It's taken me 37 days to write this. I keep changing the order, swapping out singular words in winding sentences and composing the 'perfect' ending. But endings are never perfect, so instead I'm sending it out into the world when it feels ripe. Grief has been a strange beast for me. It likes to tug on the oversized pants I've been living in like a nagging child trying to get my attention - usually when I’m mid conversation or attempting to work. Grief likes to remind me of moments I’d rather reflect on in my own allocated grief time. But grief doesn’t know what time is. And it doesn’t care to know.
Below are a collection of my words about the thirty years & 11 months I knew Dad before he died, the week before he died, and the days directly after; so I suppose a content warning is in order. Each section represents a day, or rather a headspace, in a kind of 'order' that just felt right...thanks for joining me. ________ Today Dad's still alive, although I wouldn't necessarily call it living. A petite and fragile figure, who cannot speak or move; laying 'snuggly-buggly' as he would say, in the lounge room of the home he resides in with his beloved. His hair did not vacate the premises during chemo, and even what we called his 'solar panel' (that small circle of hair at the tippy top men tend to lose) grew back, awash with salt and pepper strands. He's being tended to like nothing you've ever seen - handcrafted oils for feet massages, regular moustache perfecting by my cousin, hand holding, music, silence, laughter, crying and extremely well applied lip balm. He's a loved (and tenacious) man still holding on so tight. And honestly, why would you want to leave the pampering of the century? The ultimate Lounge Lizard.
It's been six days I've been here with his extended and chosen family to prepare him for this transformation; into what, we're not sure. I've been collecting versions of what happens after we die all my life, where we go, what we do there, whether we come 'back'. When I was a child I thought that each person got a turn at being every person on the planet across time. Billions of re-births happening all at once. As an adult, my mums friend told me that when you pass, your spirit enters the space between death and rebirth, whipped around by the wind; the bardo it's called. After your time in the bardo, you can return reborn to balance your karma or continue on to a new place. I liked this idea when I first heard it...Dad was an avid motorbike rider so he'd be fine in that wind. Alas, we will have to wait and see. The days feel long here with him, and they're beautifully gruelling. The mornings begin with communal breakfast; toast any way you could possibly dream it consumed by the loaf and then it's each to their own as we pick through leftovers til night. There are a core group of people by his side, who weave in and out of care and rest, care and rest. We are of course, all caring all the time, but sometimes we must care for our own unkept hair or unkept hearts and return to him slightly more kept. The dogs get walked, the windows get opened for sun and closed for warmth. We can't light candles because of his oxygen tank so the tv screen where we're playing albums dad liked on youtube serves as a kind of ambience machine; and I do often wonder if the people who make those youtube collations know what we're using them for...The room is filled with cushions, blankets, knitting materials, books and empty mugs with tea bag strings hanging lax by their handles. It's cosy here. My sisters and I, although not blood, are deeply bonded at this point. Braided together with different kinds of strings - shared stories, shared meals and shared trauma. We used to joke that we could open a therapy office called 'Daddy Issues' - and still maintain that it would do very well. I have to say in all this, that as an only child of a single mother - Dad leaving me with sisters is a gift I could not have anticipated meaning so much until right now. A gift I must remind myself with voracious perseverance when I feel myself slipping, that he has given them too. I suppose you could say they get to keep loving him through me (and I them); a group of women, each living so fully in their complex perfection holding me tight. Thanks Dad.
I've had a strange relationship to this notion of 'parenthood' my whole life, mainly because Dad and I would come in and out of flow together. Sometimes so similar when we would move our hands the same or get frustrated with people not changing lanes fast enough. And sometimes so far apart I could forget that it took two to tango and that maybe mum had me 'solo' like the (not so) Virgin Mary.
My inherent need to be loved and adored by him, as I think we all want our parents to do, has taken my heart on many a bumpy ride. At times I felt immensely misunderstood by him. I think he saw me as too sensitive, too thrown about by my emotions, maybe even needy. A particular irony as his Father could think the same of him he always inferred. At other times, when we’d sneak doughnuts before my step Mum made us a healthy dinner, when we were playing pool at the pub when I was 4 (no comment haha), when we’d listen to music in the car at the beach or when I'd look into those big blue eyes - I felt a genuine, indescribable bond and I felt seen in a way I haven't yet felt with anyone else.
That's the thing about parents, you never know quite which parts of you are theirs and which parts of you you grew all on your own. My apple green eyes are certainly a DIY project, but the moodiness and brightness snuck their way over from him into my very makeup. Here we all are, half of our parents and a whole us. A whole person that can be loved and adored by whole other people in ways we never expected.
He died last night. How am I alive when half of me just died?
44 hours have passed, a strange day that has been going for 44 hours straight. I didn't know time could stretch out like this. I'm at my nana's house, being fed flour in all its forms. Pastries, biscuits, toast, pie. I fear I may become flour, flying away upon the slightest of breeze - but my spirit is too heavy for that, thank goodness. Nana is out seeing the 'Sound of Music' stage show, and I'm in her cornflower blue dressing gown after downing a packet of salt and vinegar chips and recovering from almost drowning internally via cups of tea. I feel reflective, and in a dream state where Dad is both alive within me and dead in reality - but am I not reality? Nana tells me that although my Father is dead that I am to be reminded that I have a Heavenly Father in Jesus. Great, now I have two dead dads I laugh on the phone with mum in a moment of levity. Mum and Dad met at a regional football game in a place called Burragate, locking eyes across the dusty field. Between this moment and my birth is a tangle of stories so disparate that I have at times, wondered if Mum and Dad were living in two different planes of existence, bending the space time continuum to have me and then heading back to whence they came. Dad tells a story about a hostel floor and mum begs to differ...but here I am, and I'm so thankful some questionable names for me like 'Petal' were vetoed. They separated before I was born, and as a result I never lived with Dad. I originally wrote 'he never parented me', except he did. Just the once, when I was 27. He told me off at a restaurant for helping the waitress tidy up the table, he said it was tacky behaviour that implied I thought I was better than her. It didn't happen again after that (the parenting) - helping waitresses lives on.
Over the years, I learned that Dad was a true musician, with rhythm living in the cells of his bones. I say 'was' but even in his vegetative state - if we put on a song he didn't like he would deliver an almost imperceptible frown that you could only see if you knew the shape of his wrinkles in their usual resting state. We would promptly change the tune. Watching Dad play the drums was like watching a personified symphony, his torso motioning forwards and back, tossed around by the melody. His arms and feet moving in total synergy creating the beat. He would sit 'wayyyyy in the back pocket of the beat' my sister would later say in her funeral speech. It was magic to watch, and to this day I wish I could do something so effortlessly and impressively as he could drum. He sung a mean Mustang Sally, his official 'move' to win over the soon to be love of his life. He replaced 'ride Sally ride' with 'ride Angie ride' and 20 years later they were still locked in harmony. A new sort of symphony.
He was genuinely funny. Hilarious even, with cuttingly precise comedic timing, sarcasm, whit and oozing with charm to fix any offence taken. I have countless videos on my phone of him drumming on a table with his cutlery, open mouth kissing his dogs, asking the most random of questions like 'do you have to pay tax on super?' and rattling his false teeth around in his mouth for the kids. He was extremely loved and liked. His adoration for their dogs Ruby, Goldie, Sally and Ralph ran deep, and I have many photos of him in a love lock - spooning one of them with his eyes closed in contentment and tenderness. Sometimes I think it’s easier professing your love to a pooch... I remember the first time he ever said I love you to me. I was 16 and we were sitting out the front of his restaurant on NYE flicking stones with a stick. We promptly had a fight right after but it was good for that shiny moment. Since then, during each phone call and visit we had - that tiny crack of love opened to me a tiny bit more. He didn't say I love you often, yet he'd always tell us to 'keep a cool head' when we'd leave his house - I guess we all accepted that was the same thing.
Today on day 5, I am reminded that I have access to joy should I require it. Amidst the little void that the heartache is cultivating like a spring garden, my sisters, step Mum and I have shared many a joyful moment. We've shown each other photos we had deep in the archives of our phones, told stories of his peculiarities and wonders, we've hugged and walked and sung - all to much remedy. On my 9 hour drive home, I let the first wall down that was holding the ocean of tears in, as well as letting the wall down on my healthy eating habits. Country town bakeries make a mean hot jam doughnut and who am I to deprive myself of that pleasure? I have access to joy.
17 sunsets and sunrises have come and gone. Sometimes when I dip into the grief between emails and phone calls and meetings I wet a face washer with the hottest water possible and let the steam permeate my pores. I wait for it to cool a few degrees and slide the towel material slowly down my face and along my collarbones - all with my eyes closed. I squeeze the excess cooled water out on the houseplant that's looking the driest and go on with the day. Refreshed. I feel the rawness of the grief slipping away from me in moments...and I often want it back. I have been pulling out photographs and videos and asking people about him to pull him back closer again. I don't want to forget the grief because what if I never feel it again? Are grief and love not the same?
I've lost count of the days now, I think it's been four weeks - maybe more. I'm at home on a freezing night with the windows wide open. I feel content, warm next to my heater, and safe. The love that has shown up and wrapped me in its arms has come from directions I forgot existed and I'm reminded daily within the ceremony of death, that the ashes can breed new life. I have indeed felt strangely closer to my aliveness lately. The taste of food, the sun on my cheek as I’m driving to coffee in the morning, the sting of the cold at night. On his birthday, June 26th just a few days after the funeral, that feeling pulled me to a tattoo studio in Brunswick. Him and I had joked about getting matching Milo tins to cement our shared addiction, and as big Austin Powers fans my sisters and I in true 'Daddy Issue' style, laughed about getting the iconic line 'Daddy wasn't there'...but neither felt quite right. On my arm already lives a collage of magnolia flowers, bees, moths and lavender so it was only fitting to add to it something from the natural world; a June Bug. Our June Bug as it were, was a man of music and humour and care, whose apparent lot in life was to be surrounded by all the things the beetle represents (according to google anyway). Creativity, reinvention and a little bit of luck. I think our family would say his real lot in life was to be surrounded by beautiful women, and I think he'd agree. _____ Dad was alive for almost 69 years; alive with rhythm, alive with cheek, alive with complexity and alive with gusto. Moments when that feeling would fade, he tried drugs to get it back, and when that didn't work he helped recovering addicts get the feeling back too. He made music to get it, made love to get it, rode his bike to get it and told stories to his daughters to get it. And as this piece of writing comes to it's end, an ending where life carries on and I continue growing around the void, I'll leave you with this thought; Perhaps in the rituals of loss, when we forget 'the feeling', we could allow death to pull us closer to our aliveness.
Rest easy, Pa.
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