It’s been 3 years this month since my dad passed away. Died. Was taken from us. Was killed. A torrent of terms that I still often see in the format of a slide show through my mind. Big 70’s font, bold letters, tread milling forward towards my internal eyes. Attempts to force the mind to compute. It’s been 3 years. Come one. Focus on what this important man is saying in your work meeting or you’ll look a tit later on.
On approaching the anniversary date, the apprehension and adrenalin that courses through my body at least a month before we even get there, is relatively indescribable. You know something is off. You know it’s not just the ‘new moon’, or your hormones and sleep being off because of lock down. It’s the knowledge that you’ve just paced your way through another year of life. Another year further away from a moment, the ripples of which altered every fibre of your being in ways that you’re only just starting to understand. Another year away from seeing, hearing, touching, hugging, laughing with, arguing with that person. Another year that they didn’t get to feel all the emotions that every human being is entitled to feel.
And here we are. We’re essentially a global wreck. Loss, hurt, rage, hopelessness. They’re emotions that we’ve probably all felt at some point or another. Locked in our own bubbles away from many of the things that, ordinarily, we’d do to shake ourselves out of negativity. But I haven’t been able to help wonder whether other people that have already been shaped by sudden loss feel similarly to how I feel. I can’t help but wonder if the people that have been there before, are experiencing it ever so slightly differently. But that could also be me being an attention seeker…
On hearing that mothers can’t hold the hands of children, children can’t hold the hands of parents, husbands and wives unable to hold hands with their soul mates as they draw their last breathes and step into the unknown. It’s a tough and regular story at the moment. And unless you’re a sociopath (which apparently 1 in 100 of us actually are), it’s going to tug on your heart strings in a distant sort of way. A way in which you acknowledge that it’s awful, but you don’t completely feel that pain – because how could you? Unless you’ve felt it first-hand, how could you know for sure what those people are going through?
I feel a genuine and real connection to anyone I meet, or speak to, or hear the story of, that has lost someone suddenly and in an ICU. On a Radio 4 interview the other day an ICU Consultant said that he thought he had cried all of the tears he’d ever cry for his patients and their families, until this pandemic. And I swear upon reading it my heart actually exploded 5% and I bled. Part of me bled emotion. Thinking back to those days in that hospital. Thinking about the man my dad was and hoping that he was one of the people this consultant might have cried for. Hoping he was worthy of this strangers’ tears, because to me he’s worth the tears of every human being on the planet.
I imagine anyone that has ever grieved so hard they got terrible irritable bowel understands what I mean right now. Every time you hear of someone else that has had to experience that pain. The pain of watching your loved one struggle their last breaths as a ventilator is turned off. Anyone that’s had to watch the colour drain from their favourite persons skin as they held their hand. Anyone that’s stood in a hospital corridor after you’ve left the side of someone that you just had no idea was going to die that day. I’ve felt that pain. And that’s how I know that not being able to do those things as they died must absolutely crush a person.
I imagine it to be like the Aura’s from Donnie Darko. I have a little stream of light stretching out from the very centre of my chest cavity, seeking out other little chest worms of light from people that are also struggling their way through the darkness of grief. I really just want to smile at them. I want to let those emerging fresh into the slightly different tint the world has post loss know – all the bullshit everyone says about how it gets better. Well, it turns out it’s not actually bullshit. It does actually get better.
A lot of people I know are experiencing things right now. They’re struggling to sleep. Their dreams are more vivid than ever before. Their concentration is all over the place. Fear of the future is rife. We’re all crying sometimes without an obvious reason. We’re all essentially just looking to stay alive in the best ways we can. Taking pleasure from the small things in life. And that my friends, is grief. I do genuinely believe we’re all grieving a little. We’re grieving for the lives we’ve temporarily lost, the people we’ve permanently lost, the friends we miss, the stability we want back again. We’re grieving at the realisation that the way we were living our lives just wasn’t OK. Maybe some of us have only just realised the level of inequality that exists in this country, and we’re grieving the safety of our naivety.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, other than that I miss my dad, and some rambling message in there about how we’re all in a global state of grief. At some point or another, we’ll all lose someone that we’ll miss terribly. And when that day comes I’m here for you. If you’re feeling grief at the state of the world, I’m here for you. On the day that you recognise what you’re feeling is grief, and it feels all consuming, remember reading this. My little light worm will be there to hold your light worms hand, where ever and whoever you may be.
Sky High Diaries 