I hadn’t made him help me carry that desk up those stairs, then maybe he wouldn’t have been so tired, or strained and the tumour wouldn’t have grown in the same way- if he’d rested that day, maybe those first cells would have given up. I know that this is nonsense, that that’s not how our bodies work. But there’s more- there were times during his illness, when things were unbearably hard, that I thought, I cannot bear it, when will it stop? When can my dad no longer be ill? When will his pain, my family’s, my pain, stop? When does the uncertainty of it all end? (Theatre director Simon McBurney speaks in Desert Island Discs about a similar feeling- he too was in his 20s when his father was ill and died of cancer, he speaks about wanting the pain to stop, and thinking at the time that his father’s death might bring that end about. But, like me, he found that when his father did die, the pain only worsened.) In the face of knowing that he couldn’t get better, what I was asking was, when will he die? I cannot tell you how awful a thing this is to feel, think and type. Even now. Because I also cannot tell you how much I loved my father. And that love is not a response to his death; I have always, always thought that he was one of the most wonderful human beings who has ever walked the earth. I still do. And I am lucky in that way- because I have known him, and also because my relationship with him wasn’t complicated- losing someone with whom you have had a difficult or complicated relationship, I can only appreciate how much harder that must be to grieve and untangle. But my relationship with my dad was positively uncomplicated, one of the least complicated I have ever had. I loved him, and it was easy to. Because he was kind, quirky, smart, ever so funny, sharp, fascinating, curious, mischievous and interesting. But I have found ways to blame myself for his death, to try, I suppose, to make sense of something nonsensical. I have tried to lasso meaning in the face of chaos. I share this because I suspect that I’m not alone in it, and I want to say two things in response, to myself, and, if you’ve ever felt the same way, to you. Firstly, no amount of willing, praying and hope could make my dad better. And I spent a year trying, trying really hard, negotiating and praying to a god I’d believe in on the condition that they took action and made my dad better (not the grounds I’d suggest building any kind of successful relationship on, by the way). But no amount of any of those thoughts changed things. So it stands to reason that my thoughts bore no relationship to the progression of my dad’s illness. I’m just not that powerful. Secondly, I’d like to borrow from another astounding book, recently adapted into a play by Sally Cookson, A Monster Calls, written by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd. Firstly, if you relate to anything that I’ve written so far, I’d really recommend reading it. Secondly, I’m about to do a spoiler and jump to the most profound bit, so avert your eyes if needed. This is an exchange between Conor, a young boy whose mother is dying, and a monster in the shape of a yew tree who has come to visit him on a nightly basis, Conor thinks to haunt him, but in fact, to help him. The monster/tree asks Conor about the truth of his recurring nightmare, in which he holds his mother’s hand as she dangles from the edge of a cliff. It’s a relatively long extract, but pretty relevant, so bear with me:
‘“You let her go”, the monster said.
Conor shook his head. “Please-“
“You let her go”, the monster said again.
Conor closed his eyes tightly.
But then he nodded.
“You could have held on for longer”, the monster said, “but you let her fall. You loosened your grip and let the nightmare take her.”
Conor nodded again, his face scrunched up with pain and weeping.
“You wanted her to fall.”
“No,” Conor said through thick tears
“You wanted her to go.”
“No!”
“You must speak the truth and you must speak it now, Conor O’Malley. Say it. You Must.”
[…]
“It’ll kill me if I do,” he gasped.
“It will kill you if you do not,” the monster said. “You must say it.”
“I can’t.”
[…]
“I can’t stand it anymore! […] I can’t stand knowing that she’ll go! I just want it to be over! I want it to be finished!”
[…]
“I could have held on but I let her go.”
“And that”, the monster said, “is the truth”.
[…]
“I didn’t mean to let her go! And now it’s for real! Now she’s going to die and it’s my fault!”
“And that”, the monster said, “is not the truth at all.”
[…]
“It is not your fault,” the monster said, its voice floating in the air around him like a breeze.
“It is.”
“You were merely wishing for the end of pain”, the monster said. “Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.”
[…]
“Humans are complicated beasts […] The answer is that it does not matter what you think”, the monster said,” because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
“But how do you fight it?” Conor asked, his voice rough. “How do you fight all the different stuff inside?”
“By speaking the truth”, the monster said. “As you spoke it just now”.’
And maybe that is why I am writing this after all. To speak the truth about my experience of loss, of grief, so far. To speak the truth and hope that my truth overlaps with someone else’s truth and experience. In the hope that we can bolster one another. Because in the unutterable chaos of things, that’s what we can hold onto isn’t it? Truth, one another, and a rather magnificent coat.