“Dad I miss you, Dad I miss you ”
I found myself saying these words shortly after my father’s death in September 2007. Sitting on the sidewalk, the sun spun long-shadowed trees and I lost in a fog of grief. Consumed, drowning in waves of anguish I struggled to cope.
I had arrived at a crossroads in my life, the one we fear the most and I was totally dis-oriented. The death of our parents. The buffer between oneself and our own mortality had been swept away. The passing of our parents brings us closer to that void, that chasm, that darkness.
We seldom encounter death in our lifetime, a family relative, a favourite aunt, a long-lost friend, an accident victim . We skirt around the theme. We try to handle it ‘antiseptically’. We try to avoid the term.
Death.
It comes unannounced. Knocking. Ringing. Un-welcome. And grief follows as sure as day follows night.
Each of us deals with grief in our own private way. We keep it a secret. We contain it. Tears and expressions of sorrow are merely ripples on a turbulent sea. Beneath it lies a profound sorrow. Waves of anguish wash over us and we yearn to be found on some faraway, friendlier shore.
One September day in 2007 I made the journey I feared I would have to take and so shortly after my mother’s death. The words were the same
“ You’d better come now “
The motorway was gridlocked that Monday morning and so, missing the earlier flight from Luton, I had to wait a couple of hours. Alcohol helped deaden the pain.
And, as my father’s life gently ebbed away, with each passing hour, each minute, each second, till the time came to say good-bye. The last goodbye.
When you can no more turn around and take one last look. When you can no more stare and say a final “ I Love you”. When you can no more bend low and kiss the forehead three times in one last, parting physical act. One last touch. Father and son. Flesh on flesh. Tear in eye.
And for some reason I had brought with me my son’s GCSE Poetry book. Had someone said that in his final years Dad read a lot, The Bible and yes, someone said he loved poetry?
In the not private ward, five or six other beds were occupied with elderly patients in various phases of their impending death. Some silent, some stared, one babbled incoherently to an imaginary friend.
And so I read my father poetry on his death-bed. Keats, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling all the classics he loved. He was semi-conscious, hooked up to a saline drip and breathing with artificial help.
I read and I cried. I couldn’t get the words out. I choked. I stumbled. I stopped. I started again. My father‘s lips moved and I leant across the bed to hear his final word. “Gunga …”
I had come across a piece of poetry I had never read before as it stared up at me from the pages of my poetry book. Cristina Rossetti’s ‘Remember Me’
“
Remember me
when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When
you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet
turning stay….
Better
by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember
and be sad.”
I thought how could someone write something so beautiful. I turned to go, not wanting to stay, not wanting to go, and watched a swarm of bees busy about their nectar tea on that warm September eve.
They moved from blossom to blossom sipping of the nectar, save one who sought a different path. And words came. Not at once. Not flowing. Not constant. Not when. But stuttering and stumbling and staggering through this fog of grief. Stop. Start. Write. Wrong.
I walked out of the hospital
Sister by my side both silent
The raucous caw-caw of quarrelsome crows
Questioning each others roosts
And nesting for the night