It was only when I was driving to get my Click and Collect shopping with two dogs in the back of the car (also on our way for a walk) that I remembered it was my dad’s birthday. I’d like to wish him happy birthday, but I can’t. He would have been 79 today, 16th October, but on the 1st January 2023 it will be sixteen years since he died suddenly in a terrible accident.
It’s strange the way that these things pop into your head. We often think that anniversaries are reminders – dates for celebration or harbingers of greater pain. But in my experience, they can also be arbitrary signposts amongst a much more haphazard navigation of memories and connections to those we’ve lost.
I like to think that I think of him on his birthday. In truth I am more likely to have many thoughts about the fact that it will be his birthday soon and then forget it on the day. Equally, I used to turn into a total nightmare in the run up to Christmas, becoming ever so easier to ‘handle’ once we’d got past New Year’s Day – the day itself never being as awful as the thought of it. As the years have gone on, I manage the amalgamation of Christmas, birthdays (my son’s and my own) and the anniversary of my father’s death a little more calmly. (Though others close to me might not agree!)
In the car, on the way to Sainsbury’s where I collect my shopping from the man sitting in the truck in the lower carpark by the recycling bins, I think that maybe I will honour my dad by posting on Facebook about him on this his would-have-been 79th birthday. I’ve never done this before. Sometimes when I’ve seen other people’s posts about their beloved much-missed relatives – dads, in particular (I guess I notice those more) – I feel bad, like maybe the fact that I don’t put up a post about him means that I somehow didn’t love him as much or grieve him as deeply. So, I think on this day, in the car, perhaps I’d like to put a photo of him up there on my feed.
And then I wonder why. I feel exposed and I quickly decide against it. It is my private grief, my dad, my missing him. Who would I be posting for? I don’t want anyone to comment. He was not on Facebook, and he is no longer here to make choices about how he controls his image online. I feel like it could be wrong for the other people who love him. Who loved him. Who might or might not be on Facebook. And yet I also feel a sort of jealousy of the people that share their memories of their loved ones comfortably, proudly, joyously and with great open sadness.
But I know, somehow in my core, that I don’t want my dad there on a rolling feed. It feels strangely casual, a little bit uncontrollable. I think of a discussion I had on Friday with a student where we were talking about the attention people do or don’t give to street theatre as they go about their busy day and compared this to a social media feed. We were discussing whether a recording of a flash mob that goes viral online was the same as one in the street in the way it just invades your (head)space – or not. I don’t want my dad to be left in the street.
In the car, I also think how it is strange that I am having this debate in my head on the same day that a friend posted that she, like many before her, was stepping away from Facebook, for a while at least, to protect her mental health. I have missed the moment to celebrate him on that platform anyway. It is dying itself.
So, I decided to write this, and publish it here in this thought-space, which although also online is not generic, nor rolling. It is not the street.
This is a celebration of my wonderful enormous dad, who I lost and who I miss all and some of the time, not on his birthdays but on days when it sneaks up on me – often in the shower – and hits me, from its hiding place in the depths of my body, with the rawest pain: reliving that shocking day where one moment he was there and the next he wasn’t, answering the phone on the day after my 30th birthday and being unable to comprehend my mother’s words as she tried to tell me what had happened, crushing myself down, down, into the corner of my then living room wanting the two walls and the floor to swallow me, sitting on a train waiting for a driver to turn up, other passengers shouting ‘happy new year’ down the carriage as we tried to get down to Devon where my father no longer was… A pain that emerges from the depths, as strongly as ever, just less and less often perhaps in amongst a happy life that I have slowly, in fits and starts, built since that divide in my life – before and after, before and after.
But it is also a collection of (confused) thoughts that I had when I remembered that today was his birthday. About how we share, celebrate and mourn people. About death online. About exposure and about a personal fear of leaving loved ones like litter on the street of social media.
I have known sudden death again a few times since that awful day. Not someone as close to me as my father, but people whose absence I feel, whose sudden disappearance leave strange heartbroken holes in the air. That remind me of an Ian McEwan short story in which a man turns his wife inside out into another dimension. Gone so suddenly we can’t grab hold of them but still feel they must must must be there, somewhere there.
Some people apparently choose to get their loved one’s voices digitised so they can continue to have conversations with them (or an AI version of them) after their death. I cannot listen to the two recordings of my dad’s voice that I have. But I have them ready on a hard drive, always. We are all of us different. And grief comes to get us all at some point.
Just not always on the anniversaries…
Finally, I have also chosen to post here a poem I wrote for my dad’s funeral in early 2007, which is the last time I wrote or spoke about him publicly. I leave it here as a document of my love and shock, forever and forever more.
Say goodbye to my Dad, He’s gone
Dad-dy Dad-dy Dad-dy I listen for your heart beat in the house. Dad-dy Dad-dy Dad-dy It is the flap of the sails in the dipping wind. Dad-dy Dad-dy Dad-dy and the masts chime without you. This is my dad. Walking in the mud, slip sliding we laughed remembering together falling together, on ice, I six, little hand in your big one great warm loving hulk crushing me; I carry you proudly a scar under my chin. This is my dad. Ring ring, ring-a-ding ding. Hello sounding gruffer than the everflowing loving that impossibly parcels into your heart. Magnetic, like radio waves, connecting our voices I never understood how your protection tender knowing always cradled me, across the particles of moving air. Everywhere. Ring ring ring-a-ding ding. Click, click clickety chagung, fumbling for his phone. Sssh, I’m in a meeting, yes what. Why answer I always ask and listen to the silent because I love you, and I care. It is not true, it is not true a man so big, so strong, so bellyful, so on, and on and on Ring ring ring-a-ding ding. Say goodbye to my dad he’s gone. This is my dad. I scream, I cry, I mourn, I long. That I must have faith in all that is left unspoken. This is my dad. I love his brain. This is my dad, zapped away. Folded inside out into another dimension, where I cannot follow. Sharp, precision, a day beyond my thirty years, on New Year’s Day, sharp, real, no ebb, no flow. Listen. This is the waves. I cannot make their sound. Let them pound me, crash me, tower and cradle me. This is the wind. It sings when he is gone. Let it splice me, sway me, whip and circle me and when it is strong I will lean back across the sea finding only the elements match for my feelings when every word is a nothing, a half, not enough, a betrayal. This is the wind, hear it, make it blanket me, and ring ring ring-a-ding ding ring ring ring-a-ding ding, answer Dad-dy Dad-dy in an everlasting heartbeat, Dad, let the wind make the abstract physical and hold me in your absent arms.
