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.