Father's Day Blues

I've been battling with fury recently.  Deep burning, frustrated fury.  As a result I've been drinking too much wine and beating myself up for failing.  Then crying at small bits of sadness in deep and heavy gulps.  Why the dramatics?  My long suffering and relatively recently acquired boyfriend is bewildered by the madness I'm sure.  Which, of course, turns me back to the paranoia of 'when he finds out what I'm really like I won't see him for dust'.  A state of mind that insults his intelligence and belittles his affection for me, and could indeed set up a need for an escape on his part.  The one thing I haven't been able to do is write.  The muse has deserted me.  No pictures in my mind to form  into words, just pain and loneliness within.  A empty vessel making rather a lot of sound.



Why? I hear you ask in patient tones across ether, what this time?  It's Father's Day today.  A silly idea imported from America to boost the card industry.  In addition there seem to be a number of things you 'should' buy for your father and they are specially labelled for the day so your father can know you made the effort for him. 

The small band of followers of this blog, who must have despaired of ever seeing anything on it again, will know that my own father died in 2009 from pancreatic cancer.  A brave, strong and loving man, who missed my mother after she died in 2006 so much but, after the initial mourning depths were passed, managed to live with that loss with dignity and courage.  She, too, died from cancer, in her case breast cancer and so it is particularly foolish that I keep drinking more wine than is good for me as excessive alcohol consumption is associated with incidence of cancer.  I don't do a great deal to combat the risk of cancer catching up with me; I tend to treat it as an inevitability rather than a possibility, which might be foolish, or could just be pragmatic.  I know my love of blueberries is a good thing in the fight, but my love of red wine is not.

I took the news of my mother's cancer quite hard.  She was 52 when she was first diagnosed and I remember us all struggling through that first time.  First, she didn't want treatment and just wanted to die, then she found her courage and endured chemo and radiotherapy, but it was tough to be alongside. The second time she was diagnosed, 7 years after that first episode was harder though.  I experienced 'anticipatory grief'.  I was exhibiting symptoms of bereavement without actually having lost her.  It must of been tough for my then husband to deal with, but it was overwhelming for me.  I had counselling, which helped a great deal, and I remember listening to the Goldberg Variations in the car coming home from sessions.  There was something exquisite in those deceptively simple piano pieces, it calmed me and brought me back to my world.  My mother recovered from her treatments following more chemotherapy and radiotherapy.  I can't remember which time she had surgery, both I think, a radical lumpectomy rather than the full removal of a breast.  The third time she was diagnosed it had reached her bones and we knew there would be no recovery.  Her diagnosis was in 2005 when she was 64 and she died in March 2006, a month short of her 66th birthday.

One of the few things I have done is the Race for Life.  When I first went years ago, even before my father died, the signs on the backs of people telling for whom they were running brought tears to my eyes.  I felt the emotion bubble through me, rising up in strangled gasps.  The enormity of the loss we endured was great, thousands and thousands of people battling with the extraordinary, unbearable pain.  My mind is somehow drawn to the death of the Princess of Wales, a time that is often belittled in the minds of the quasi-intelligentsia who like to demean the ordinary person with a facade of long words and apparent considered thought.  It's nothing of the sort, of course, they are the small minded people not seeing the truth of the world.  Diana's death instigated the most astonishing outpouring of grief I have ever seen.  Men and women openly wept, the flowers at Kensington Palace became a huge, if temporary shine, and I remember making the Absent Father sit and watch the funeral as I felt it was going to be important to share this experience.  Oddly, he had to be persuaded.  He didn't see this funeral as important, he had other things to do with his time, I forget what, probably something to do with his workshop and provisions for that workshop.  He was compliant, of course, and grateful afterwards that he was able to join in the conversations that bubbled through our lives for the next months.  We went to, and hosted,  Dinner Parties in those days - does anyone still do 'dinner parties' I ask myself?  Not me.  But at DPs,( and their even more appalling cousin, the Kitchen Sups aka Kitchen Supper, a curious invention of the Upper Middle Class to both draw in and push away guests at the same time)  there was always a group of superior sorts who just couldn't understand how anyone could weep for someone they didn't know.  If you were at a very superior DP then there was always the possibility that somebody, called Binky or George (a woman, of course), was at school with or vaguely related to Diana/Sarah Ferguson/one of the Diana flatmates so actually knew the poor woman and therefore if she could do the whole thing without blubbing into a hanky for hours on end, then surely all these working class people who were trudging down from the north, roses and balloon with card on it grasped firm in one hand, soggy hanky in the other, should be able to do the same.  There would be a nodding of heads, the conversation would pause and someone would then attempt to explain the whole behaviour as if those working class people from the north were from another planet, and rather an inferior one.  If no-one took the bait and tried an intelligent discourse, then everyone would have another class of wine, just to dull the feelings a little bit more and the conversation would inevitably return to which school was best at the moment, how the garden was going, and which part of Tuscany/France/the Algave anyone thought was worth it and all would be relieved that.  Sadly, I frequently let myself down at such parties by showing up their emotional illiteracy, something I didn't understand at the time, but it put me outside a world I thought I belonged to.  I would point out that the soggy hanky brigade weren't actually really grieving for Diana, just the image their had of her, the role her life played in theirs.  I'd usually lost the really dim City types by then, but one or two would try and parry the psychological conversation for a while.  Essentially, I see the Royal Family as necessary totems, and Diana with her beauty and sweetness, was cast as a vehicle for our dreams.  I have no idea what the real Diana was like, whether Charles was a baddie or not, I rather suspect not, for life isn't black and white,  But, with the help of the media we support with our patronage, she became the Princess of our dreams.  With her death so sudden, the shock awoke grief unresolved within us.  I'm sure you're reading this thinking 'I'm not that simple, she was just a woman to me' if you were an adult at the time of her death, but it was another time and place, and grief was not something we were allowed to feel, not properly.  The rituals of a faith based society were being eroded, the expectation was that we went through the motions, but actually just got on with life as our parents and grandparents had.  Then everything changed.  Teenagers bring flowers to a graveside, or at the place where a friend died; at an accident site it is normal to see a mound of flowers, and I tend to have a few thoughts, which would be prayers if I prayed, for the life and soul of the departed and their loved ones, strangers on this journey through life, but companions in existence.

My attempts to explain the importance of grief, the fact that Diana's death merely underlined how little we were given permission to own our own feelings, were usually met with blank incomprehension.  These people would never need to show how they felt, good grief, that was so...common.  But then we were 30 somethings, successful, middle class, beautiful people for whom life, growing up in the 1960s, was not a struggle.  Death, divorce and illness has, no doubt, effected us all by now. All, no doubt, occasionally frozen in pain, sometimes garrulous, at other times gulping in grief at carnations by a lamp post, I hope .

I started writing this blog on Father's Day, determined to work through the anger I felt at the impotence I have with my own childrens' father.  But I got stuck again, frozen by a different grief that surged through me having walked my Race for Life (sciatica ambushed me again making running impossible). Once again the labels that we all wore on our backs saying why we were running moved me immeasurably.  There were thousands of us, women and girls, all commemorating someone.  The sheer numbers of losses, the apparent pointless of such pain in the scheme of things made me retreat into myself.  Despite the determination of the organisers to make this a positive event, it had the reverse effect on me.   I felt oddly desperate by my parents' graves I visited on my way home, It is a place I visit regularly, if not frequently, and somewhere I have been comforted by in the past.  Yes, they are buried in the churchyard adjacent to the church I was married in, but it was their loss that filled my soul and mind, that sharp and debilitating pain that engulfs.  It has taken many, many weeks of thinking I should be writing, but knowing I can't to get me to this keyboard, and bash away trying to organise my thoughts.  I've been through the phase of 'why bother?' to 'you thought you could write, now you know you can't' to 'just sit down and try'  and here I am.  Drinking much less red wine, by the way, realising that grief isn't something you deal with, it's something you live with, talk and write about.  For the good of us all.