Up Early - For Dad

Seven days ago, sat in a coffee shop, much like the one I’m currently sitting in, I read Nick Laird’s new poem in Granta. Up Late is a brutal and beautiful howl of a poem in which the poet writes about the recent death of his father. I read, as I read most things, through a self-centric lens, tearing up at the loss Laird described, but primarily drawn to the parallels between his experience and my own. Laird’s father passed away earlier this year in the ICU department of Antrim Hospital. My father also spent several weeks in Antrim ICU this spring. I wondered if our fathers were present at the same time; if the same doctors and nurses had cared for them, relaying messages down the phone when Covid kept us from visiting in person.

Last week I fixated on the line, “I have been writing elegies for you all my life, Father, in one form or another.” Last week, elegies were very much at the forefront of my mind. My publisher was about to reveal the cover for my third novel, The Raptures. The Raptures is the novel I’ve needed to write and tried to write and repeatedly failed to write for almost twenty years. It’s an elegy to the community I grew up in; a community I am no longer part of. Part accolade, part earnest critique, this book was both the hardest and easiest thing I’ve ever written. My father looms large throughout its pages and last week, as it began the inevitable process of becoming a real thing, loosed upon the world, I wanted his blessing.

My father had spent much of the past spring seriously ill in hospital. This brush with mortality left his brain a little hazy round the edges. He was also much more emotional than before. He was quick to talk about the things which really mattered: how much he loved his family, how proud he was of all of us. On one occasion he told me I should stop worrying about what other people thought and get on with writing what I needed to write. He’d never said anything like this to me before. “Just write the books you have to write Janny,” he said, “that’s the most important thing,” and I could hear the gravity behind his words. This was a passing on of trust. A validation. A blessing of sorts. My father has not always understood what drives me to write or what draws me to the themes I write about, but I am confident that he recognised who his odd and stubborn, artsy daughter was and did not want me to be anything but the fullest version of this person.

I am struggling here with tense, dipping into the present when I should be in the past, because that phone call last Sunday -an innocuous exchange about the weather and a forthcoming holiday, the Lions tour of South Africa and the imminent arrival of The Raptures- was the last time I ever spoke to Dad. He passed away suddenly on Wednesday morning. After so many long, brave months of illness and recovery, it was a heart attack which took him in the end. We were able to sit with my father in the ICU of the Causeway Hospital, holding his hand as he slept peacefully away. Later, I know I will be incredibly grateful for this. It will make his death a little more real. At the time nothing felt real. We went into the hospital with a dad and left with a carrier bag of his effects: watch, wallet, wedding ring, shoes and the jacket I bought him for Christmas two years ago. It had been cut off by the paramedics, so there was nothing to do but throw it out. I wondered why they’d returned it to us; why they couldn’t have dealt with this one small obsoletion when we’d have so very many to face up to. As we left the hospital at dawn, I noticed a tiny robin sitting on the kerb beside my car. It nodded at me twice and flew off. It felt like the closing scene of a sentimental movie and at the same time unbelievably profound. My father’s name was/is/continues to be Robin. I am not the sort of person who routinely believes in signs like this. Perhaps I will be now.

Almost a week later the absence of Dad still doesn’t feel real. I have accidentally laid a place for him at the table and twice said ‘Mum and Dad’ when there is only Mum now and several times imagined myself recounting slightly mad things people said at the wake, safe in the knowledge he’d see the funny side. I have yet to cry properly. I’m not sure what proper crying is. Grief does not feel like the solid weight I’m told I should be feeling. It is just a fractured way of thinking and a bone heavy exhaustion which I can’t seem to sleep away. I don’t feel real myself right now. Running a Covid-safe Irish wake stripped the reality out of me. Amidst the rush of sympathetic visitors and endless tea pots I became a robot version of myself: functioning without feeling, rattling around inside the shell of myself. I did what I had to, after which there was nothing left to give to grief.

I’m so thankful for the support of an extended community but the shock of my father’s death reverberated so widely I’ve spent much of the last week setting my own grief aside to comfort others. Dad was loved by a lot of people, many of whom were moved to genuine, raw expressions of grief. Others came bearing platitudes: sympathy card sentiments and answers we weren’t yet ready to hear. Though I have come to understand that these worn-out words are no less sincere. They’re often the protective shields people reach for when they do not know how to approach the enormity of their own sadness. In The Crying Book, the American poet, Heather Christle writes, “maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around.” When someone we care about dies it is impossible to dictate the shape or pace of grief. In the immediate after words could only approximate the way people were feeling about the loss of my father and so we kept say things which already felt over said, and we made food and told stories about this precious person we’d lost. We busied ourselves with the trappings of grief, though, as Christle says, it felt like we were not quite centred in our grieving. We still aren’t. We are mourning around or near the loss, not yet capable of voicing the true enormity of it.

I have not yet cried about Dad but I have cried over Nick Laird’s poem and an episode of Inspector Morse which I watched on the evening after the funeral and -in deep frustration- at the parking ticket machine in the Fairhill shopping centre which would only take coins when all I had was a debit card. Of course, I know all these tears were really for Dad, but they haven’t quite landed yet.

I re-read Up Late this morning. In the space of a week the poem has taken on a new depth. It is heavier that it was seven days ago. I cried hard this morning reading Laird’s words. I could actually feel them and also felt a certain degree of jealousy that the poet had a few months of perspective on me. His grief is still an open wound but in shaping his loss into sentences and stanzas it is beginning to take a form. It is, if not manageable or even understandable, at least ready to be further explored. As Laird writes, “the eye adjusts to darkness, even to the presence of what overwhelms us.” I am not yet in the adjusting stage. My eyes aren’t ready for it. They’re far too tired. The overwhelming’s yet to come and, beyond this, dear only knows what is waiting for me. I’m writing about Dad this morning because writing is the only way I know of pinning my sadness down. I feel the need to list and catalogue. If the details are there, I will at least be able to see what’s been lost.

In Time Lived, Without Its Flow, her meditation on the death of a child, the poet Denise Riley writes, “what a finely vigorous thing a life is; all its delicate complexity abruptly vanished.” GK Chesterton, in The Great Minimum, (which -take note friends and family- I wish to have read at my own funeral), takes this sentiment to its logical, glorious conclusion when he writes,

“Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.”

Dad was something and he has now been. Though, right now it feels like all the delicate complexity which was my father has abruptly vanished, I know that he leaves behind an enormous legacy of blessings, memories and wisdom which I will be untangling for the rest of my life. This morning, I’m not exactly sure what I’ve lost. But I am beginning a list. The way Dad taught me how to consider others in everything I do. The way he modelled steadfast perseverance; that first to arrive, last to leave mentality I can’t seem to shake off. His intellect, which kept him curious and keen to learn and eager to see us learning to. His desire to bring people together. His love of travel. His unswerving devotion to ITV3 crime dramas. That furious Carson scowl. I take after my father in so many ways. It’s hard to identify the absent parts when so much of Dad is muddled up in me.

I’m writing about my father this morning because I’m not sure what else to do with the last seven days: the sudden there and not there of him. I understand that in wording my loss -in shaping it into understandable sentences- I am holding it at a distance. I am, in a sense, making it safer, more manageable. At some stage, my grief will be neither safe nor manageable. It will most likely catch me unawares when the rest of the world is trundling on and I am doing ok, possibly even flourishing. I’m not going to sit around courting sadness. I will get on with being until it catches up with me. This morning, the stanza of Up Late which hit me hardest was the blunt reality of,

“My dad is dead. Bad luck.
The light breaks and the night breaks and the line
breaks and the day is late assembling. Rows
of terraced houses are clicking into place. Clouds
decelerate and make like everything is normal.”

My dad is dead. Everything is normal. My little house is as I left it a week ago, the unwashed dishes still sitting beside the sink. The usual stack of bills and book proofs have dropped through the letter box in my absence. The same people I see most mornings are sitting in this coffee shop, watching me write as I usually write, at the table by the window. I look the same as I looked last week, perhaps a little more tired around the eyes. Everything is normal. Everything is far from normal. I am suspended in the space between. I don’t know what to make of any of this yet.