“There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.” - Ann Patchett
This summer, I’ve been learning about loss. Some days, I trick myself into believing that I’m getting used to it, and then I wake in the middle of the night, weeping away from sleep, because in this too-real dream, my father has died. And then my midnight mind clears, and I remember that it’s true. My father is dead.
It’s been two months, and now the icy shock is thawing. The manic busyness is starting to slow, my body is beginning to purge the trauma, and this deep anger - a feeling largely unfamiliar - is emerging. I’m physically unchanged and yet entirely anew. I suppose that’s part of death’s effect: the landscape of the living is forced through tectonic shifts.
On my second day back in the office, I was told that I should, “just move on.” I don’t know if it’s a cultural difference or an interpersonal one, but I cannot move on. I saw my father suffocate to death while intubated and in agony. I am grieving. I am mourning. I am in shock. It exists in the present participle. My dad, and his death, are not past.
And yet, in the vastness of the land now-after, life feels surreally unchanged. In Amsterdam, the world keeps moving, and my father is simply in England, at home and alive. There are no traces of him here. Here, there are no ghosts.
I find myself drifting through the supermarket, trying to remember what I came in to buy, trying to remember what the right ingredients are – trying, really, to remember what it was that my father taught me. I fear that this is an endeavour I will spend the rest of my life attempting to achieve. To follow the morals he instilled in me like a ouija board, reaching towards resurrection every time I read a certain book, or cook from scratch, or donate to charity.
There’s so much that will forever remain undone. I’m scared of tripping on the laces of the shoes I walk in, so many routes remaining perpetually with one set of footprints, rather than two. We had a list of films we were meant to watch together, and now I can’t see a clip from a Jean-Luc Godard film, or hear a reference to The Godfather, without wanting to turn my stomach inside out and the clock back with it.
I miss the sound of him - of the sounds that made him. The opening chords of Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love are like a fist to the gut. I can’t listen to Billy Joel without returning to that homesick seven year old, missing mom and dad while at my first ever sleepover. His records are back at home at my parents’ house, and I long for that tangible signal of him. But if I had his records here in Amsterdam, they would sit here like an urn, sure proof that he is gone - and I’m not ready to make that claim yet.
I’ve been avoiding much of my life since he died. I haven’t been writing, and I’ve been nervous about talking to people beyond my immediate circle, worried that the nighttime weeping will leak into day. There are no words and there are so many words with nowhere to go.
In the wake of death, I suppose, our job is to find new homes for the words that have become displaced. And to accept that, for some time or for longer, some words spoken will only hover, with no place to alight, the right ear now ever beyond our reach.
And yet, as my friend Barney Norris wrote, ‘one thing a death will do is make you reflect on how many kinds of love there are to be experienced in the world.’ I love many, I am greatly in love, and my capacity for love not only matches but exceeds that of grief.
In time, I hope, those lost words will alight on the earth like leaves kissing the autumn soil, my roots will find anchor, and my love for the world will be strengthened simultaneously because, and in spite of, my father’s departure from it.