Happy Birthday Dad

This is only my second post on Substack and already I am veering off topic, but I hope you’ll indulge me on this occasion. I knew I wanted to write about this but doing so ‘on main’ (as I still think of Twitter and Instagram) didn’t feel like the right place. I’m not even sure about what I want to say, but here goes. This is about bereavement, so if it’s something you’d rather not read about, please do take care.

Today is my dad’s birthday. Or at least it would have been. He died on 5th February this year, eleven days before the publication of my debut novel. He had cancer, with a prognosis of 6-9 months, until an infection he couldn’t fight took him very quickly over the course of a few days. I am incredibly grateful that I was with him at the end, and he died peacefully in a hospice with my stepmum - the love of his life - on one side of the bed, and me on the other. His other children (my stepsisters and brother) and his grandson had been with us most of the day, and we’d all shared stories, laughed and cried and talked to him throughout that time. In a surreal, sad way, it was a beautiful day, filled with love. It felt like family.

The following day I essentially ran away.

I live some hours away from my family, and I got in my car early the morning after he died and drove home. I told a handful of friends what had happened plus my agent, editor and publicist (but no one else involved in the launch of the novel) and changed no plans. It has always been my way, to keeping going regardless, and at the time it was the only thing I knew how to do. The novel got launched and from the outside it appeared that nothing had happened. Inside was a different story entirely.

My relationship to the concept of family is a complicated one, much like my relationship to Dad himself. Growing up, we were not a happy family. I won’t bore you with the myriad reasons why. As Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina, ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ But I was absolutely a ‘daddy’s girl.’ and idolised the man I saw as clever and funny and capable. That ended abruptly when he left our family when I was seventeen and walked straight into another (tale as old as time).

For many years I found it difficult not to be angry with him. That anger was (I felt) justified. He was happy with this new family, way WAY happier than he’d ever been with us and because of my mum’s mental health and my sister’s complex disabilities, I was essentially left to pick up the pieces, until I too escaped, leaving to go to university and only returning ‘home’ sporadically afterwards. My experience of family for a long time was one of duty and responsibility (always mine, never theirs). I preferred friendship - a chosen form of love - infinitely more reliable in my experience.

Over the years Dad and I went through long periods of estrangement then would somehow always end up back in contact (once after I randomly bumped into him in a shopping centre on Christmas Eve and he took me for a cup of tea in Woolworths. He didn’t recognise me at first).

These episodes were punctuated by occasional moments of closeness; during his first bout of cancer; when I got sober at thirty-six-years-old; when I took him and my stepmum to the Lake District for a road trip to see his sister; but by then I was hyper-independent and - I thought - had no need for a father figure, not that he ever really tried to be that. It was too late to be family, and I wasn’t sure he ever gave me a second thought unless I was in front of him. I tried not to think about it too hard, though I can see now that my unexamined thoughts and feelings about fathers, families and love showed up in every area of my life, particularly my relationships with men.

This all changed a few years ago when I began writing, and when dad was diagnosed with dementia (before his final cancer diagnosis). The writing became my way of making sense of my childhood and my feelings of loneliness during it. The novel was inspired by my most vivid childhood memory, of the day that Peter Sutcliffe (the serial murderer) was caught, and it turned out my dad knew him. The List of Suspicious Things is infused with themes of family, friendship and community and is full of imperfect people doing the best they can in the circumstances they are given. Unintentionally, as a result of writing it, I began to soften in my expectations of everyone around me, including family.

At the same time, something about the dementia stripped away the facade that dad just didn’t care. He softened too. He said he’d like to speak to me every week (I can’t tell you how out of character that was, for both of us!) so I began calling him on a Sunday and we started to discover things about each others lives. I found out he liked watching documentaries about air crashes (why?!) and he liked hearing about the escapades of my rescue dog, Rocco. He loved the novel more than I would have believed possible, and after his cancer diagnosis he had an end-of-life counsellor, who he gave a proof to, then sent me her lovely message about how much she’d enjoyed it. I began to feel like someone he was proud of. I began to feel like a daughter.

This shift wasn’t necessarily comfortable for me, I wasn’t used to it, but I did it for both of us and it felt good. So why did I run away so fast the moment he died? It’s a question that has been on my mind since it happened, and I have judged myself harshly for it.

I can see now however, that actually I reacted to his death in EXACTLY the same way as he handled the difficulties in his life. He wasn’t someone who talked about his feelings or even expressed them (until his final months). It was his way to keep going regardless. From the outside it looked as though nothing had happened. Maybe on the inside it was a different story for him too.

I have only just begun to grieve, and who knows what sense I will make of this further down the line, but I can write the words I only learned to say out loud in his final months, I love you Dad.

Happy Birthday

.