This is a slightly more personal blog entry than normal. It’s all been a bit quiet on here for a while, since I’ve been on holiday (Dubai – bit crap, will explain why in another blog). Also, I came back to find a family crisis. I’m an only child so our family is small and we just don’t have crises. It’s not our way. Well, it wasn’t until now. I found out that the day after I went away for a week, my father walked out of the family home, leaving my mother alone. This really did come out of the blue. They’ve been together for 37 years as happily as any couple I’ve ever known. Unlike many people I know, I was lucky to have a childhood in a home with a huge amount of love and stability. A stability that it’s hard to believe could ever be undermined. Sure, in the last few years they’ve not seemed to laugh quite so much as they used to, but I thought that was just work stress and getting older generally. It’s an unwelcome surprise.
Neither of them told me anything was wrong and yet (forgive me for mumbo jumbo potential here), I somehow knew that there was something very wrong somewhere when I was in Dubai. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t settle and enjoy myself I think. I rebooked my flight and came back four days early.
I have a theory that the generally accepted stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) are actually the fives stages of dealing with shock. People who have lost loved ones after long battles with cancer don’t seem to go through these stages in quite the same way that people deal with shock of loss from a car accident or heart attack. I go through these stages in immense speed when I see signs like “Pizza’s £2”.
Well, true to form, this is how I felt when I found out at work on Monday. My own stages of dealing with trauma appear to be slightly modified: Practical plan-making, Bargaining, Anger, Depression, Acceptance. At first it was all very matter-of-fact and about what practical steps I could take to try to reduce the stress load for both of them. Then I felt a bit shaken and by the time I’d gone out for a couple of drinks with my pal Vince, I’d got to the stage of randomly crying mid-sentence. I’m over that now I think, but it was a curious feeling. It hurts so much to think of them both being lonely with nothing I can do about it. It is a weird fact that my mother had never once in her near 60 years slept alone in a house until a couple of years ago when Dad was away for some reason overnight. That’s what comes from being from a huge family and marrying very young. Imagine how painful that loneliness must feel. Forgive me if I stop imagining it, as I may very well start to cry again in this public place.
As an only child of parents who have always seemed to be very in love and thus deeply co-dependent, I’ve always had as my deepest dread the day that one of them dies, leaving the other alone. Somehow, it seems that they are both experiencing this at the same time. Except, as my mother said, if you’re bereaved you don’t feel the same sense of having been voluntarily snubbed.
If you have kids, don’t have just one. There will come times in that kid’s life when they will ache for the experience of having a brother or sister, even one they’re not especially close to. They will need the strange reassurance of knowing the somebody else understands the full picture precisely.
Neither has a side love interest, but they’ve decided that they need to part, at least for six months. I don’t think that they’ll get back together, which might well be the best thing. I can’t believe I’m thinking this way.
Meanwhile many of my greatest fears spring to mind. I am sure that my father is self-medicating with whisky. I’ve seen several friends lose parents and close family to the addictive effects of a whisky bottle (it always seems to be whisky). There’s nothing I can do about that, so I just have to put it to some dark corner of my mind and try to forget about it.
At 37 years of age, the reaction to this is different to age seven of course. It doesn’t affect my own domestic life, the trauma on a personal level is much less. Against that though, middle aged maturity makes me more sensitive to the pain that each is feeling, I suspect. The sense of grief is more vicarious grief, rather than personal grief. Yet many of the same well-known thoughts have somewhat ludicrously pestered me: did I cause this somehow by something I did? Is there something I can do to keep them together? It’s ludicrous to have these thoughts deny one access to restful sleep, but it happens.
I keep having “September 12th” thoughts. That’s how I describe trying to deal with acceptance that something has happened that seems impossible and must have been a dream. I first had that feeling on 12 September 2001. It’s become a daily reality recently.
Yet in crises like this, one can’t help but notice the enduring strength of the human spirit. Although both are immensely sad, both my parents are getting by and I can see that they’re both taking comfort in the knowledge that things will get better. Mum is coping better than Dad, which doesn’t surprise me. My extended family were a great comfort to them both while I was away, which in turn is a vast comfort to me. I have called a couple to thank them for their support and concern. I’m suddenly forced to unexpectedly face one of my greatest dreads and I’m also getting by. Add to this the confusion of the fact that everybody else in the story is a week ahead of me in terms of reaction. That’s a very confusing feeling. But the simple fact is that life goes on and somewhere above the Manchester drizzle, I’m confident that the sun is still shining. I’ve been lucky that I’ve never felt the effects of the death of somebody close to me, but for the first time I can really understand how people get through the crisis.
