I’ve woken up too early to a jarringly bright sun. The school holidays have, I’m told, just started, and while my contemporaries are run off their feet ensuring their children are kept busy, I am staring into the void of yet another chapter in the distilled misery of dealing with my father’s death. I chose today to travel to my hometown to collect his ashes because I didn’t want the experience clouding the rest of our trip home, filled as it was with joyful, celebratory events, catching up with friends and a lovely family holiday with my wonderful in-laws.
Of course, I knew it was coming, but lying in the bright Corfu sun beer in hand, the reality of my impending and potentially final trip to Swindon faded into a forgettable future. I could keep it there I know. The funeral director casually mentioned people leaving their loved ones’ ashes at the funeral home for decades and I can understand why. A closed casket meant I didn’t have to really believe he was in there. Even the blurred anguish of clearing out his home, leaving most of his things, that familiar fabric of his presence on whose certainty I had always counted, to languish in charity shops and rot in skips, held a quality of the surreal. The feeling he could walk through the door at any moment, his coat and hat still hung in the hall, slippers waiting for his feet to slide into. Dismantling and dividing his possessions, boxing and abandoning my own, tearing them from their near-40-year resting places felt sickeningly unnatural. At night, I catalogue the things I couldn’t save, that I will never see again. I torture myself visualising the moment he would open his front door, arms wide open ready to hug, as the car he had been eagerly waiting for pulled up with us in it. How as a child, my own ears were so attuned to the sound of his Volvo I could detect it from the end of the street.
Yesterday, in Marks and Spencer, I saw the bald pate of a portly older South Asian gentleman from behind, and for a split second I thought, ahh – there he is. Today, I will be presented with his remains, and there he will be. I have never seen someone’s ashes before. They come in something called a scatter tube, a sealed bag inside, pre-prepared perforations in the lid. They offered one with a cricket theme which I politely declined, knowing encasing him inside imagery of his beloved sport would be more than I could bear. Perhaps I was wrong. Should I call them and change my mind? The simple beach design I chose suddenly feels banal, generic. He may be in there for a while so perhaps I should bite the bullet and make it more homely for him. Of course I know he’s not there. Sometimes he’s everywhere, sometimes nowhere. But having, seeing, the tiny bits of him that are left is terrifying in its certainty. In the complete, incontrovertible reality that he is gone forever, burnt up into tiny fragments of former human. That he, like his belongings and his memories, is now entirely my responsibility to carefully and competently set to rest.
One of the many reasons I chose not to have children is that I never wanted to do anything because I had to. I always wanted to live on my own terms, make my own choices, and not be responsible for anyone else. And aside from the onerous demands of being alive placed on us by the authorities that be, I had largely accomplished this goal until my father got sick. Being thrust into the world of elder care, the endless appointments, follow-ups, assessments, and medications to be organised, the basic rites and rituals of human life to manage for another whole person, often in the face of bullish institutional incompetence, was not something I was prepared or in any way qualified for. Neither was my father’s death. Each step on the downward trajectory of his health took more from me than its predecessor, each challenge had to be met in the immediate, leaving zero time or resources to dwell on the past or think about the future. Now the future is here, he is gone and the past is all I have to fend off my desolation. Each memory a gift boxed charm to be unwrapped and attached to a forever bracelet that I hope will, that I need to carry me through however many years of unparented life lie ahead. Knowing I will never again be loved as a child stings me all over, a sharp disorienting pain of loss and loneliness. A limb torn off, its phantom presence a feverish disconsolate ache.
My beloved father is now a tube of bone dust. And I will carry him as he once carried me, sign for him as he signed for me, and take him somewhere he would want to be taken, rest him somewhere he would want to be. The next thing I must try my best to get right on my own. The next emotional and practical mountain landscaped by death.
Cultural Cuckoo 