Gentle Reminders

Last week, I went for a walk in the cemetery park near my flat.

The heatwave was still very much in session, golden light filtering down softly through the canopy of leaves. As I turned off one of the main paths, a brown and white greyhound trotted up to me, nosing at my dress. His owners were sitting at a bench a few feet away, and I held out my hand for the dog to sniff. His damp nose bumped my knuckle, and he moved away again.

This gesture was something that my dad had taught me to do. I was a very excitable dog-loving child – if I saw one in a pub, I instantly wanted to run over to it and make it love me more than it loved its owners. He had grown up with dogs and loved them too, but he told me I had to wait for a dog to come to me, and to hold out my hand for it to inspect before touching it: a polite gesture of human-canine friendship.

It was a lesson in gentleness, the gesture now itself a gentle reminder of someone gone (readers of this blog will know that my dad died in May 2018).

On the Internet, the gentle reminder is its own subgenre. It is proof that reminders are not always as gentle as advertised – search the phrase on Twitter and in between well-meaning missives about unclenching your jaw and drinking a glass of water you will find chiding posts about remembering that there are x many members in a band, not just the one you like, or that “an unsupportive friend is a hater too”.

In the three years since Dad died I have been learning to navigate reminders of him, and like these tweets, they weren’t always as gentle as they seemed. I’d see someone on the street that looked like him, or search my email inbox for something innocuous and bring up an old email thread, then find myself three days later only just coming up for air after being sunken in a kind of haze.

Sometimes, they weren’t gentle at all. Last year, I was watching a horror movie with my boyfriend (title redacted for the sake of spoilers) and in the final act the distant father who had been trying to protect his daughter throughout sacrificed himself to save her. Suddenly I was loudly sobbing with all the lights on while my boyfriend sat there looking very uncertain about what to do. The funniest part about that story is that it was Father’s Day. The universe! She loves a joke!

The good news, realised only on that sunny day in the park last week, is that the reminders are much gentler now.

Maybe it’s something about passing the two-year or three-year milestone. Maybe it’s that thanks to lockdown I’ve had to do a lot more reflecting and processing than I previously allowed myself to do. I’ve thought a lot about what this process has been like for me, and what I wish I could go back and tell myself, what gentle reminders I would give to myself when I was still in the wilderness of it. And unfortunately, thanks to the situation that brought about lockdown, there are probably a lot more people navigating that wilderness now.

So, here’s a Father’s Day gift from a fatherless writer who won’t shut up. These are the gentle reminders I wish I could go back and give myself, and that you are free to take for yourself, if you want to.

1. A few months – even a year, two years, three – is not a long time.

It might be a long time to go without a haircut or without speaking to a close friend, but to process a death, it’s really nothing. This was very hard for me to see in the beginning.

Once a few months had gone by, I started to feel self-conscious bringing up my Dad in conversation. I didn’t know anyone else close to me who had lost a parent beside my siblings – we even still have a full set of grandparents – so as the emotional triage phase ended and life started to seem like it was going back to normal, I began to question whether I, too, should be starting to forget.

Everyone seemed to expect me to be my normal self, to have normal-sized reactions to things. In hindsight, this was probably a combination of reality and projection, but it felt unrealistic in a way I found hard to articulate at the time.

The way I described it to a friend recently is that in life, you usually have two hands to deal with your problems: two hands to catch an argument before it hits you, to break it down into something less painful. But grieving is a two-hand task, and in the beginning, it’s a crushing one. So, when something comes flying at you, you have two choices: take your hands off the grief and let it crush you, or accept the body blow of whatever it is that’s come up. The shitty part is that most of the time, you end up getting crushed by the grief either way.

All this to say: if you’ve lost someone, and things are crushing you more than they would have before, that’s okay. It’s okay to remind people that you’ve still got your hands full with this difficult thing, and to ask for patience. And if you’re supporting someone who’s grieving, it’s worth giving them that patience. Ask them, every now and then, how they’re doing with it, and let them know that there’s space in the conversation for any answer they might give, even if that’s no answer at all.

Which brings me to my next reminder.

2. You don’t have to talk about it all the time, to whoever asks.

You might find that you do anyway, and that’s fine. I’ve had my fair share of parties and work drinks where I blurted out “Well, my dad died” to blank looks or nervous laughter – but it’s not compulsory.

Sometimes, it can be helpful to talk about it. To a friend, or a family member, or even a total stranger who has similar experiences to you. Some of the most healing and helpful conversations I’ve had have been with people I don’t know well at all, but who have also lost someone close to them.

But sometimes, it can feel terrible. I always think having an unproductive conversation about grief feels a bit like someone seeing you puke on yourself – you feel like you’ve embarrassed yourself by letting them see all that undigested mess. In the worst cases it feels like they just want to see it out of curiosity. I’m willing to bet we all have those conversations at some point or another, and it’s okay to decline the opportunity if you see it coming.

Maybe there’s no one you can talk to or want to talk to about it. Maybe you don’t know anyone who’s gone through something similar, or at least, nobody you see often or feel comfortable reaching out to. For me, what helped was listening to The Griefcast: a podcast of comedians talking about death. I would probably not recommend this if you’re in that horrible first year, but it totally transformed my relationship to this loss after the second anniversary. It is also a perfect example of an ungentle reminder becoming gentler over time – after the first few episodes I had to stop and take a break, because it was weighing so heavily on me, but now listening to the show is a relief.

3. Finally, forgiveness is key.

I know I sound like Gwyneth Paltrow trying to rope you into a kind of Grief Goop, but listen: I’ve learned more about forgiveness in the last three years than I had in the previous twenty-three. Its different shapes, its different uses.

Not everyone is going to know what to say to you, and that will hurt sometimes. You will pick up awkward interactions like souvenirs and exchange them with other people you meet who’ve been through the same thing – the time someone was callous, or flippant, or cruel in a way that is hilarious now despite being apocalyptically upsetting at the time.

You yourself might be a bit shit. A bomb’s just gone off in your life and everything feels different now. You might act erratically or say or do things you’re not proud of. Maybe you’ve spent a lot of lockdown torturing yourself with the memory of every bad thing you’ve ever done (or maybe that’s just me).

And, of course, there’s the person who’s gone. They walked out in the middle of a conversation, and even if you thought that conversation was going nowhere, or had lost the capacity to change direction or become productive, that sudden silence can be infuriating.

I can only speak to my own experience here, and that is very much still a work in progress, but working out what forgiveness might look like in relation to each of these things has been important to me. I mean forgiveness here as a kind of bloodletting, a siphoning-off of the resentment and anger I didn’t realise had built up until it was overwhelming. Asking yourself what you need to get rid of it – do you need an apology? From who? Are they able to give it? What can you do with an apology that you can’t do without one?

Forgiving doesn’t have to mean forgetting all the bad things, or pretending they never happened. It doesn’t mean letting yourself or someone else off the hook, and it doesn’t mean flattening your feelings down to an unrealistically compact solution so that you can never be tripped up by it again. I just mean whatever kindness you can do to yourself, to set down some of the weight you’re carrying.

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I’m not sure if these reminders will be helpful for anyone. I’m not even sure if they’d have been helpful for me – it’s one thing to be reminded of something, and another to internalise it the way you learn from a mistake. But I hope they do help. And even if they don’t, I hope that someday soon you’ll be walking through a park in summer, and you’ll get a gentle reminder that this grief doesn’t always have to feel so heavy. There are good things among the bad, even if that good thing is just you. As I love to say, life is a mixed bag. You take the reminder, and you keep on walking.

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It took me a long time to understand the phrase “distant regard,”
but I am grateful for it now,
and I am grateful for my heart,

that turned out to be good, after all,
and grateful for my mind,
to which, in retrospect, I can see

I have never been sufficiently kind.

— Tony Hoagland, “Distant Regard”

A Lesson in Aftermath

A year ago today, my dad died, and over the course of the summer of 2018 I found myself dealing with the aftermath.

I’ve written about it before. There was a kind of incongruous serenity to those first few months, like a stop-motion video of crocuses shouldering themselves out of the soil: thousands of tiny, jagged movements coalescing to a slow progression. When I think of them now, I think mostly of sunlight flickering through a train carriage on my way from one place to another. I read books, met friends, received condolences. I planned a funeral and a memorial, and I met a lot of people who had cared about my dad.

Most people will find themselves in a situation like this sooner or later. It’s part of the terrible contract of parenthood that after they have spent years dealing with your shit—both literal and figurative—you then have to deal with being left behind. The instances in which this contract is broken are brutal tragedies I can’t begin to cover here.

You learn a lot over the course of the process. To put it lightly, death itself is a logistical nightmare. Some interesting takeaways of mine were that grave plots are not bought but rented, often for a period of 75 years or so; that you don’t need any sort of licence to move a body cross-country (you can literally just put it in the back of your car, though we opted not to do this, for what I feel are obvious reasons); and that it is deceptively difficult to carry a coffin down an aisle. The more you know!

You also, perhaps predictably, learn a lot about the person you love.

Me and Dad, summer 2017

One thing I had always known about my dad was that he was someone who was keenly aware of his own mortality.

It’s a strange awareness to have of your parent, the idea that they have a close relationship to death, but I understood this about Dad from an early age, and I came to understand it even better as I was planning his funeral.

Early among the new stories that I heard was that, when my nan was pregnant with him, the doctors were not sure Dad was going to survive to term. When he did, he nearly died during delivery—and then again, three weeks later.

A few years later, a boy in Dad’s class at school was caught in a strong tide off the Welsh coast and drowned, and Dad sat for hours on the stairs at home, feeling terribly sorry for the people who had been with the boy when it happened, feeling acutely that it could have been him who had been pulled away.

This was who he was, always, throughout the intervening years before he was my dad and all the years after. Aware, painfully so, of his own mortality, and of himself as a survivor; an awareness that only intensified when, at the age of 25, he served as the RMO for 2 Para in the Falklands in 1982.

Though he’d carried some of his awareness of death with him when he arrived in the Falklands, what he saw there meant that he carried more than his fair share back. For much longer than the time that I knew him he was open about his struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and suicidal thoughts, and the internal battle that he waged gave him a formidable power for compassion.

This was the part of my dad that I recognised most clearly in all the stories that were told to me over those first few months. His Falklands career is legendary, of course, but I have always been equally proud of the man I grew up with: the doctor whose patients always told me how kind he was, and who went out of his way to ease their suffering; who would gently kiss my and my brothers’ scraped knees and tell us they would heal more quickly because he had “magic spit”.

His compassion had its failures at times, like anyone’s. He was just a person, and we had more than enough shouting matches to prove it. But he taught me a lot about kindness, and that giving people time—whether that’s more for themselves or just a little more of your own—is often the most powerful thing that you can do.

Sorting through these stories of my dad as they came into my hands, I thought of what T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I realised that my dad explored more of the world, and of life and death, than a lot of people get to. He saw battlefields, jungles, rivers, and deserts; he was shot at, kidnapped, and hurled himself out of planes. Even after his early confrontations with mortality, he explored the line between life and death more closely than many would be brave enough to. I would like to believe that when the time came, he greeted death not with trepidation, but as the final frontier of a lifelong exploration.

Dad with his characteristic cigar and (unfortunately) characteristically heinous shirt

This was a nice revelation to come to. It was comforting, and it eased the passage into the long quiet period after the memorial.

But still, the fact remains: all this aftermath is a pain in the arse.

The debris of a life—especially one so long, so full and so complicated—it gets into the cracks of everything like sand from a beach. A year on, and we’re still feeling it chafe between our toes. Things grind to a halt for months; lawyers go silent; bills fly in from the other side of the world. The loose ends keep pulling free from your hands and what are you supposed to do?

When does it all get swept away, the grit wiped from the wound? And what do you do when that, at last, finally happens? Does it ever?

These are ongoing questions, ones maybe without answers. The revelations that come with picking up the pieces do not quite protect you from their sharp edges. The accumulation of years takes time to sort through.

But here’s what I know, or at least have found myself to be true despite the painful cliché of it: funerals, and all of the aftermath, are as much about meetings as they are about goodbyes.

Because the truth is that we meet the person that we grieve again and again: in new stories we hear, in old ones we’d forgotten. We meet them in memories that resurface, and we build new relationships to them over time. It’s not without pain. It’s not without joy. And it is definitely a poor substitute for the real thing. But it is a powerful statement of what remains of them, of the best of them that is inscribed upon the earth.

A poem I keep coming back to is Ada Limòn’s “Instructions On Not Giving Up”. In it,
Limòn writes of blossom strewing the streets “with the confetti of aftermath”, of the leaves greening over “whatever winter did to us, a return/ to the strange idea of continuous living despite/ the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.”

I love this poem for its recognition of the complicatedness of trying to move on. I love it for its recognition of these unavoidable things: the mess, the hurt, the empty. For its celebration of the beauty that comes despite or even because of that.

Each May when the trees fill with green and I’m pulled back to this loss that will never go away, I hope to return to this poem. Even when there are no more funerals to plan, no more wills to chase, and the confetti is long swept-up, I hope to return to this notion of the cycles of things. The way that love returns like seasons, with new surprises. The idea of the fertility of everything, even in the blistering aftermath of loss.

Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

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We are fundraising in Dad’s name for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans with PTSD. You can donate here.

On Denial

Grief is a hard thing to write about, for many reasons.

For one thing, it’s a pretty intangible concept—what is it that you’re feeling when you’re grieving? “Grief” itself isn’t so much an emotion as a frame for it: a word made to weather the changeability of loss.

That’s the other problem with grief—its variability. The experience of grief differs wildly from person to person. Grief will even differ, I imagine, from loss to loss (I’m a first-timer, so I can’t confirm this theory, but it seems to me that there are too many colours of pain in the world for anyone to ever grieve the same way twice). So how are you supposed to write about it?

I can only speak for myself, and if it were me, I’d spend the first few paragraphs talking about why it’s so difficult to write about—a sort of disclaimer, to show the reader that you know that you’re not an emotional everyman, that you make no claims to represent for the billions of other people dealing with the aftermath of death.

Once this writerly loophole had been exploited, I’d take a look at the language that we do have to talk about grief—perhaps the widely-known “stages” of this variable, intangible, invisible experience.

Everybody knows about the five stages of grief. The theory was introduced by psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, and posits that there are five key steps in the walk through grief—these being denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Predictably, a lot of experts have taken issue with this theory when applied to grieving for a dead person.

For one thing, Kübler-Ross didn’t actually base it on the behaviour of people who’d experienced the death of a loved one. In fact, the model was based on the observation of the terminally ill (for a surprisingly accurate summary, see The Simpsons).

For another, researchers have found that people experience multiple trajectories following a loss, and have said that Kübler-Ross’s model is too simplistic. The world and grief are complex—who knew?

Still, I like the five stages model. “Stages” is probably over-generous—emotion isn’t linear, and the idea that none of these things bleed into one another seems far-fetched. But I like it, all the same.

I like that it offers a way in, that it’s allowed me to prevaricate for so long while actually touching on a lot of the things that I think are key to understand about grief before you even begin to talk about it, namely

1. that it’s messy,
2. that it changes, and
3. that even experts can’t tell you what to expect or how to come out the other side, so I certainly don’t claim to.

So, that is where I’d start. Over the course of writing about grief, I’d probably write and rewrite, go through several drafts. I’d question why I was even trying, spend a week procrastinating, before deciding that if grief is a deafening silence, that’s no reason why the conversation around it should be.

To talk about grief, I’d begin at the (not by any means empirically-supported) beginning: with denial.

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Years before

Six months ago, my dad died.

He was 61. It was a Friday. The weather was grey. To add insult to life-altering emotional injury, I was hungover at the time.

Dad had been in and out of hospital over the last three months, and he’d been optimistic lately of being out again.

(Normally when people ask if the death was sudden, and I say that he’d been in hospital for a while, they nod as though that alleviates the suddenness. Here’s something people might not tell you about death: it still feels sudden, even when it’s not unexpected.)

At first, grief felt like a lot of running around. To be very bluff about it, having someone close to you die is a real trip, but being the one who has to organise everything afterwards adds another element of strangeness.

In the first month after he died, grief was a lot of train journeys back and forth to my family’s house. It was a lot of reading, a lot of TV watching, a lot of sleeping almost anywhere but in my own bed, alone. It was making a lot of decisions I didn’t feel qualified to make, and receiving a lot of condolences that didn’t really feel like they were for me at all.

It might not seem possible to be in denial of something when you’re actively involved in dealing with its aftermath like this, but it is. I was even aware of it—when I was answering calls, planning the funeral, choosing the flowers and the coffin and making decisions about who should speak, what they should say.

3 days after, Clapham Common

I wasn’t deluding myself about whether or not he was actually dead. (That’s what I’d always thought denial was—the flat-out refusal to believe something had happened.)

It was more the feeling that, although I knew the stone had been cast into the water, it hadn’t quite settled yet. It had been in the air for a long time, and now it had finally broken the surface, the cool, hard fact of it was still drifting slowly down through sunlit layers of upper water. The currents were still warm, there were still living things up there—new things he’d written to me or for me that I hadn’t seen, shining envoys swimming through from his last weeks.

It had a long way to travel, then. It still does. Down to the dark bottom of the world, burying itself in the silted floor to fossilise—or be preserved, I don’t know in which direction this metaphor goes. (Part of me thinks that maybe grief is a rock that never reaches the bottom; it just goes down and down and never stops.)

In that sense, denial, and grief itself I suppose, feels a lot like waiting. For other people also, I think this is the perception—particularly given the linearity of the stages theory. For the grief-adjacent, you feel like you’re waiting it out: waiting for each stage to be over, waiting and waiting, through denial and bargaining and anger and depression, waiting for the rock to hit the sand as though that is the final truth of grief: acceptance, devoid of anything of these prior things. A point of stillness. A fact.

But that hasn’t been my experience. (At least not yet—as I said, I’m a first-timer, and this grief is very young.)

So what is it? In my experience, denial is a necessary mechanism, a kind of self-preserving reflex. In fact, it was what made almost everything I did in those first weeks and months possible.

4 months after, at the memorial

Denial gave me the courage to assert authority, for one thing—to make decisions as though I knew absolutely what the right call would be, because I still felt like at the end of all of it, at an undisclosed point, he would be able to tell me what I’d done right or wrong. Crack a joke, call me a name. It made authority feel like something borrowed, rather than something that was new and mine and the best we could do. That was another thing denial was: the anaesthetic daze before and between pain.

Part of the issue is that “denial” isn’t great at describing itself. Is a scar “denying” a wound? That’s an overly philosophical way of putting it, but a useful way of thinking about it. You can’t live in the pain all the time, and I have no doubt that the brittle barrier I’d shored up between myself and the bottomless pit that all my energy would have drained into otherwise was an essential part of trying to heal.

Six months down the line, I don’t feel what authority I have to be borrowed anymore. I’ve gotten used to its shifting weight, and the idea that it’ll never really feel like it’s mine. Denial allowed me to share the burden for a while, while I learned to take that weight myself.

So how do you write about grief? How do you write about denial?

My answer is that you say that denial is your body’s way of being kind to itself. It is saying to yourself, Here. Come inside. Get warm. Eat. Speak to someone who loves you, let them tell you a joke. Laugh at yourself and stupid things on the TV. Read a new book, or an old one. Take the rest you need.

And when you’re done, then you can brace yourself for everything else you have to do—the entire lifetime that is to come.

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Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.

—Ali Smith, Autumn