Evening All,
For me I have to say that the hardest part of this whole shitty journey is the fact that nearly three months later I am still completely confounded by the whole thing. I am suspended in this foggy painful disbelief that makes moving on completely impossible. It sounds normal doesn’t it – ‘oh, she’s in shock poor dear how could she comprehend such an awful thing’ but it feels different in reality, not nearly as simple and clean cut.
When someone you love dies, you expect to feel certain things. I think something people don't prepare you for is that they will only be shrouded in 'death' for a while. Every time my dad is mentioned/I think about him/dream about him - he basically has this big sign across him which says 'Oh my god, I died' 'dead' 'death' 'cancer'. And the shock of that, the magnitude of deaths reputation, has stopped me from realising what has actually happened. Which is that now there will just be an absence of this person that I love. And for some reason the fact that people told me my dad died didn't actually help me realise that at all.
I think that it might be because I’ve never lost anyone before so death is a concept I struggle with; even when Heath Ledger died (I had a girl/fan crush on him) I couldn't get my head around around the fact that he was just gone. Here one moment and then just gone the next. I wasn’t there when my father passed away and I never saw his body. Maybe that is why I am having such a hard time understanding that he is gone. Or maybe I just can’t let go and this is how I will feel for the rest of my life. That doesn’t seem unlikely at the moment.
People are carrying on as normal. At dinner parties or whenever I see my fathers old friends it’s always ‘so, what are you doing now’ as though I’ve probably got bored of grieving and must have moved onto something a bit more fun by now. I had to postpone university for another year because of my dads illness and the truthful answer is “I have absolutely no idea what I want to do, right now I sort of want to die actually”. Not polite party chitchat though, is it? So I just pretend that I’m on my first gap year or lie about some work I might be doing in January.
Not even just those sorts of friends – my mum, my half sister (my parents divorced when I was 7), my friends. When I am cheery and fine they think it is because I am healing, coming to terms with it all and just being brave and British about the whole thing – it’s really not. It’s because I forget, or pretend. Yes, I think pretend is more apt. I am just literally playing a grown up version of make believe everyday. Otherwise I end up sitting in a sort of catatonic state totally unable to speak to anyone and then I get into the risky business of alienating people. So, basically nobody is helping my come to terms with it - I suppose it’s because I haven’t asked them to. And, ironically, the only person who used to know more of what was better for me than I did, was dad.
Another aspect of it might sound a little bit bizarre, but I hope that some of you might understand what I am talking about. I feel like this is a sort of test – you know this is awful and tragic and you will feel broken and tired – but you have to keep going. In the back of my mind, you have to keep going because if I pass a certain time frame or heal a certain amount then I will have done well, I have ‘collected the golden points’ and then I’ll win dad back. He’ll come back if I’m good and I follow the steps and I don’t become self-destructive. I’ll get him back then right? No. No you won’t, you have to go through this the hard way to heal and then you’ll never get him back. My mind is really having issues processing that.
My unconscious mind is having a good whack at it. My dreams are refusing to stop being exhausting, weird and sometimes pretty cruel. Last night I managed to ring dad and we chatted. I recreated him so accurately, so beautifully. We talked just like we used to except for the fact that I had to inform him that he was dead. He just brushed past it and carried on asking me why I wasn’t on the train to university. When I woke I really did, for just a nanosecond, think that maybe I could ring him and chat to him - wherever he’s gone. Picturing him used to be a comfort, but at the moment it is incredibly painful. Dad standing tall by the Volvo in his Stetson greeting me as I get off the train is a image that keeps rising up unbidden in my mind, so I’m struggling not to cry. Crying in public is something I really really hate doing and this train is crowded.
I hope that I can start to understand that he's not coming back, because it hurts all the same anyway: disbelief and denial doesn’t make the pain go away, at best they hold it at bay like a shaky dam so it trickles through for a while before bursting. Can anyone really get their head around the finality of death? I suppose truth will out and is more healing in the long run. If only it didn't have to be this damn hard and lonely.
Big love to anyone else is struggling. Please do write if you relate to any of my inane babblings - it's so nice to know that there are other people out there who understand what you're going through, that's what
brought me to this site in the first place!
Smallhands x
(I've attached a song this time instead of a picture. I love film scores and I don't know why but this piece really struck a chord with me - it's James Newton Howard's soundtrack to King Kong, from a really beautiful bit of the film).
