1. Grief – It’s not linear
This February will mark the 8 year anniversary since my dad died. I still talk about him often, and think about him a lot, especially when the big things in life happen. Giving birth to my son was the most recent monumental life event for me, and even though it was a happy one, it was also tinged with an element of sadness. I’m a big believer in all the ‘signs’ of the universe and honestly if I told you half of the weird shit that has happened to me I don’t think you would believe me. Anyway, after my son was born, my mum, who was back in Ireland, was stopped in traffic behind a big truck with the name Matthew (my dad’s name) emblazoned on the side…. and then…. like some sort of acknowledgment from beyond the grave, Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’ started playing on the radio. This might not seem significant to you, but that song happened to be my dads funeral song. It sounds morbid but honestly the first year after my dad died I heard that song EVERYWHERE. Petrol stations, nights out, lift music, I even heard it at a hotel breakfast buffet once for crying out loud! She sent me a video and I cried like you wouldn’t believe. Understandably an emotional moment, but it can hit you when you least expect it too. Most recently for example, while watching the reboot of Sex and the City, ‘And just like that’ – Spoiler alert ! – I’m pretty sure everyone has seen or heard about the peleton-gate by now, but Big dying of a heart attack on screen set me off – big time.
2. You won’t forget
One of my biggest fears in the first few years after my dad died was that I would somehow forget how he looked, or how his voice sounded, or even moments or memories about him. Honestly though I still remember every detail like it was yesterday. There’s even a street in my hometown in Limerick where I used to often meet him for lunch and sometimes I could swear I see him walking down the street towards me. So much so, that sometimes I still have those fleeting moments where you forget for just a passing second that yes they are in fact no longer here, before reality bites you in the bum.
3. Humour is a healer
OK, so I know it’s just your brain’s way of coping with the situation and avoiding the true depth of emotion of the situation, but honestly, it OK to laugh, in fact it helps. Especially when it’s completely inappropriate. I remember having the pre funeral chat with the priest about which songs were to be played at the service. Bizarrely, a few months prior to this I had a conversation with my dad about what our funeral songs would be – he always had a dark sense of humour. He wanted his to be ‘Staying Alive’ by the Bee Gees – even more ironic given he died of a cardiac arrest. If you know you know. And don’t even get me started on the wake. My mum had placed rosary beads all the way from Jordan around his hands in the coffin. It was about midday when she had decided the coffin needed to be changed (of course Dad couldn’t be buried in the cheap one they sent him home from England in). So the funeral directors did the switch over to the ‘fancy’ coffin, and somewhere in the move, the rosary beads went missing. The image of my mother with her hands rooting around the sides of my dead, stiff, very cold, very dead dad, while simultaneously telling me to lift his rigid arm up, will never leave me. It was at that moment the funeral director remembered he had tucked them into the front pocket of dad’s suit. Oh how we laughed.
4. Perspective
I often wonder if my dad had not died where I would have ended up. It’s clichéd, but the realisation that life can be cut short and be taken away from you in a split second prompted me to make some major life changes. I finally walked away from an abusive relationship, I booked that solo adventure, I changed career and retrained as a nurse, I moved country, I made new friends and reconnected with old ones, I met my now fiancé, we travelled the world together, we got through a pandemic together, and now we have a baby together. That’s the short version, but my point to all this is that even though dad dying was, and often still is, a hard pill to swallow, life does go on. Yes it was sudden, it was scary, and it was tremendously sad not being able to say goodbye. But in a strange way, I think it saved me.
