Love Goes on Like This
love goes on forever
Ten years ago, on 27th April 2015, Dad called to tell me he had three months left to live.
How do you begin to write about something like this?
Immediately after what has to be the hardest conversation I have had in my life so far, I tried. I reached for my journal, my go-to for first thoughts:
“Dad has just come out of his appointment with the oncologist and has been told he has cancer in his bones, his spine and lungs. I feel sick. I was trying to prepare myself for this but I can’t stop crying. Shocked. Empty.”
This is how I began to write about a period of loss and mourning that has not gone away, although the pain has lessened.
Those first words were not crafted. They were not beautiful. They didn’t go even the tiniest way to describe what was said, how Dad felt, how I felt. They did not make good storytelling. They were for no one but me. A mark made to ensure I would never forget 27th April, a day that has become as important as Dad’s birth and death days.
All very well to mark the day, but how to truly write about it? To “bring it alive for the reader” as editors like to say?
On 27th April 2015 all I could do in that moment was react. Grasp at the first clichéd words that came to mind. I was not ready to tell my - our - story for a reader, because, as Dad taught me, a story needs sense and shape and order and in that moment, all those things were absent. All I had was a howl in the dark. Rage. Yes, that was it. I was fucking furious. “Shocked. Empty.” Wordless with anger. And that made me all the more livid, because not only were words my metier, but they were also what connected me and Dad: a love of language and stories was the most precious thing we shared.
A year later though, on 27th April 2016, I woke up knowing I had had enough of wordlessness. The time had come to begin “dealing with” my grief, and the only way I knew how to to do this was by writing it as a story for a reader. Someone who had not experienced this, but who might perhaps be persuaded to understand if only I could find the right words to unpack all that I had been carrying in my heart for 12 months. That’s when I started writing Good Grief, a blog in which I documented what had happened as we watched Dad die and Mum’s mental health decline.
In 2018 after Mum died, I finished the manuscript that came from that blog and would become my memoir, A Place for Everything. I hadn’t known I was going to write a book. It came into being. It was part of a process of learning to live without my parents that is on-going, just as my love for them continues and changes as I age, even though they are no longer here to receive it.
Even now, ten years on, there are days I find myself wanting to reach for the phone to talk to Dad. Many times I have wished I could invite him here to Cornwall to see this house, the woods, the sea, the cliffs, the wildlife. Sometimes living here makes me feel too far away and I worry that I am losing touch with my roots, my memories of childhood. It also hurts that there is nothing here to remind me of Dad. Only a few objects taken from my childhood home. If only Dad had at least visited this place, then I would have a link with him here. Wouldn’t that be a neat way to gather up our story, to put a lid on the box of memories, to say “happily ever after”? But of course, life’s not like that.
Last week, with the first of many painful ten-year anniversary days approaching, I was feeling the loss of Dad more keenly than I had for a while. I knew I was going to have to write something about it, but what? Hadn’t it already been said? I went through some old letters and photos, hoping for something from Dad’s life that I could use for inspiration - a new, unexplored way of connecting with him. I was leafing through photos of him and Mum during their student days, when a tiny, credit-card-sized photo fell from the pile. It was one I had never seen before: Dad and his parents sitting on a bench. A pretty unremarkable photo and so small I had to squint at it to make out the details. I turned it over to read, in Dad’s beautiful italic hand: “Between Penzance and Newlyn. From right to left, Mother, Father, Me”.
I laughed out loud. Dad had come here, to Cornwall, to Penzance! Here was the evidence. Dad, sitting on Penzance prom on the very spot where I regularly sit when sizing up the waves to see whether or not it’s safe to swim. And as if that wasn’t neat enough for me, there was the date: 1957.
1957 was the year that my husband’s grandfather bought the house we now live in. Another date embedded in family folklore because buying this house on the edge of the land was a pretty mad thing to do.
I showed the photo to my husband and son. “Weird to think that Granny and her family might have walked straight past Grandpa Martin and his parents!” my son said.
Weird. Or just one of those things. Ten years on, it’s hard not to find the timing of finding this photo strangely magical. It is as though Dad is reaching out to me, teasing me with this picture. It felt like a validation. A blessing. “I have been here. And now you are. It’s all good. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Keep writing. Keep living.”
Ten years is a long time in terms of words written, life lived. It’s long enough for me to able to find a way to write about Dad’s story more coherently. It’s long enough to help me stand back and make more sense of what happened. But when it comes to loving someone and missing them, ten years is no time at all. I’m not done with writing about it. Dad taught me that stories are the way we make sense of life. And now stories are all I have left of him. So yes, it’s all good. I’ll just keep writing. Keep living. Keep loving.
This post was written during the London Writers’ Salon Writers’ Hour 24-hour writing sprint. The prompt for the session seemed very apt for how I was feeling:
‘Why Bother' by Sean Thomas Dougherty Because right now there is someone Out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.
Beautiful words... and the title, "A Place for Everything" makes me pause and soften.
This is so beautiful, Anna. It’s such good writing, so well crafted and full of love. Just reading it, and feeling very moved by the lovely story but also admiring your skill at telling it, has inspired me to write, and I am also so glad you included the original prompt. Thank you.