Living in the light

Yet another huge gap between updates here. Although I guess there are potentially limited things to say during a global pandemic – or maybe lots to say given the shambles that is our current government. I actually became a freelancer just as we went into the first lockdown in March 2020, which perhaps wasn’t the best timing. But I work from home anyway and have had a pretty steady stream of work. I’ve gone back to my favourite type of work, which involves turning over rocks to see what’s underneath them.

But the thing that has overshadowed much of late is that my dad died a couple of months ago. Although he had been in and out of hospital, it was still unexpected. He’d actually only been discharged from hospital a few days before. They hadn’t found anything physically wrong with him beyond the usual things of being 80 years old and having become so housebound that you’re pretty much unable to walk. 

On the day dad died, I could have gone to see him earlier in the day because my sister was going over to my parents’ house to talk to him about sorting himself out so that he didn’t continue in his steady, and increasingly rapid, decline to immobility. Less than an hour after my sister left, he suddenly collapsed and died. Afterwards, I wondered whether I should have gone over with my sister to see him, not that we knew he was about to die. But, I concluded that I would just have got arsey with him because of the frustration about the state he’d let himself get into – and that wouldn’t have been a great way to say a final goodbye.

The thing is that he was a very difficult man. I had an often miserable childhood because of various things he did or said, and that didn’t much improve in adulthood. Although distance helped and, in the last few years, we were at least a bit more on civil speaking terms. But it still leaves a hole that he’s gone. 

I have his ashes in my office. They just sit there quietly in the background. I hadn’t quite realised how final death was before. How when someone dies, all you then have left of them is their ashes. And if you scatter those, then you have nothing.

I know you have memories and can tell stories. But still… death is so final death. I don’t believe there is anything beyond this life. That’s something I can’t say to some of my friends, who would be truly horrified at my atheist ways. I see no point in trying to comfort myself that there might be something more. 

Even in all of this I choose to remind myself: I have great access to darkness, but I choose to live in the light.