Anyone who has lost someone they love deeply will know how the anniversary of their death imprints itself on the memory forever. You don’t get a say in this – that date is blighted from now on, or, to put it a nicer way, that date is for them from now on.
Thirty years ago today, my father died, or our father, I should say, because I shared him with my three siblings. He was never just mine – lots of people loved him – though in the wilder, all-consuming days of my adolescent grief I sometimes forgot that. I was eleven when he died of a heart attack. My sisters and brother were nine, seven and five; our mum was just forty, younger than I am now.
Three decades on, I still don’t really have the words for the magnitude of that loss or to express what losing one of the people you love most in the world as a child does to you, how it changes everything so profoundly that you can’t even imagine what the other life – the one with them in it – would have been like.
One of the best ways I’ve heard it put is from a grief counsellor who visited my mother-in-law not long after my father-in-law died. She drew a small circle with her finger on the table, ‘This is what people think your grief is.’ Then, drawing a second, much larger one around the first, she said, ‘This is what your grief is.’ And then around the second circle she drew a third, ‘This is how you will rebuild your life around your grief.’ It stays like a knot at the centre of you and there will be times when it is quieter, more subdued, and there are times – on anniversaries, on birthdays, at weddings, christenings or book launches – when it makes itself known.
Mostly, when I think about my father, I remember his warmth and energy – throwing us into the air or tickling us until we begged for mercy. (There was a legendary silly string battle one Christmas.) I think of him teasing us, pushing us, daring us – encouraging us to strive for more. I think of his love of horses – a passion I shared – his daredevil spirit, his excellent head for maths. He had special names for all of us. Mine was Nic J (short for Nicola Jane) – a name that got left behind, with my childhood, after he died.
At a school dinner-dance, he was the first on the dance floor and the first, too, to ask our headmistress to waltz (she refused and scurried away. I heard about it from my mother, but I was thankful not to have witnessed it – I can only imagine the embarrassment). One of life’s extroverts, he was never afraid to stand out. I remember practically hiding under the table when he complained, in terrible French, about the food on a family holiday. Another time, when my mother was on a rare night out, I was violently sick. I remember looking at him through my eight-year-old’s eyes, thinking, ‘He’s a bit out of his depth here.’ Nursing was my mum’s domain; his was horses, dogs, tomfoolery, wintry walks. I could tell my spag-bol vomit made him feel queasy, but he cleaned it up anyway. He wasn’t perfect is what I’m trying to say – he could be quick-tempered, embarrassing – he was a person after all, but he was our person and he was taken from us far too soon.
He missed so much. He never got to watch us become adults. He never got to meet his grandchildren. He never got to grow old with my mother. I know he would have given everything, anything, not to have missed these things.
One of the reasons I wanted to become a writer – perhaps the most important – was to honour him and to remember how his loss defined us. He found his ways onto the pages of my first novel, The Girl Before You – a book filled with yearning for a loved one to return – where I tried to capture a sense of his energy:
Was it inevitable, too, that our father – so alive and unstuffy, thrumming his fingers on the table, laughing loud, teaching us how to wink, and ride horses, and do equations – was it inevitable, from the beginning, that his heart would give in so early, that he would burn out so much sooner than everybody else? Lesser men, stuffier men, men who wore normal shoes and drove normal cars, who didn’t always push for something more. All the men in the world who would still be alive when the one we loved the most had gone.
My husband and I walked around South Ealing Cemetery recently and noticed how neglected many of the Victorian gravestones looked. We’re not religious, so we discussed how we live on as long as the people who remember us do. Our father will be with my siblings and me until we go – and hopefully passed on, in stories at least, to the next generation.
At his funeral on 8th March, thirty years ago, a family friend read the poem Death Is Nothing At All:
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.
But, as I get older, I think too of Pablo Neruda’s La Muerta:
Si tú no vives,
si tú, querida, amor mío,
si tú
te has muerto,
todas las hojas caerán en mi pecho,
lloverá sobre mi alma noche y día,
la nieve quemará mi corazón,
andaré con frío y fuego
y muerte y nieve,
mis pies querrán marchar hacia donde tú duermes, pero seguiré vivo.If you don't live,
if you, my dear, my love, if you
you're dead
all the leaves will fall on my chest,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I will walk with cold and fire
and death and snow,
My feet will want to go where you sleep, but I'll still be alive.
The ice and the fire, the isolation, despair, and even the raw aliveness of grief are all there; how we never want to forget; how we never want to let go: My feet will want to go where you sleep, but I will go on living.
That’s how it goes. The living carry the dead with them, inside of us – in circles of grief bigger than anyone can guess – but regardless we stay alive. We keep on living. We don’t have much of a choice.