Trigger warnings: Frank discussion of death, details of processing death and a narrative of personal grieving.
This blog post is mainly for myself, but figured I might as well share it with you. I've put together a little collage of words, cut up and pasted back together as best I can make sense of them to process at least some of my recent bereavement which, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, became a step into the unknown. A humble and embarrassed nod in the direction of Kurt Vonnegut, whose Timequake novel this is influenced by.
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Grief is an exploding clock. It no longer puts one tick in front of the next tock. From a single pinhole camera, suddenly the whole of time is seen. Tangible: elastic and tubular and coming in and out at bamboozling angels. It reverses and then forces forward at huge velocity. It grows thin as drought only to spurt and gush again. It connects one moment to another through collisions causing flashbangs. It threads through a million parallel universes between the great expanses of "what ifs" and "what weres".
Grief makes a reluctant time traveller of us.
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On the wall are money spiders erratically scurrying over the brick. I've not seen money spiders for years.
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This is my aim: I'm going to try my best to describe the abstraction of my grief during a stage in human history when time - that oft used compress on bereavement - stopped being reliable.
It's an impossibility, I know.
It's like asking you to taste what I tasted in a dream I had last night.
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Grief is all the pain you're feeling. It's the thousand yards in a stare. It's a writhing on an otherwise mundane day. It’s the soundtrack of a mix tape made by your teenage angst self. It’s really happening.
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Grief is the sense of loss that just keeps being lost further.
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No one wants to see you grieving, the same as one wants to listen to you talk about your dream. It's because no one can put themselves in the place of either. No one is going to read 4000 words about your grief. That's just the reality.
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Grief is the coping mechanism. Embrace it like a lover on the central station of a bridge.
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I was there with my father after his mother died. Her light body hardly making an impression on the hospital mattress, her skin thin as petals. My abiding memory is how gently my father ran his fingers through her white hair. I was there in the chapel of rest with my father when my mother's mother died. Her cheekbones given a powdering of rouge. My father, again, placed a hand on her head. I was there at the funeral home with my father and my mother in her coffin. I remember her arm's broken skin unhealed. For the third occasion, I saw my father's hand lovingly caressing hair. Now I see my own hand soothing my father's cold, wisp hair. I do it because I think he was showing me what he wanted all along.
He’s the first person I’ve touched outside my household for 3 weeks and will be for another 9.
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There is absolute stillness in the room, except for a clock's second hand and my pulsing, beating, rhythms.
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I'm outside. I'm crying out. Doubled up, wide eyed at my shoes, in ancestral howls. The pain of being someone's child ripped out of me.
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My grandfathers died before I was born. My mother walked round a winter morning corner and found her father dead in the driver's seat. I don't know where my other grandfather died. My father would often say he wished he knew more about his father's youth. Time just went on using up the chances between them. I'm named after one of my grandfathers.
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I'm running to help my father. I know it's a performative dance lit by the late spring evening.
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Impotently thrashing my feelings outside, alone, I recall how my mother said finding her father in the car had changed her. I wish, wide eyed at my shoes, Superman would hear my voice and turn the Planet backwards.
That's it. No more times.
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It's Easter Sunday, 2020. I don't know if you remember what the wildest throes of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK were like?
People were terrified of becoming ill. The daily deaths cresting on the wave that weekend. Stay At Home. Protect The NHS. Save Lives. The country in effective shutdown. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. One hour of outdoor sanctioned exercise per day.
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If you die during April 2020 everyone will want to know if it was the virus.
"Not of the virus" on tombstones dated April 2020.
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I'm looking through my father's wardrobe, the sun washing sadness off my face. I find a newspaper he decided to keep dated 9 April 2020 and the letter we all got from the Prime Minister "levelling" that this month is going to be tough.
Suits he wore to church. His shirts all matched with ties on hangers. He always kept shoes polished. Vowing myself to secrecy with myself, what he will be buried in. There's a lot of things I'm keeping secrets with myself. My mind is running with decisions that, given it's only been 18 hours, might seem crass if I even spoke to myself out loud.
My grief is running on experience and learning as it goes.
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A funeral in April 2020 is something no one has any point of reference for. The unreal magical of resetting an entire human way of life over a month is bewildering.
Restricted number of mourners is the main thing everyone knows about.
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Funeral processions are mapped out for people to pay respects, blankly observe or sob tears on the pavement or hold dogs in the streets as the hearse goes by like some sort of fever imagery from the steaming reed riverbanks of 'Nam. It's steampunk.
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My employer has placed me on the Furlough . A word seemingly beamed down from the future - it simply didn't exist until everyone had heard it simultaneously. I explain what it means to my father through the window out in the warm air.
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I'm looking at my father through the window out in the chill air. There is absolute stillness in the room, except for a clock's second hand.
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The paramedic assures me behind his mask, "Could be much worse". "You don't want to be in a hospital these days". He shares my grandfather's name. He assures me my father died "without knowing anything about it". "He would have had no warning at all" he adds as an assurance. "The way we all want to go", he continues to assure me.
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I'm outside. My father is smiling, walking towards me. I'm waving, smiling, telling him to keep his distance because I need to keep him safe. I might be infected. Please, just for a week or so. Maybe take the backstreets. Good idea. I don't have it in me to arrange a Zoom funeral.
Zoom funerals. No one blinks at the term. They'd sound so futuristic to a boy back in the year 2000.
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The paramedic satisfied himself the house is clean of symptoms of the virus before walks through the door. He makes an effort to keep space between me and him and we sort of barn dance.
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Furlough has been saviour in the circumstance. The lockdown has acted as a much appreciated shield. It's been easier to hide away.
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I no longer bother winding my watch now I'm on furlough. The walls of a week have fallen to the sound of trumpets of Revelations. Only dates matter, there is no point in naming the days. The potential is the same.
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Don't fetishize the date. Don't turn a day into anything other than any other day. The potential is the same.
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I've still not eaten my Easter egg and it's June.
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The driver of the private ambulance phones. They have a few pick-ups on the way before they get here. They've never been as busy. More like a taxi service and it's just turned closing time, don't you know. They arrive 3 hours later.
They explain anything on my father's body will be incinerated at the morgue as part of new pandemic procedures. They can remove anything now from the body and leave it behind.
I ask them to leave his watch on the sideboard.
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The minister is in the house. I ask him to bless my father before the private ambulance arrives and leaves the house. We should have enough time.
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I point to the thermometer. My father checked his temperature every morning. I don't know if you remember, but a fever was something to note back then. He told me it always showed green. I point to the woollen gloves on the chair. He always washed his hands in any case. The scarf behind the door. He used that as a face covering. He was very sensible. He read a lot about the precautions and we spoke about it. I tried to keep him safe.
He left that thermometer out for me in the garden yesterday for my approval. He was so keen to tell me how well he felt; how safe he'd been all week. I knew he was hinting he wanted my blessing for leaving the house. I just gave a throwaway remark to dismiss it.
The paramedic says I've answered his question and walks into the room.
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"What do you mean, 'something special'?"
"I'm not going to tell you, but it's something I need to go do. Look at the thermometer. Isn't it a good one?"
"Yeah."
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That thermometer laid to rest by his watch on the sideboard.
That stupid, little, flimsy thermometer gives me a feeling when I see it, I can't tell you, my god. It takes me back to a conversation I had with my father. But I can't bear to move it from what would have been in his reach, if he'd still be sat on the chair.
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Grief, frail as burnt paper, crumbles into dried flakes and, falling, blinds my eyes and chokes my voice as it buries me.
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Some people have lived and died and Notre Dame Cathedral has always been there. I think about this a lot more than I should. My father-in-law lived a life with that fact. I was there holding his hand when he died in the hospice and Notre Dame Cathedral was in the world too.
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Every time I open the door of the house to check for letters the more I see it again as my family home. It is less my father's home and less further, my parent's. I have to see it that way - to will it to rewrite over my mind’s eye’s scene rein-acted by the characters of me, my father and the paramedic with my grandfather’s name, while I take the role of the audience as the theatre run unfolds night after night. Bravo! Throw the bouquets!
My dog comes in with me and sometimes picks up a scent. I'll watch him chase a memory across the floor and out of existence. His confused body language makes me very sad.
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Grief is a vibration so delicate, like a shiver when a ghost walks in a garden. It can quickly turn to a tremble. A tremble can shake down all the cathedrals in the world.
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Utility companies, banks and insurances are easy to deal with during a pandemic. Bereavement units with direct dial numbers into team member's kitchens, complaining of slow home wi-fi. No need for death certificates. I believe you. Everyone is dying these days. No questions asked. Apart from one.
"Was it coronavirus?" the lady on the phone asks straight away, "Sorry, I shouldn't really ask". Death is not a personal question if it's a graph on the daily news.
I only have to listen once to hold music. It sounds like a Walkman with a distressed tape of the latest Taylor Swift held to the receiver. It's warbling and tinny. It makes me smile to think the girl is cheering herself up with happy songs.
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After my mother died, father and I talked. My father showed me where the files were to administer his affairs and when his work was done, I told him I didn't know him as well as I wanted.
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Today I've not seen my father walk up the street or down it with his newspaper. I'm uneasy although rationalise he's taking the backstreets to avoid contagious people. I'll ask him if he wants me to get his newspaper when I collect his shopping list later.
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Remember: what is said in grief can come across as hurtful. Let it go.
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They say that I will know the real person behind his smile, his tip of the hat and "howdy-do-de!".
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They say my father missed going out when the pandemic hit bad. He was so very active, they say. Amazing energy. So happy. They say stopping his active life is what they, personally, believe killed him.
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A neighbour says: "Will they not just burn it?"
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The funeral home was not doing their Silver of Gold standard funeral package in the early summer of 2020. It's the supply and demand economic model by which we are dictated in this modern age. In other words, it's the "Medieval Plague" funeral package or take a hike.
Cremations with Covid-19 on the death certificate.
Burials with cemetery plot deeds only.
No embalming.
Bodies wrapped in a shroud and no personal items.
No votive offerings for the ferryboatman allowed.
Flowers are scarce but not as scarce as coffins.
If choosing wedding guests is difficult, selecting 6 mourners is a particular cruelty. With so few mourners and no service to mumble the old rugged cross at, I choose a memorial card - the size of an old cigarette player's card - to hand out with a poem printed on the back my father had copied out in long hand and left between a couple of banking files.
I've developed a good relationship with the funeral director. She lets me add one thing into the coffin. It's my father's retirement tie.
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I won't miss my chance to be return my neighbour's regards when the opportunity arises. Everyone loses someone, but only some are considered witches.
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The period towards the funeral is oddly barren of activities. Nothing to do but check in on if the coffin has arrived.
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The morning of the funeral was mercifully bright. The coffin arrived in the nick of time.
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We are distanced at the graveside and I'm never more apart from my father while he's reunited with my mother.
The minister reads a comforting internment verse from his iPad. What year is this?
The funeral director explains I cannot hold the tension of a rope when the coffin is lowered. He promises to give me the rope, limp, after. He does and I run my fingers through its braid.
A gravedigger I vaguely recognise walks up to me.
"Hey!" he says, "How are you?"
I've had better days.
"Great weather though!" He says with a gesture of a man enjoying a carefree day.
"It's ironic because of, you know?" He covers his mouth and nose with a dirty palm.
I guess.
"Well, better get to it! See you around!" He tests the ground.
OK, I'll leave you to it then, to bury my father with that spade you've got there.
The birds are singing in far off trees.
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My mother had a palpable fear of being buried alive. I was sworn by her to make sure she was dead when the moment came, by whatever death's hand chose to deal her. I promised I would look for a sign.
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My mother was the card dealer in her death.
When her mother died I heard my mother's primal yell, but I couldn't understand. Perhaps no longer being a child was too painful.
The hospital fed her with a tube in her arm.
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The doctor phones. There's a backlog on autopsies. They are basically stacking them up. No expected cause of death means there is no need to find one if I'm happy not knowing. Let's just agree it was an life changing event. No fancy Latin term to get the tongue round. Tempus Fugit.
The Registry phones. There's delays on printing death certificates. The department is relying on wi-fi. I phonetically spell out names and double check on dates from the documents. Mother's occupation. Father's, father's. Place of birth registration. And the cause of death - that one is easy: Time. It's all very important for those amateur genealogists.
The lawyer phones. There's no processing in the court system right now. The law firm office is locked shut. I scan, photograph and mail documents in electronic bundles at their request. I am asked if I can videocall - how very sci-fi 1990's retro.
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Here's some straightforward advice: Start a Filofax planner. You can take it with you, sit with it somewhere comfortable, pass it to someone.
Make daily to-do lists in it and use the monthly planner. If you get a contact number, write it beside the other contact numbers. Add a note if need be: why you need the number. Write down what you need to talk to someone about then, when you do: who you talked to, when you talked to them and what the outcome was. If there is any action to follow up, then write it down with a date and add it to the planner.
Write down thoughts and ideas about the funeral service, about plans you have, advice given.
Separate out actions into their own folders and put post-it notes on letters.
And only do things when you have the energy for them. If that's just one thing, fine - you want to do three things in a day - fine. Stay up when you're not tired, lie in bed when you are tired. reward yourself often. It’s okay if you’re at capacity and cannot fully engage with others. Greif is your time to look after yourself and keep your levels up during a bereavement.
Talk to people who support you. Sometimes talking about anything at all is too hard, so write. Communication comes and goes but let people help you and ask for help especially at points when you feel you can't.
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People are phoning me who I don't know. They are saying they are visiting the graveside. They tell me they are grieving for my father too. They want me to know they will visit regularly to keep it tidy and place things in his memory. I say I'm grateful.
I'm not grateful. Another's dedication always makes me vomit out my own.
My mother is there too. This is where I have grieved for her for ten years, placed my flowers and prayers. Where my father tended the grave with love every Monday.
My father knew I'd tend the grave for them both. The idea that the place would not be just for me to visit hadn't crossed my mind.
Well, if they want it, they are welcome to it, I crabbily mutter under my breath.
I know, eventually things settle and I'll be on my knees in with winter roses.
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Here is the truth: Friends do whatever they are able to. The physical closeness and intimacy of just being with them is missing but they give me all they can and ask nothing in return. They are treasure at the bottom of the dark, crushing sea.
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I'm constantly verbally fencing. A parry of tone there, a riposte here. My words are flashing, trying to keep light on my toes and not be pierced in the heart.
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Time and death part ways with a science equation. Information the dead hold about the world will turn sepia and wilt by tomorrow's change of the season.
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Because the roadworks are left by the wayside, because shops remain boarded up, the small talk to pass the time is still strangely relevant as the weeks roll by. But I can sense the drift now.
Eventually my father's small talk and news change matter and dissipate, and my changes be less known to him. I'll be left with his bleached-boned words and he will be left with how I always seemed to him.
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I find the list three quarters written in the kitchen. Pen still across the paper. My father ate an orange every day and, naturally, they were top of the list and circled. As if I'd forget. I was doing his shopping as part of the self-isolation we are all practicing. I throw it in the bin to not turn it into nostalgia.
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Going through my father's paperwork today. Estate letters and records, just as he said where they would be, along with a contents page he's written so I don't miss anything. I keep finding, interfiled, handwritten notes on scrap paper. Poems exulting life and positive sayings and affirming religious scripture. And photos. Happy faces, loving fun and enjoying activities from last year, from a generation ago, again, interfiled with documents and note books.
I can't separate my father from what I am doing. He reminds me with each opening of a file, offering words of support. It's wonderful. I can't disassociate any routine, administrative task from the presence of my father. It's exhausting.
There's a box which holds every birth, marriage and death certificate of the family. Newspaper clippings of obituaries. Funeral service booklets. A card wishing my father a happy birthday from his mother. Education certificates and letters of successful job applications. A postcard. A half-begun family history he's started. Deeds to two cemetery burial plots, elaborately designed that only legal documents from 100 years ago can be. A foolscap page on which my father has written his early biography with a black pen.
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I write best when I uncouple the cogs and springs and just burn the oil instead. I need to believe I'm composing a fugue masterpiece under great toil as an attempt to take the shape of a soul. I can't let the impetus be lost. I have to keep feeling this way.
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I open the top bedside drawer and find an envelope addressed to me with an instruction to be only opened after my father's death. It's a letter dated a few years back. He couldn't have known I'd be reading during a pandemic.
"It's hard now but I'm telling you with everything I have here: I lived a contented life and was grateful for it" written in peacock blue from a series of late nights in his bed.
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His work is done.
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I read on some social media meme you can't spell emotion without motion. Emotions move on.
How can you tell something is moving when there is nothing marking it's passage?
My grief in this sickened world is a ship without a sail on a tide-less ocean without ever seeing land mass, the stars at night spinning, not orbiting. One long day of dark and light.
If somebody told me it's only been two days and another that it's been two centuries, I wouldn't know who to believe.
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I'm OK with drinking more than I usually do. People tell me to make sure I enjoy a glass of wine at the end of the day. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone! But I'm acutely aware a side of my family had addictions to alcohol as I pour each glass.
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I needed to tell people of the death. Usually a priority before a funeral date. During the late spring of 2020 it became drawn out. No one can come to the funeral so what's the rush? It was a labour. Everyone was at home, no one was able to walk in and tell the news to a community. I was relying on my father's old contacts notebook.
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Here's some good advice: keep a clear set of contacts - numbers and addresses and even what these people mean to you.
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Weeks later I discover a box within a box of tinsel. In it is a Christmas card list. It's like if the Rosetta Stone was also Holy Grail shaped. I write letters and enclose a memorial card.
In 3 to 4 days I receive phone calls from shocked voices. Suddenly I'm back on the day of my father's death. I see it all before me. Softened details sharpening up on the whet stone from each telephone ring.
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The strain wares me out. The house plants I'm watering are dying one by one.
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One uncle I had was an alcoholic. There was one occasion I talked him out of committing suicide. "You're a good man" he said on the phone "I won't kill myself today, ciao!" which was surprisingly continental of him.
Years later I heard he had died. I don't know how he was found or if anyone placed hands on his head. He was given a pauper's funeral, so I'm told.
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The minister immediately spoke about a service for my father, when such gatherings are permissible in the great beyond: the future when things are back to normal. The delay until we can all meet under a church roof will be a good thing: people, me, we will be in a better frame of mind for a life's celebration.
I'm not so sure. It feels the need for it is changing into an anxious shadow. Like it is looming at the third stoke of midnight. What will people expect from it, from me and how I present myself so far after the funeral?
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People want to attend a traditional funeral. Those established cues are vital to allow everyone to establish their expectations about how they are going to approach parts of the day.
Tell people at the start of a funeral that there's a role-playing aspect and see how comfortable they sit.
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I realise I am perched on the final branch. The culmination of my parent's growing this family tree. It's a strange and profound feeling to be standing on the bow when the cradle has fallen. I think the tree would be rowan.
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How do people come up with someone's biography for a funeral? I don't know anything about my father's youth. I wish I'd asked. I think I'll write a poem for the eulogy. Play music from the White Lunar album. Shhh! Keep it secret.
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"I've spoken to many of you and you've told me what my father meant to you. You've made these little talks over and over again so much easier because it's been lovely to hear everyone saying the same things over and over again as a credit to the sunbeam he was to you all. I saw the same of him too.
So it's tricky to think of something you don't already know. But here's my try. My father's home was perfumed with poetry and decorated in photographs.
Poetry written, given, found and hard fought. Everything came accompanied with a poem or poetic saying left beside it, like domestic little gods people would offer prayers to in Ancient Rome, my father would assign these words of love, hope and compassion as well as spirit and peace from everything using fridge magnets to bookmarks to just leaving in drawers and on surfaces. He reminded himself about the lives he came into contact with through so many photographs of those still present or sadly gone. Photographs in pockets, wallets, binders, in frames on walls, on shelves, on tables.
My father was constantly surrounded with people he loved and lived with words he was inspired by and, thanks to you all having known him, he encouraged others to reach their potential and enjoy the miracle of being alive. And well, if you can do that, this is my definition of a life well lived.
As a little tribute to him, I've tried to write a poem I hope he will like [insert poem here]."
Or something like that as a start. It's a rough draft.
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I used the government department "tell us once" online system. Two weeks later I receive government forms, which I complete. Two weeks later I receive final confirmation of the changes I made. Two weeks later I receive refund cheques. Two weeks later I receive letters of instructions on how fill in the forms and where I might be entitled to refunds to the estate. Two weeks later I receive letters of condolence from government departments thanking me for informing them using the "tell us once" system and that the system will soon instruct me on what to do.
In the Spring of 2020 I do declare I've witnessed waterfalls bouncing of rapids back up the cliff face.
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I'm better at letting the tension go if an item on the to-do list is postponed. It's ok if it waits.
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I am unable, yet, to talk about the funeral of my godson. And that's OK.
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You have to let the guilt go. Who are you holding it for? It died with the person. It's how it is.
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The earliest memory I have is probably of the yellow bird, my father and me all lit under a late spring evening sky.
It was a clockwork, mechanical contraption. Yellow tin body. Multi-coloured rainbow cellophane wings. It made an awful racket when wound up and the wings would flap. I liked it when it was still.
I remember my father youthful and full of years to burn, at the park just behind the new estate built for the modern commuter. He wound the bird up and threw it, it's wings flapping maniacally and tin body clicking like a second hand.
I stood in rapture of wonder and terror: would my toy fly across the park, right over the fences of the houses and out of my life to nest some other place? Why would someone make such a toy? Something that flies away? Who would create something to leave you? Who would wind it then? I remember that feeling.
Of course it couldn't fly very well at all. The thin cellophane wings couldn't hold its body no matter how fast they flapped. It didn't go very far at all.
Nonetheless, I felt so much of a child's grief then. I didn't want it to leave. I didn't want my father to let it go.
My father let me run and pick it up from the spring-dew turf with my plump toddler limbs changing into those of a boy. He said that it was not a very effective flyer. It would never fly far. He let me carry it home and it never left the little shed with the oh-so modern lawn mower again.
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I run my fingers through my hair which has grown shaggy in the 14 weeks. Time has aged me but I look ready for my school class photograph.
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It's midsummer. Suddenly the nights are growing. The gears are beginning to move. The cultural restrictions are easing and accelerating.
I'm anxious my coping mechanisms in my Land That Time Forgot will be out of date against the rush of modernism. I'm coming out of it a different person than who entered. I'm irrevocably altered in this landscape I recognise.
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I had an old, old dream last night. It was a steamy, sticky night in my dream, and in my room. I picked some ice cubes. They were frozen water but had the consistency of Jolly Ranchers when I crunched them.
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