Stop all the clocks
The inscrutable passing of time
On Saturday, it would have been my Dad’s birthday. He was a water-carrying Aquarius. Apt for someone who ‘left school with nothing but a swimming certificate’. Aquarius’ are known to be dedicated and dependable. They’re problem solvers who consider the bigger picture. At times, a maybe little aloof.
I haven’t spoken about him much recently. Not in my newsletter, and not outside out it either. The most recent time I can remember I was recounting “the end” and some of the strange, spiritual, and unexplainable things that happened. I could feel myself becoming glassy-eyed by the power of the words spoken aloud into existence, hanging awkwardly in the air.
A few weeks ago, I read Death of the Party, an essay by Raven Leilani. She speaks of the intense experience of grief she faced after the loss of her father and brother within five months of each other, during which her debut novel was released. A time of complete emotional turmoil. She speaks of the right to grieve, something I opened up to my therapist only last week that I had been grappling with. My deservedness of grief. Grief as a scale and a measurement. Of perceived allotted amounts of time for grief all of which culminate in the assumed societal preference that we all, sooner or later, get over it. A thing best left hidden and unsaid.
On considering those who are ‘afforded the humanity of grief’, Leilani states that grief narratives of marginalised people often intersect with the violence [against] the state. How in the aftermath of the death of her father, the confrontation went beyond personal loss and morphed into a kind of anger on his behalf as a Black, elderly man who was thus more vulnerable during Covid (which is what he died of). I cannot begin to comprehend the anger at a loss that shone a harsher light on the inequalities BAME people face across the board when it comes to medical care and treatment. Especially when considering her brother’s death was illness related, too.
I don’t believe in getting over it. I believe in weathering it badly, in nursing the grudge, and tending pathologically to the archive of people you have loved.
- Raven Leilani
However, the essay did strike similarities for me. After death, I felt an anger. A rage and a fear for the world. Yes, as immortal as you’ve inadvertently been led to believe you are, death is not only possible it is coming for us all. I’ve made comparisons before of the vulnerability that comes with exposure to death to standing under a hole in the ozone layer. Unprotected and vulnerable. In death, there is nowhere to hide.
I felt an anger akin to ageism when my dad was dying. He was 77, sand slipping through our fingers. We begged nurses and doctors to do more, making pleas and phone calls, believing he was viewed as a lost cause because of his age. He has people waiting for him at home, we wanted to say. He can’t go yet, not yet! At the time, it felt good to have somewhere to direct blame. It became more tangible and logical to cling to, for there was no way my Dad could just simply die. That he would soon cease to exist. That he would leave when I was 26 and barely knew who I was (and still don’t). Committed, now, to only ever knowing a past version of me.
That anger, it can manifest itself in the most gruesome of ways. It can make you feel isolated and alone in your grief. There can be anger at people whose parents are still alive. Anger at those with better relationships with those who’ve passed than you had. Anger at the fact my Dad decided to have kids later in life. Death is unfair. It is the ultimate form of rejection. As Leilani highlighted, for some, death can enhance anger towards the injustices faced in life too.
It will be three years in May since he died. My grief-fueled anger has now mostly subsided from the tsunami wave it once was to shallower waters, occasionally lapping at my ankles with the tide. Left in its wake is simply a hole. All parts of life follow a narrative that overlaps theories and stories of how we arrived where we are in the present. It is evolutionary. Understanding the building blocks and how everything links together. Death snatches that away, the natural order gone and the stories lost. I can never ask my Dad about who I was as a child before my own memories were able to form. I can no longer question him about his life, his parents, or growing up. What I know of my history from his perspective will forever be frozen in time. When people say they lose a part of themselves after someone dies, I now believe this is the most logical way to try and comprehend what it means.
I went to a funeral on Saturday and as they as tend to, it made me think and feel existentially about life. It’s meaning. My purpose. The fragility of being alive was suddenly so overwhelming it was suffocating, with the potential to make me never want to risk leaving the house again. What a privilege it is to see wonder and value in being alive.
Before editing and building out this piece I added a note which said ‘I’ve been to eight funerals but I’ve never seen anyone get married’. Days later I would then receive an invite to my friend’s wedding in Greece next year. My brother, too, got engaged over Christmas. Another wedding with a date TBC also on the list. Where death feels like finality, measures of love are always in motion ready to outweigh despair with copious, even borderline sickening (cough it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow), promises of hope.
