One of the GCSE poems I teach, ‘My Father Would Not Show Us’ by Ingrid de Kok is a poem about an (adult) child processing the death of her father, processing her mixed feelings of frustration as to why he didn’t let her know he was dying and grief of what life could have been like with him if he were a different person. She was a student living away in Canada at the time of his death in South Africa. Initially, she is angry at her father’s denial of death, either to himself and/or to his loved ones. This later shifts to her sense of compassion towards his father, understanding the enormity of what it means to accept/not accept death- but also perhaps not wanting to subject his loved ones to death as well.
When teaching this poem I share with my students that I lost my father when I was younger as I know some of them have also lost people. I want them to know it’s normal to lose someone. Although I don’t go into many details, I want them to know I am a person who has been affected by death and that over time, we are able to process our feelings about death through different perspectives.
Besides losing my father, I have always found the poem inherently relatable. If I can be honest with you, there are even aspects of the poem I find enviable. My own father passed away when I was 19 and I also had complicated feelings about his death. Like de Kok’s father, he had given up on life, actively resisting all ways to improve his health, resulting in an illness that was quite prolonged, which also prolonged the suffering for all of us. Unlike de Kok, I was present for my father’s death due to being home from university for what was supposed to be a one week visit. I had been the one to have to tell others, including my four siblings, about his death. In some ways, I wished I had also been away, but I also know that I had a certain privilege in being the only one of his five children who were with him when he had died. I grieved but was also relieved. Like de Kok, I grieved that we were never going to get the better version of him he had sometimes, rarely, chosen/been able to be; relieved that we didn’t have to put up with the more truthful version of him that had existed. I was also sad that he had given up the gift that I saw life as, and selfishly, the opportunity to see me into adulthood. I was grateful to be away from death. I was so vivaciously full of life, and to be alongside someone so empty of life, truly terrified me. I was also angry at him, left with feelings I could no longer direct towards him after he died. Angry that he didn’t choose life.
My father was not an outwardly religious or spiritual person. After he died, I was preoccupied with the anxiety of wondering ‘where he had gone’. Even though I was spiritual, my beliefs didn’t reflect his, I felt quite certain he wasn’t going to fit into whatever I viewed as ‘the afterlife’. Not only was he dead, but he was just gone. I found this most disjointing in the week following his death. I experienced sleepless, dreamless nights, and after his funeral, I finally slept after pure exhaustion. My father, like me, was a vivid dreamer. We remember our dreams, eagerly sharing them with those whom we wake with. That night of exhaustion, I had a dream. This time my father was present. He was at the top of an extraordinarily towering, old staircase calling down to me (strangely he’s never deaf in my dreams) that he was okay and that I didn’t need to worry about him. I could only see his hand waving as he walked away from me. At my young age I found this subconscious interaction quite comforting – but where had he gone?
At the end of October, my friend Leah came to visit London. One of the activities I planned was to visit Highgate cemetery along with a tour of the mausoleum. I clicked and paid for the visit without further thought of what the visit would entail. On a rainy Halloween Sunday (unintentionally), our group of around fifteen trekked up the Victorian cemetery with a lively, animated tour guide, juxtaposing the quiet, sombre setting.
We approached the formidable, ornate doors to the mausoleum, our guide jokingly asking if any of us had necrophobia, and before I could process what the question actually meant, we were inside. He closed and locked the doors behind us, shrouding us in complete darkness. A flashlight was shone upon a wall of caskets, and then an endless hall of caskets was revealed. My heart stopped. I was unprepared for this. I knew there were going to be dead people but I expected them to be hidden behind a consistent funerary recess, a continuous wall of epitaphs. Instead I was confronted with dilapidated rows of funerary recesses, many, many niches with missing seals. Inside were rotting, collapsing coffins. Not all the caskets were visible, but too many were. While we were reassured that the caskets were triple lined, I felt no comfort. Even now as I type this memory, my shoulders tense with anxiety. Although we were strangers, our group huddled together, moving as one down the dingy, cool corridor. With each searching flashlight beam I held my breath, worried what I would see next, knowing that I had already more than surpassed what I could mentally process for an entire lifetime.
As we wrapped up our photography, the tour guide called back to check to see if there were still people inside, to which I called to him frantically that there were, and hurried towards the exit.
I mindlessly asked Leah as we headed back outside, “Can you imagine accidentally getting locked inside?” To which our tour guide told our group that this had in fact happened to someone…on Thursday. He had taken a school trip of students inside and another non-school visitor had slipped in the back. When the tour guide had counted all of the children back safely, he locked the doors and moved along. Unbeknownst to him, the surprise visitor got quite the surprise himself, and found himself as a solitary live prisoner amongst the many dead. He was there for over an hour. A phone call to the cemetery alerted them to his presence and he was finally released. Which is why, the tour guide explained, he now has to lock the door behind each group as they enter. My peers listened to this anecdote as a spooky/funny “all’s well that ends well” happy ending, moving on as quickly as we moved away from the mausoleum.
I could not.
I now had to imagine the unimaginable. Obsessively my mind wracked this stranger’s experience. He was trapped with the dead. I joked to both Leah and my partner that if it were me, I would need permanent therapy, that I would be irrevocably altered, that I would never be right again. But I was not joking. It was genuinely one of the most disturbing things I had ever heard happen to someone, in such ordinary circumstances. Why was I so disturbed by this, when the others seem so unbothered and could so easily move on? I was incredulous. Incredulous at my, what felt like immaturity, but I knew wasn’t. I couldn’t name the feeling, other than those caskets would one day be us, my loved ones, me. I could not shake the feeling of fear of that visit, even well after we left, and even after the days that followed.
Less than two weeks later Tom died. One of my past partners. One of my best friends.
One of the people who I loved and cared most about in this world, who knew me best in this world, died. In a cruel irony, he died on the morning of the 11th of November, Remembrance Day. I stood for an hour and a half, unable to reach him by phone, waiting to meet him for lunch. When I returned home I received a phone call from his father that would forever alter me. He had taken his own life. With one act, he became the other. Tom was gone.
In the months after, I still do not understand his death. Especially as I thought he was getting better. Bipolar disorder. He had fought it for over a decade. Like cancer, it robbed him slowly of almost everything and almost everyone. I struggle – how much of his death was his choice, and how much was the dominance of the bipolar? If I over assume the role of bipolar in his death, how unfair am I to his own autonomy? If I assume death was a choice in his autonomy, how unfair am I to the insidious pervasiveness of bipolar? Questions I will never get the answer to. Questions that are none of my business to ask, and yet my duty to ask. Tom is gone. He is no longer here. Except for what he left behind, including people who loved him, like me.
The poem “Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden explores how earth shattering death is in stark, unbearable contrast to the ongoing world around you. How can death be so personally altering but not alter everyone else? How can the world continue to revolve when yours has stopped? It made me wish for the mourning clothing of the past. It made me wish that I could visually set myself apart from others. To non verbally shout I am grieving, my heart is broken, I am not myself-I may never be again, please be gentle with me. I kept repeatedly asking in the days following his death, if we all know that we are going to die, if we all know that death is inevitable, then why aren’t we better at grieving? Why does death undo us?
Tom is gone. I repeat this to myself over and over again, even now. Death has created a feeling of scarcity. For a person who was already preoccupied with death, and in a world where we are surrounded by death, a deep shock of panic has entered my body since, and will not exit. If he could go, who’s next? This is a genuine reality. Someone will go next. When? I reach 40 years old this year, I understand that by entering the second half of my life (if I am lucky) I am also entering into a space where loss en masse is inevitable. However, death is also senseless. It is not always the oldest that go first. In the last decade I witnessed from afar the tragic losses of my friends, of their loved ones. Their stillborn baby. Their husband, while pregnant with two other small children. Both of their parents within a year of each other. I witness global atrocities, genocide, war, austerity. Excruciating, senseless losses. Tom was 43. He should have lived a longer and better life, but so should so many others. To isolate him in this list of losses feels self-absorbed, but he is how I understand the profoundness of loss. I hate that it takes personal loss to truly understand loss.
If you’ve not been close to death, it can be quite easy, or easier to dismiss this. People want to distance themselves from death. It is uncomfortable. We don’t want to think about it. People who have lost someone are consumed by death. In the months after losing my father I was obsessed with the possibility of losing my mother. It consumed me. If I lost him, I could lose her. This has resurfaced, but this time, it’s to almost everyone I love. Each conversation, each embrace, each text, I imagine as the last. It is not helpful. There is a reason we cannot think about this all the time, and yet, at the current moment I am. I am comforted by friends who share their experience of grieving. We are alone in who we lost, but not alone in having lost.
I am also aware of the parameters we put around grieving. When I lost my father, I also lost money. I was working an hourly wage job where I was able to take time off – unpaid. I realise the privilege I have recently had in being able to take time off. In such a public facing job where I’m responsible for keeping a cool head, I was unable to face my students, my colleagues. I couldn’t help but think if the circumstances of Tom’s death weren’t so traumatic, would I have needed the same amount of time? Was it that he had died, or the way he had died that was so painful? Or both? How much time is one allowed to grieve before things have to go back to ‘normal’ when there is no normal? Upon return, one of my students was confused about why I had been gone so long. When I explained that I had lost someone close to me, he asked “Why did the funeral take a whole week?” Due to his autism, he couldn’t comprehend my absence. Having to explain my grief to a deserving but difficult audience proved challenging. He still didn’t seem able to absorb the reasons for my absence and I felt grateful for his naivete.
It had never occurred to me that my expectation of funerals would be cultural. Every funeral I had attended has had a visitation. A time to visit with the family and be with the body. This, for obvious reasons, used to really unsettle me. However, it was something you did out of support to the grieving family, it gave wider opportunity for everyone of that person’s life and their loved ones to say goodbye. I used to think of it almost like a Funeral’s eve, time to get used to the idea of loss. Although I found seeing my father laid out difficult, it mentally prepared me for the idea that he was gone and he was going to be further gone once he was buried. Tom was cremated. There was no visitation, there were no last moments with his body. Funerals are much more expensive and at a higher demand here in the UK, particularly around London. This was further complicated due to the manner of Tom’s death, it took 3 weeks for his body to be released by police. The funeral was the first and last time I was in the same room as his body but I was too busy going over the last words I had prepared for his eulogy. I was not able to be present. It was also not a religious service. Although I have not been to church in many years and consider myself more agnostic than religious, I found I missed the ritual of religion, particularly the spiritual guidance provided. The three week pause between his death and the funeral broke me. It was all real now, I couldn’t just pretend it was a prolonged time away from Tom. Tom was dead. He wasn’t coming back.
I took another week of absence from work. While my first week off was due to the initial shock and processing, this second week I felt crushing suffocation from the full realisation of the finality. This was the way it was now. I could only return to work knowing I had one week until Christmas break. I was also grateful for my planning of my partner’s surprise birthday away to the Netherlands and the Christmas visit with my mum and sister, things I had planned well before Tom’s death, and was so eternally grateful for keeping me occupied in the first Christmas without him. Never was I more grateful for loved ones: the ones at Christmas, the ones who held me after his death, I had never felt more grateful to be loved and still be able to love.
In the weeks and months after his death, I am brought back to that same GCSE poem, except this time, it is the opening of the poem that is etched in my mind:
“Which way do we face to talk to the dead?”
De Kok borrows this line from another poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, it is one that I have always had difficulty analysing with my students. It’s so abstract. So metaphorical. So unanswerable. Lately, it’s all I can think about.
Like my father, Tom wasn’t a religious or spiritual person. Like my father he had a very matter of fact attitude to death. Perhaps illness does this. Like my father, I am unable to imagine where he is now and I find this distressing. There have been no dreams to reassure me. He is simply gone. It can feel at times as if he never existed, even though he did. This surreal feeling is especially true after having gone through his belongings. This person who lived, breathed and was, now is a smattering of things mostly given away and the memories the living have of him, until we are no longer living.
Mentally, I return to that mausoleum. It was easy for me to be petrified then, as the last person I lost was almost 20 years ago. How distanced I was from death to not see those caskets as other people’s loved ones. That they were the Toms of so many others. That if one of the loved ones were in that room telling me about their loved one’s favourite book, or favourite food, or favourite memory- would I have considered myself trapped in that space? Would their love have overridden my fear? My love for Tom and my fear of where he is now both fight palpably within me, both as genuine as the other.
I wish I could say that Tom dying has made me less afraid of dying. I wish I could say that Tom dying has made it easier to talk about dying. What I can say is that Tom dying has made it more necessary to talk about dying, to make space for the dead amongst the living.
Dear Lill, reading your beautiful, sincere and authentic views about death has really moved me to tears! I too lost my dad and I have never had closure about the great loss that I endured. Your response was real, honest and very inspirational. Hoping that Tom is now resting in peace. Big hugs xxx
So very profound Lill! Your sharing your experience brought back my own memories of suffering after Boomer died and yes it never fully goes away. It is the high price we pay for great love. Take care of your special self. It will get better over time. Hugs!
Thank you Noelle. Hugs and love to you. xx
Well done Lil, I was 15 when my Dad died and you nailed it…it took a long time to understand why the world didn’t stop for even a second….
Thanks for your kind words, Emery. I’m so sorry you lost your father and had to process something so difficult at such a young age. x
Lill, I hope you got some comfort from writing this, the truth is it’s hard to make any sense of a tragic, and especially unexpected loss.
I was 23 when I lost my mum after a short illness, she was only 61.
I had great trouble accepting what had happened and had the overwhelming sense of pain, loss and emptiness for a long while afterwards. I was barely an adult and everyone else had their mum – I didn’t. Plus, nobody prepares you for the curse of a broken heart.
Time does help, as does the love of others who will support you through your loss. We go on because we have to. This experience may shape your future decisions and you will never forget, but the weight of your sense of loss will lighten.
Be kind to yourself whilst you are working this through.
I’m so sorry for the loss of your mum, and for it to be so early in life- an unimaginable loss. Thank you for reaching out and your kind words, Steph, they are deeply appreciated.