Grief: Take it or Leave it.
Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door
As the poet Longfellow remarked, ‘there is no grief like the grief that does not speak.’ Who is interested in another person’s grief? We see their tears, we see sadness, exasperation, but it is not ours. We comfort ourselves with the salving thought that ‘they’, i.e., the grieving, will ‘get over it’. We lean on old aphorisms such as ‘time is a healer’ but until we are plunged into the real territory of our own deep grief, such attitudes are simply conscience-serving window dressing.
To speak about one’s grief, to expose and reveal it, is not a very English thing to do. But bringing it out into the open can be a mild form of catharsis. To write about it like this and show it to the world need not be shameful. Those who see this and perhaps absorb it can dispose of it as they wish. Share my thoughts or dismiss them. I do not care; yet I am a writer and words flow from my brain and onto a page.
The opening lines of this post are by a rock band, Mike and The Mechanics. The Living Years is a song about the singer’s father and the many things he wished he had said to him before he died. I first heard it on BBC Radio 2 in the early 1990s, and the idea of expressing one’s grief in such a way was described by Dieter Meier, of the Swiss electro-funk band Yello, as ‘disgusting and self-indulgent’. For a while, until recently, I think I shared Dieter Meier’s view. But not now.
When my daughter Sarah died at 11.10 pm on December 23 2012, a whole chapter of my life was torn from me and shredded. Sarah was the reason for so many things. The reason for love, the reason for marriage, the reason for me taking life’s responsibilities seriously. As I held her hand as she breathed her last on that hospital bed, I kissed her on the forehead and, like a drowning man, 46 years of being a father ran through my conscience like an epic movie. Sarah loved me and her mother deeply, and that love was reciprocated day in, day out.
And among all the flickering memories, my shame reared its head. Where was I on October 2nd 1966 when she was born, as her 19 year old mother, Wendy, went through the first agonies of childbirth? Was I at the bedside to see her emerge into the world? No. I was celebrating in the Olde Blue Bell pub in Hull.
I did, however, give her all my time and my love when she was a little girl. She was the cutest infant a father could ever wish for. She never complained, rarely cried, loved my stories and made us laugh. In fact she made us smile right to the end.
I shall always remember the glorious Autumn day in 1987 when she realised that living in Grimsby with her then boyfriend Kevin had been a bad mistake. She packed her bags, I picked her up and drove her here to Mansfield to live with us again. We stopped at a pub on the way and sat outside in the sunshine drinking and smoking, planning her future. And she would never be out of work. She did her job well; geriatric care and nursing. From the age of 16 right until the cancer struck her down, she served the NHS with hardly ever taking time off for illness. And her colleagues loved her. Why wouldn’t they? She was lovely.
Yet where was I at many of the crucial moments in her final two years of struggle with her cancer? Sure, I took her for her regular chemotherapy sessions to Nottingham, and her daily radiotherapy, but was I there with her on the day she finally lost the power of her legs and became unable to walk? No. I simply heard about it on the phone. Could I have spent much more time with her during those dark days when she could no longer get up the stairs to the bathroom? No. I left her daily care to her long-suffering husband, Ivan, and simply turned up occasionally to take her out to lunch with her wheelchair. Could I have been of much more help to Ivan, who faced changing her dressings every morning before going to work, until he had to surrender the task to the District Nurse? Yes. I should have been there, I should have done more, and offered my services. But although Sarah only lived ten minutes away, her cancer seemed to be happening at a distance. Perhaps, I hoped, she would be cured. Maybe she would get better. I placed my trust in medicine and science. Sarah was my lovely, lively, bubbly daughter and surely, fate could not remove her from our presence. Could it? Would it? But that’s what fate did.
And so this week every December these guilty thoughts will re-surface, punctuating the 46 years of love we shared. I look now at your smiling face on the wall above this computer and grieve. I grieve because I will not hear your footsteps coming down the path on a summer afternoon to sit and drink beer with me at a barbecue. I grieve that you will not bounce laughing and joking into my life on Boxing Day, I grieve that on New Year’s Eve you will not be there in your chair at the end of our table laughing and drinking, ready to bring in another year. And I grieve on Christmas Eve as I sit by the fire reminiscing about all the wonderful Yuletides we spent together, especially when you were our firstborn child.
Is there anything good in all this? Yes; your brother Martin is still with us. I know this time of year hurts him as it does us. Yet at the end, from your hospital bed, you asked me why I was so unhappy and I could not find the words. But you told me not to worry because everything was fine, because you knew the end was coming and you’d faced bravely up to it.
Is there an afterlife, darling? God, (whoever you are, with your warped sense of cruelty) I hope so. Will we meet again? I hope so too. We still have much to discuss, and there are still things I would like to say to you. Grief: do we get ‘over it’? No. Never. Rest in peace, dear girl. I love you.
THE PURPOSE OF HEAVEN
(For Sarah: October 2 1966 - December 23 2014)
Last night I had a golden dream
Real and perfect, so it seemed
In that cerebral sleeping world
You re-appeared, my much-missed girl.
Your smile and laughter, warm embrace
Your lilting voice and smiling face
Seemed to offer me a choice
That hope might dare to raise its voice.
An option from on-going grief
An alternative, a new belief … but;
Still reaching out, holding your hand,
The dream dispersed, as grains of sand.
Decades of life, I now have seven
Yet hardly dared believe in heaven
Perhaps this was my soul’s defeat
Maybe heaven’s where the dream’s complete.
Although our grief will still persist
Heaven’s a thought I can’t resist
Because last night you came to me
Through a door into eternity.
And we shall laugh, embrace again
Beyond this life of strife and strain
Dreams incomplete, unkindly ended
In heaven are fulfilled and mended.