The Process of Grief
“We are all connected in ways we cannot even begin to fathom. Our lives unfold through…and within each other. What one suffers, we all feel. What one does changes others forever.” - David Rhodes
The past couple of weeks of my life have been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. On February the 8th, the man who brought the physical being that is me into the world died suddenly and unexpectedly. At 81, he still had a grip of steel and could still crush my hand in his. “I always did hate a flabby handhake,” he used to say sometimes, with a chortle, after a few pints; I think he was quoting John Wayne from some movie or other.
The first-born child of 7, he was born on the longest day of the year in 1942, smack bang in the middle of World War II. Like many of his generation in Ireland, he went to England and was part of the countless Irishmen that went there looking for work on the building sites at a time when there would have been precious little for him in Ireland. He once related one of his earliest memories being that of buildings that had been blown to bits by bombs and also said he remembered playing with gas masks as a child.
I had a week of insomnia after learning that he had dropped dead and kind of got somewhat lost in time and space. During the day I felt exhausted, barely able to keep my eyes open, and at night, when nobody was around, and left alone with nothing but my own thoughts, my mind ignited with memories that went back the entire span of my 43 years on this earth. I felt things that happened decades ago as if they were happening in the present in real time. I can only describe it as being a kind of emotional time travel. In my head, I felt like I travelled through the entire spectrum of emotions from extreme grief to extraordinary happiness and everything else in between.
I felt the innocent infatuation of a teenager that was incapable of speaking to girls but used to paint pictures in his imagination of their virtuousness, a virtue that would be impossible for any real woman to actually live up to. I felt breakups like they had literally just happened, annoyance about perceived injustices or an insult from someone that burned me to the core, and recalled lines I had written down 20 and 30 years ago like I was writing them, and feeling everything I wrote, in the present day. Memories I would have thought gone came bubbling to the surface, and I felt everything, like someone sentenced to death by electric chair might feel electric currents pulsing through them. The electricity of memory coursed through my consciousness with no mercy. I haven’t touched alcohol in over a year and a half and thought it might be medicinal, and justifiable, to knock myself out with half a dozen pints of Guinness on this occasion, but it was only a passing thought, and I’ve had enough experience with that to know there is nothing wholesome to be found in pint glasses of booze, not in my case anyway. It just dulls one’s senses.
One of the things I found myself thinking about over the past couple of weeks was something that a guy from school once said to me back in the 90s which always stuck with me. He was a big Metallica fan, and probably still is, and when he told me he was going to see them in concert I asked him if he was going to get shit-faced at it. He replied that he wasn’t going to have a single drop of alcohol because he wanted to be fully conscious so as to absorb and appreciate every moment of it. And while I was struggling to sleep over the course of the week my father was buried, I got to thinking that the charge of emotions and memories I was feeling was something that I needed to feel in order to heal in some way. Also, when in any way inebriated, I always find it harder to construct words and sentences, feel a little less aware of other people’s emotions, find it a little more difficult to follow the thread of conversations, and also find it difficult, afterwards, to recall details of those conversations. Like the chap from school years ago, I wanted to be fully conscious and absorb and remember as much as possible of the day. To have deep conversations with people and not remember details afterwards, because you were inebriated, is an afront to the practice of conversation and in some sense an insult to the time that someone took to have a conversation with you. I understand that some people feel the need for alcohol to be able to speak more easily, but that’s not me, although it probably was in the not too distant past.
I used to write silly poems and things as a teenager which I have viewed as pretty cringe in recent years; cute but embarrassing to my “adult” brain. But at times during my sleepless nights, my teenage self came fully to the surface and it felt like I was again that person with all the associated confusion and angst that teenagers often feel. I felt the inspired love that filled me with an insatiable need to somehow capture and describe feelings that were impossible to describe; I saw the faces of those that past versions of myself attached intense feelings to and “fell in love” with all of them all over again. It was pretty crazy. It was what might be somewhat akin to some kind of psychedelic experience but without any actual drugs being involved (apart from caffeine lol).
At 4am on the morning my father died, I woke up with a feeling of intense despair. At the exact same time, my mother woke up and felt restless. When I learned of his death, at around 11am, I rang my brother in Australia and one of the first things he said was that he had been talking to a work colleague about our father a few hours previously and had, for no apparent reason, been using the past tense about him as if he was no longer alive. As far as he knew at that point, consciously at least, our father was still alive, and he felt a little confused with himself as to why he had been using the past tense. The fact that the three of us had such experiences at the same time has made me a little pensive about human connections that somehow transcend time and space and conscious thought, and which we do not, and cannot, fully understand consciously.
This morning, I woke up at 5am and went for a walk at around 7am. The moon was full and bright and big and gradually sinking below the horizon. The sky was relatively clear with shades of pink and purple and the sun began to rise above the horizon as the moon sank below it, and I found myself thinking of it as symbolic of the cycle of life and death. One passes from this world so that the other can blaze across the sky in all its glory. Night becomes day and then day becomes night again in a seemingly endless cycle which is sometimes pretty and sometimes not so pretty but the whole process keeps going nonetheless. We try and find meaning in things, and some of us try to convey that meaning in words so as to somehow be able to connect with the inner non-physical parts of ourselves and other people, but no words ever do such things justice.
Born on the longest day of the year, in the middle of a world war, my father was buried on Valentine’s Day. But I do not feel him to be dead. The vessel which carried his earthly being may be gone, but the impact of all of his interactions, “good” and “bad”, with everyone he encountered in his brief earthly existence shall echo through eternity, the same way all of our lives will.