My Father's Birthday

... and I'm still adjusting to him not being around.

My dad would have been 92 today. I haven’t seen him for almost six years and I am still adjusting to that. Mum has been gone two years soon. I am not sure if you ever get to the end of a grieving journey because you are not just grieving for the people you miss, but for the life you had with them which you can never get back. Even now, I still get the urge to ring them about something important. For one delicious split-second, they are still around for me to be able to do that until the truth hits. I still get the urge to drive around the corner to their house, walk in, see it preserved in aspic as it was with dad sitting in his armchair with his headphones on, mum in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen but never seemed to do anything in it. It is as big a mystery as the building of the pyramids. Google Earth has just updated but for a long time it was their house, as it always was, my home, where I grew up, where they looked after me, world order in place. My dog sitting by the gate in his favourite place, but now the picture is of the new owners and all their alterations. Sadly.

Grief is like an imp that waits around corners, not striking when you most expect it: birthdays, Christmas, Fathers’/Mothers’ day. It prefers the element of surprise, of chaos, it feeds on the unexpected. Which is why, listening to Photography by Def Leppard on the M1 the other day I burst into tears. There is no link between that record, that group, any lyric and my parents. And yet it hit me in a sweet spot and blinded me. A sucker punch in the gut because it made me realise the truth a friend told me that it never hurts any less, just less often. But it is the pain that keeps that connection with them alive and so, masochistically, we have trouble letting it go.

I can do my weekly shop in a supermarket and be hit by a thud of memories because that’s what I used to buy for mum/dad. Those drums of Treeselets get me every time because that’s what I used to get dad every Christmas. Or mum’s preferred loaf of bread. WTF. Only some weeks though, when the sadistic imp of grief seems to point this stuff out to me. My hand will reach out to put a bottle of ‘Bells’ in my trolley when it’s on special offer for mum, she’d love the bargain. For a split-second, she is alive again. Until the truth hits…

My life is changed forever. We cannot crawl back into the past, we can only travel forward on an ever-moving platform with that past receding more with every moment. It is the surreality of it all, the moments around their passing that are tattooed in my head in all their technicolour glory in ink that does not want to fade. I did not have the perfect relationship with my parents, they weren’t saints and I wasn’t Pollyanna. We were very different to each other. I was this strange bohemian who didn’t see the merit in working in a bank. They wanted me to be settled, stable and I wanted them to ‘get me’. I wanted mum to leap up and down when a new book landed, like my stepmother-in-law did, but she wasn’t a book person. We are what we are and the fact we weren’t textbook Hallmark film, Brady Bunch people didn’t matter, we loved each other deeply and the thing I regret at the end is that being a caregiver for elderly parents, that duty often got in the way of that love. The tiredness and panic and never being able to make any plans. Once all that has gone, been boiled away by death, you are reunited with the bare bones of your relationship: the love and it is still burning with nowhere to go.

I forgive them for the bits they got wrong, but I cannot forgive myself for the bits I did. Why do we do this to ourselves? I know if my son was beating himself up about something he’d said or done that he felt shit about, I’d have binned it without a moment’s thought. But I’m self-flagellating about some stupid things that have grown to the size of Californian Redwoods in my head.

Guess who wee baldy is!

I am ‘lucky’ in that I have writing in which to put my emotions. After dad died, I wrote I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day in three weeks. I couldn’t get the words down fast enough. There was a lot to work out on paper and it would have been a very different book had I done it at any other time. I wanted to rewrite a part of our history with that book: dad wanting to sit down with me and have a conversation about ‘when it happened’ and I wouldn’t and I should have because it was important to him, the same way Robin refuses to have that same conversation with Charlie. When I wrote about them, I was trying to claw back into the past and alter things. And I am about to release the sister book to that Let the Bells Ring Out written in the wake of mum passing, because it felt right to craft a story about mothers who love and fret and get things wrong as well as all the little things they do that you don’t notice at the time, but they store somewhere inside your brain and much later they visit you and you remember those small thoughtful kindnesses. It made me feel close to mine again. The grief I have has been a fuel and helped me to write what I consider to be the best two books of my life. So you could say that grief has given to me as well as taken away.

When my dad died, my novelist friend Nicola May sent me a poem that resonated like no other. Just a short one but the last line just captured how to deal with grief: Let it be what it is today. Too powerful a beast to wrestle, you can’t win against the ephemeral, it is a riptide that demands you do not swim against it, but float on the top of it, let it push you and tire of you and then deliver you to shore. It was the best advice I ever had in how to negotiate those terrible days.

In time the memories will warm me, I’m sure, though they still hurt at present and so I don’t dip into the pot of them too often yet, they need to lose their cutting edges first, their acid burn. Today I will raise a glass to my daddy and try and think of him sitting in his armchair with my dog at his side rather than in the hospital bed slowly fading. I will try and think of him not pale and waiting forever to be seen in A & E, but blissed out on a lounger in the Spanish Sun and mum serving up a Sunday roast with the best Yorkshire Puddings this side of Christendom because it was stuffing out on them one day that made me change the title of a little book I was starting to tout around called ‘Secrets Between Friends’ to ‘The Yorkshire Pudding Club’. It is twenty years today since I got the publication deal for that book.

As I age, I see them more in my face in the mirror, I hear their words, expressions, the tenor of their voice in my own voice and when I do it brings them back for a split-second. Those split-seconds are all I have, before the truth hits, but they are small, transient priceless, precious gifts…