Today is the first day of my dad’s birthday month, and it’s also the first time in my adult life that I won’t be messaging my mom to say, ‘What does Dad want for his birthday?’ Though, funnily enough, on his last birthday I broke with tradition and asked him directly. His answer was, ‘I don’t know, darling. Ask your mother.’ Which is pretty funny, and sums up the way their marriage worked. It’s been a strange and difficult year for our family. The first 12 months after losing someone you love is a bit like an obstacle course where you try to make it through the family-oriented celebrations – Easter, anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas – in one piece. These occasions are not the same, and they never will be again.
His death has been such a momentous and devastating event in our lives that it’s hard to even imagine that last year this time he was with us, talking, chuckling, telling stories, being Dad. But I do remember the last time I bought him a gift – a pair of slippers from Woolworths – wondering how many more times I would be able to do that. I knew he was an old man, and even though he seemed as well and strong as he’d ever been, he had been battling vascular disease for many years and, as much as we chose denial as our coping mechanism, his health was never going to improve.
You learn a lot of things when you suffer loss, but the biggest lesson for me is that you never ‘get over it’. The grief and the sorrow lessen in severity, of course, but another loss accompanies this process and that is of your former self. You’ll never be quite the same person that you were before. You are changed. Forever, inside you, you carry the burden of your pain, tucked away somewhere private where the world can’t see. Now and again when nobody’s looking you’ll take it out and examine it and be struck, anew, by the intensity of your love and longing. Then, you’ll get off the couch, wash your face and fetch the kids from soccer.
And another surprise for me is how relationships change among the people left behind. When my mom was being otherwise my dad and I would roll our eyes at each other. I know for sure that when I was being otherwise she had him to complain to. Now, it’s just her and I and we’ve had to find a whole new way of relating, which has been challenging and at times exhausting. We only have each other now and the pressure on both of us can feel immense. But you go on because you have to. It’s the nature of this business called life.
My mom and dad were inseparable for 54 years. Her bravery in the face of the loss of her life partner and soul mate has been humbling and has shown me a whole new side to this person I thought I knew. One of the last things I ever said to my dad was, ‘Dad, you know, I don’t think it’s a great idea for you to die just now because I’m not sure Mom will cope.’ It was partly in jest because I didn’t really think he was going to, I was just making sure. Honestly, I don’t think he was that keen either because there was a rugby match he wanted to see the following Saturday, but his old heart had other ideas. And, despite what I feared, my mom did cope. We all did.
It will be hard gathering on the day of his birthday without having him sitting there in his chair, but we’ll do it anyway because not doing it would be worse. We’ll eat his favourite fish and chips, and tell stories about him – that’s the way you keep the people you love alive. We humans are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. You fall down, you get up and you rejoin the dance. Life is nothing if not an exercise in courage, so let’s be gentle with the souls around us. It’s become a cliché, but we really are all struggling with something or other. I hope the new year has more laughter and less heartache than the one that has just passed, but I also know that, whatever life throws at us, we’ll survive.
Susan Hayden is the voice behind the popular blog Disco Pants & A Mountain
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