It's been a while. Days & weeks. It feels like a very very long time since I wrote anything here.
Life has felt a little challenging this year, for all sorts of reasons....I was hanging in there, waiting for the summer holidays to begin, waiting to press the pause button & take a breath.
And then my Dad died.
One phone call & life changed. Everything feels different now.Things just feel....weird.
I lost all my words for about two hours after that call, I sat on the floor at home & there was nothing. Then I made some calls & started the process of dealing with everything.
I should say here that for many reasons, I hadn't had a close relationship with my Dad for a while. I was there for him about 4 years ago when he was very very ill & then he, for whatever reason, decided that he didn't want me, and several other people, in his life.
It was very complicated. But sometimes people make decisions & all you can do is accept those decisions & live your life accordingly. Some things are out of your control, hard though that may be to accept.
If I've learned anything from the craziness & the unhappiness in my family, it's that the only thing you can control & are responsible for is your own behaviour, you cannot make other people do anything that they don't want to do.
My parents had a very messy & terrible divorce a very long time ago. Our family was, & still is, divided....there was - and continues to be - a lot of sadness.
But it wasn't always that way.My Dad didn't live with us after I was 8 years old but he was present in our lives, in his own way.... in my 20s, we both worked in the City of London & I lived & worked with him for some time. There were good times, happy times.
I could write so much on this topic, in many ways it would probably be cathartic do so....and maybe I will some day soon.
Suffice to say that in the last month, many family issues have arisen, awful things have been said....funerals & death seem to bring out both extreme kindness & the absolute worst in people, almost as if things aren't said now, they never will be.I don't understand it. At all.
As my father's next of kin & the eldest child, it fell to me - and I stepped forward - to organize everything.I planned the funeral in the way I felt he would have wanted, wrote a eulogy to reflect the person I felt he was, sorted & cleared his home & did everything & anything else.I kept very busy. Travelling across London on the way home from his house, I cried in public on the train ....several times.
And now, just two weeks after the funeral, everything feels strange.
Thankfully it is the school holidays, so life can be quiet.I've been losing - and finding - myself in films & books, my eternal refuge....last Monday I watched 4 movies & didn't move all day long & in this past week, I've read 5 books.
I don't feel like the same person I was 6 weeks ago.I feel sad & a little alone.I don't always share this much on my blog, but this was too big not to share.
People who I hardly know - my Dad's neighbours & his ex-wife - have been enormously kind & helpful, that has been a lovely thing.
Death is very very final, that much I do know now....there are no more conversations to be had, no more thoughts about what might or might not happen. Everything Just Stops.
But when it happens, all the bad stuff & the sad stuff that shouldn't have been just seems to fade away, all of that drops out of your mind & it's the good bits that remain, suddenly your head seems full of them.
Maybe it's self-preservation or our way of protecting & comforting ourselves, but that's been my experience so far. It is a day by day thing though.
My Dad had a full life, burned the candle at both ends, he lived & loved, although in many ways his was a life of two halves.
I read something the other day that said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here)...."he wasn't always a great Dad but he was a good Dad when I needed him to be" & I completely understood that description.
A good friend who was a student with my Dad many years ago, sent me an email a couple of weeks ago in which he quoted a Hebrew proverb which has stayed in my mind & which seems like a very :good philosophy to adopt....
"Say not in grief he is no more but live in thankfulness that he was."
