Content warning – you might want to skip this one if you are experiencing grief or family difficulties.
The Light’s father died this morning. She called me from work where she heard the news, and picked me up en route to see him in the care home where he breathed his last at about 4am. It wasn’t a great surprise; when we visited him last weekend it was hard to tell if he was responsive or knew we were there, and he looked as ill as I have ever seen a living person.
She has slept most of the rest of the day and is emotionally exhausted, but frankly he was an awful man who treated her like shit her entire life. The last time she tried help him out of filial duty a few years ago the reaction brought her trauma to a peak, leading to a breakdown which left her unable to work for 6 months. For the sake or her own health and sanity she had kept her distance since then.
When my own father died at the start of the year, from COVID related pneumonia after a lengthy stay in a care home due to Alzheimer’s, I was vaguely sad, but didn’t experience anything worth calling bereavement or grief. I hadn’t seen him this century, and acting as a pallbearer was as physically close as we had been for decades and emotionally close as we had ever been. If I ever had any mourning to do I did it in slow motion many years ago.
The evening before my father’s funeral I asked my mother if she still had a bright silk scarf which he never wore but which I remembered borrowing for a party in my teens. She didn’t, but gave me a watch, a Swiss made automatic, but another item which no one could never remember him wearing. I’m wearing it now.
This song struck deep when I heard it in between these two deaths.
Families, eh?
My father died when he was five years younger than I am now. He looked older than I do though, cos people did back then. Plus he smoked cigs, drank like many an Irishman of his generation and ate pretty crap food. Perhaps he was an alcoholic, I dunno. He wasn’t the greatest husband or father, but he was a very nice man.
I don’t like James Blunt’s voice, but I get the impression he’s a nice man too.
That’s sad, wider context notwithstanding. I’ve written about my dad here before who I have never quite got over losing, and on Sunday have a family do for my mum who passed in April. Its never easy and there are no easy words to offer apart from that in time you might start to get used to it, but rarely get over it.
This one gets me going.
I love Bruce’s story about his father on the ‘Live 1975–85’ that I think was originally the introduction to Independence Day:
When I was growing up, me and my dad used to go at it all the time over almost anything. I used to have really long hair, way down past my shoulders. I was 17 or 18, oh man, he used to hate it. And we got to where we’d fight so much that I’d spend a lot of time out of the house; and in the summertime it wasn’t so bad, ‘cause it was warm and my friends were out, but in the winter, I remember standing downtown where it’d get so cold and, when the wind would blow, I had this phone booth that I used to stand in. And I used to call my girl, like, for hours at a time, just talking to her all night long. And finally I’d get my nerve up to go home. And I’d stand there in the driveway and he’d be waiting for me in the kitchen and I’d tuck my hair down on my collar and I’d walk in and he’d call me back to sit down with him. And the first thing he’d always ask me was what did I think I was doing with myself. And the worst part about it was I could never explain it to him.
I remember I got in a motorcycle accident once and I was laid up in bed and he had a barber come in and cut my hair and, man, I can remember telling him that I hated him and that I would never ever forget it. And he used to tell me: “Man, I can’t wait till the army gets you. When the army gets you they’re gonna make a man out of you. They’re gonna cut all that hair off and they’ll make a man out of you.”
And this was, I guess, ’68 when there was a lot of guys from the neighbourhood going to Vietnam. I remember the drummer in my first band coming over to my house with his marine uniform on, saying that he was going and that he didn’t know where it was. And a lot of guys went, and a lot of guys didn’t come back. And the lot that came back weren’t the same anymore. I remember the day I got my draft notice. I hid it from my folks and three days before my physical me and my friends went out and we stayed up all night and we got on the bus to go that morning and man we were all so scared… And I went, and I failed. I remember coming home after I’d been gone for three days and walking in the kitchen and my mother and father were sitting there and my dad said: “Where you been?” and I said “I went to take my physical.” He said “What happened?”. I said “They didn’t take me.”
And he said: “That’s good.”
And another piece I love about fathers and love is Robert Hayden’s poem Those Winter Sundays.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Thanks for posting something so personal, Gatz. When it comes from the heart, it touches everyone, I am sure. The idea of totems is an interesting one – daily reminders in the physicality of the object.
The phrase mourning in slow motion is one that has resonance for me – my great aunt had Alzheimers when I was a child and I could tell even at a young age that this shadow of a woman was someone who my mother was slowly mourning, having enjoyed many family holidays with her. My grandmother had a stroke and the last months of her life she wasn’t the force of nature she had been, but a child again – actually quite a sweet one. And now my own father is suffering from Parkinsons’, which means we have been slowly losing him for about 5 years, and will carry on experiencing him ebbing away for another 5 years or more. Last time I was over, I gave him a wet shave, and it felt in part like I was caring for a simpleton, not the strong presence in my life, the dedicated, community-minded, self-starter.
It’s just a part of life, as Neil sung – all that is constant is change – human companionship makes it bearable – it is an honour to experience the reversal of roles, even as I mourn the people we were together many years ago.
Mourning in slow motion, yes…when my wife died she’d been suffering dreadfully for 18 months or so, the last 6 months in and out of hospital, respite care etc. I’d been with her every step of the way, and when she finally went (15 years ago next week as it happens) I felt nothing but relief. I’d done all my mourning before she died. I just felt I could start living again. And went straight out and bought a Golf TDi…
As for my dad, he and I had a rather remote relationship. He was a teacher, and at times it felt more like teacher and pupil than father and son. He was much closer to my sisters. When I was 8/9/10 he used to plonk me on the back of his BSA Bantam (me in t-shirt, shorts and sandals, no helmet – my mother freaked out) and head off into the wilds of Essex to do brass rubbings, zoom down the runways of disused airfields, and occasionally break into derelict half-timbered houses, of which there quite a few in those parts back then. But the closeness faded away as I headed into adolescence and got surly and monosyllabic – I went to the school he taught at (my mates all went there), which didn’t help. Neither did his gradual drift to the right, politically.
Not long before he died I was gobsmacked when he suddenly said, ‘I suppose I haven’t been a very good father to you, have I?’ Naturally I told him he was talking nonsense, but it seemed like a defining moment. He was a good man, and I have no real complaints, he just wasn’t one of the great dads.
Being a father is a challenge. I’m definitely not one of the great ones. It can be hard to make and keep a connection as the person each child is changes so radically almost before my eyes. I think I know who each girl is, and then the reverse entropy that is childhood confounds me with what each has become while I wasn’t looking, often absorbing and then reflecting bits of my and my wife’s being and personas, expressions and behaviour that we weren’t consciously aware of. Bit by bit they construct themselves from what they experience. and in between all the work and household chores and catering and collapsing after another hamster wheel of a day, I try to be patient, to listen, to connect. What comes through, I won’t know (possibly ever, possibly until years later) – lots of times our interactions seem grinding and frictious (is that a word)? Sometimes, particularly when we are engaged in a project that delights us both, or rarely all 3, and even sometimes all 4, it feels like the world is in sync, and anything is possible. Naturally it doesn’t last.
I remember times like that with my Dad, like your trips round Essex with yours – they are golden, whatever else life throws in our path. We can go and dwell there whenever we want.
I was probably a bit sub-par in the fatherhood stakes when my kids were young – I was away quite a lot on biz and generally caught up in the publishing life, involving lots of late nights etc. My daughter gets cross with me because I can’t remember details like whether she had chickenpox and there’s nobody else to ask.
Of course now I’m the sole remaining parent…
My father died in late 2020 after a very short illness. He was a completely mentally competent and physically fit 84 year old, and then in the space of six weeks he was given a diagnosis of leukaemia and was gone. It was all so quick, no slow decline followed by sympathetic offerings that it was ‘for the best’. He was my best and closest friend and I still tear up almost daily when I think of him (as I am now writing this).
My Mother-in-law died in December. She was a cold, strange and distant parent and grandparent and her passing was in complete contrast to my father’s, like a cold blue light that gradually dimmed until it finally extinguished, an event noticed by fewer than a dozen people. I saw not a tear from my wife or any of her siblings, and if there was any sense of loss felt by the grandchildren, it was well disguised.
Remember when I was small and my mum had to regularly miss a day’s work (something she and my dad could ill afford to do) to take me from Coventry to Birmingham to try and correct my cleft palate.
My abiding memory of my Dad is how he would find out what time the train passed his factory in Canley and always be standing high in an external landing waving at us as we went past.
This song by Pete Atkin always reminds me of him
‘My abiding memory of my Dad is how he would find out what time the train passed his factory in Canley and always be standing high in an external landing waving at us as we went past. ‘ – that is the loveliest thing @Jaygee and a perfect example of how it is often the smallest acts of thoughtfulness and generosity that make the biggest impact.
I don’t usually go for posting personal or self-indulgent stuff on here, but why not on this occasion!
My dad died suddenly at the age of 58 from a sudden aneurysm/brain haemhorrage that came out of nowhere. He had only recently retired a few months before, and was just starting to take full advantage of his retirement in various travels and adventures. At the time he collapsed, he and my mum were in Slovenia on a hang gliding holiday!
Talking of totems/reminders – in my wallet I still keep the train ticket from the airport to Ljubljana at the time me and my brother and sister travelled out there in a panic when my mum first contacted us. Seems a funny thing to hold on to, but there you go.
At 58 he seemed to me like an old man. Now, of course, being less than a decade away from that age myself, I have a different perspective.
I can’t complain about my childhood. He was a well-loved man, although quiet and distant (and quite scary sometimes) as a father. His love of music was the big thing I got from him, and my only regret now is I didn’t bond with him more over this. My favourite songs now are probably his own favourites, and like him my taste is kind of stuck in the late 60s, early 70s: Man of the World by Fleetwood Mac, Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman, The Beatles, Cream, Mike Oldfield.
My dad had a fall last week as a result of a mini stroke, cracked a couple of ribs and is in hospital until it’s deemed safe for him to be at home. He’s 93 and we now have to see if he needs carers. He’s always been difficult, unpleasant even at times. Not sure how I feel about it all.
I didn’t manage very well when my own kids were small but once they got into their teens, it all got a lot better and they talk about their childhood fondly so it can’t have been that bad.
That may well have been how The Light’s father ended up in hospital for a month before being moved to the care home (we didn’t find out until the latter bed). With his Parkinson’s and a couple of TIAs he was in and out hospital like a cuckoo clock for the last few years of his life.
Falls are generally not a good sign
Often followed by severe loss of confidence and a decline in general health.
My father died in 1987 (stomach cancer), he was 59 I was 25. Has been pretty weird to have recently become older than he ever was. Still dream about him a lot
@Dai
Know what you mean. I am now exactly the same age as my dad when he died (66) in 1988.
While not especially afraid of death, I will be glad when this particular landmark is safely in the rearview mirror
Another Loudon WAinwright III song for you both.
I miss my dad a lot and had a dream about him a few months ago in which we were chatting and just doing normal stuff, and I can remember the feeling of loss all over again as I realised I was waking up and it had been a dream.
It’s a real killer when that happens, isn’t it? I’ve done that as well, for a couple of different people. Recently it was my grandad. They seem so real and vivid in the dream.
My sister, nine years gone, has been ‘back’ a couple of times recently. No great drama – just there doing normal stuff. Like the man said, someone take these dreams away.
I find it fairly comforting in that we are having a kind of relationship even after his death. I have other occasional dreams about an alcoholic close friend who died at 42. In these cases there is more guilt that I didn’t do more to save him, even though it was probably impossible.
My Dad was a nice man, quiet,thoughtful, reserved and popular with his work colleagues. He was devoted to my Mum, but he wasn’t very good at being a father. He was distant and undemonstrative, and when I was a child and wanted a Dad to play with he never really wanted to. The distance widened as I grew older and he was never able to shake off the authority he felt he ought to have, and was unable to treat me as an equal – or at least as an adult and a friend. I’ve regretted it and missed it all my life. Only towards the end when he became ill with lymphoma was there a degree of rapprochement between us, but even then neither of us could bring ourselves to say the things that had always been left unsaid.
When he died 22 years ago I felt no bitterness, just a huge sense of regret and missed chances. The hospital gave me his personal effects in a plastic bag. His watch, his glasses, his hearing aid and his shaving brush. I’ve kept them all. I stumbled into the hospital room where he lay dead and undignified not having been made aware that he had passed away. A brown paper tag with his name on was attached to his wrist with a strip of white bandage. I’ve kept that too. In death he lost all of the dignity that he had tried so hard to maintain in life.
A beautiful and honest OP @Gatz, which has promoted some equally powerful responses. Thank you, and all the best to you and to the Light. Whatever the relationship was like, the loss of a parent is always a really hard thing to navigate your way through.
HP posted a marvellous, beautiful little fragment of fondness in the form of a poem about his dad; he put it here about 7 years ago, yet I’ve never forgotten it. In fact I kept a copy for myself. I read it when he posted it, on the day before my own mother’s funeral, and its sentiment rang so true for me about both my parents. They are gone now, dad from cancer, and mum who simply gave up a little while later. They were both wonderful people, and I look at the world we have now, knowing what they went through, and can be certain that they would be disappointed to see the state of things.
I remember that poem by HP.
I wish I’d kept a copy.
This one? It’s a wonderful poem. So excellent that I kept a copy. Hope you don’t mind, HP.
Something of England will go with him in memory
That Ariel summer down to the sea
Racing the rattler under galleon skies
The halloo from a hill, the cut pillows with steam
And apples bright as bells in the shining bower
The chalk stream chill and ribbon rill
By the wagon in the furrowed lea
Through blithe lanes to the free house
A seat in the sunset window, and her laugh
Rig the dappled canvas, spark and tinder
The starstruck sigh of her name
And the breath of old gods, green and gold
Passed then from that blessed earth
On the best of days, and the last
The Radio Times unread, not thinking much at all
The kettle clouds the dimming glass, waits for his star to fall
Yes. Exquisite isn’t it?
That is fabulous. Made my day, thanks. I like this one too:
He is gone – David Harkins
You can shed tears that he is gone
Or you can smile because he has lived
You can close your eyes and pray that he will come back
Or you can open your eyes and see all that he has left
Your heart can be empty because you can’t see him
Or you can be full of the love that you shared
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday
You can remember him and only that he is gone
Or you can cherish his memory and let it live on
You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
Or you can do what he would want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on.
Oh, that is beautiful
We had this read at my mum’s funeral last year (ameneded to She Is Gone obvs)
Beautiful poem.
My dad fell into a river and died three years ago. My brother and I spent three days with the search parties looking for his body. When someone found him, we chose not to go and identify the body. As my brother said at the time, “How many three-day old corpses do you think there are in that fucking river?”
This sounds grim but needs context. A week earlier we’d celebrated his 80th birthday on the same riverbank. Everyone he’d ever loved in his life (those that were still alive) was there. Afterwards he sent us all individual notes saying how much he’d enjoyed the day. A week later he was out for a walk in a glorious midsummer dawn, had a heart attack, fell into the water and was dead before he hit it. You couldn’t wish for a more cinematic exit. After the initial shock, the family’s consensus seemed to be, fair play, what a perfect way to leave the stage. So somehow we never really grieved, my mum and us. Does that makes us weird?
My dad worked all his life in overalls and died with engine oil still ingrained in his fingers. We’d had our differences, as dads and sons do, all through my teens and early 20s. But I remember exactly the day we moved on from all that and it’s remarkably similar to the Springsteen story above. I was straight out of University at 21 and temporarily back in the family home, and he took me aside and asked me if I wanted to join the family business. They worked under cars twelve hours a day, my dad, his brother, and my cousin. I said No, thanks, I think I’ll go my own way. And he said, “Good lad.”
Up. Muchly.
Great story. My dad was also a mechanic all of his life and he loved his job but it was never for me. I lost him in 2016 – as a young child I thought he was very strict, as an adult he was my absolute hero and I miss him every day. Yesterday would have been his 92nd birthday.
This is a wonderful thread. So much familiarity in the words used and emotions felt. Dad was 71 and I was 26 when he died of a sudden aneurysm. It was just at the point when my very young marriage was starting to frey at the edges and sone fatherly advice may have helped.
Despite the horrors of his war years in Singapore my dad was a lovely, kind man. I often wonder how many hours and miles he clocked up ferrying me to football matches. He’d come and watch when I played pub football in my early 20s. He’d stand by the side of the pitch saying nothing then get in his car and go home. I’ve never forgiven myself for not once offering him a pint in the pub with my mates. Why was I such an arse?
Now my boys are around the age I was when dad died I realise I have no reference points for how these relationships are meant to work but I think we’re doing OK. I wish Dad had lived to see his grandsons.
He would have been 100 last year and I think about him a lot. Mum who’s in a care home now does too. As dementia does its thing old memories seem to come to the fore. She dropped in to the conversation the other day how when they first married and lived in my grandparents bungalow dad’s war nightmares were so bad he’d climb out of the window and escape to the garden. Blimey. How he went on to have a job, family and outwardly happy life I don’t know but I’m enormously proud of him and miss him still 30 years after his death.
I’ve posted this little video I made before but will share it again now if that’s OK…
Great thread. It saddens me to hear of fathers who were unloved, disliked, even hated, probably because it’s outside of my experience. My dad was a solidly working-class Cumbrian who grew up in the 1930s depression, had no formal qualifications, served six (conscripted) years in the military, and was the kindest, gentlest man I ever knew. He died when I was 24. Isn’t life a bugger?
Some lovely – and heartbreaking – posts on this thread.
When I was a kid, maybe 5 or 6, I hero-worshipped my dad; I guess many people feel that way about their father. As the years dripped by, I began to resent him a bit: a know-it-all type who increasingly got on my nerves. We fell out badly several times, and the relationship was very strained.
Years later, in my mid-twenties, I hit some financial difficulties, and he managed to get me a labouring job at the place where he worked. He’d regularly give me a lift in, and one day, the genesis of which is lost in time, we called in for a pint on the way home. Skip to now, and we’re pretty much best mates. We go for a drink every weekend, regularly meet up for meals, and we go to watch live football together. I’ll always be grateful we got the opportunity to reconnect on an adult level.
A wonderful and moving and often very sad thread, this. Thanks for it.
I love my dad very much. He’s an extremely loving and gentle man, which I think are his defining traits, but they make him sound quiet, which he isn’t. He’s incredibly musically gifted and knowledgable. He’s really funny. He gives voice to whatever butterfly thought has just flitted across his brain, often resulting in saying very unexpected and seemingly random things. He’s very silly. He’s almost wildly demonstrative of his feelings sometimes, but very rarely angry: he’s a brooder, and a sulker, but not for long. He’s a bit flamboyant, and he has that very man-of-a-certain-age instinct to try and appear expert on topics he knows absolutely nothing about. He lost his dad to the war at the age of 3, and was raised in the sort of grinding, Road to Wigan Pier, barely-subsistence poverty that I don’t think is quite possible in Britain in 2022 without actually living on the streets. And yet, a more loving and content man you’d be pushed to find – I don’t know how he’s done it. And his marriage to my mum is – there’s no other word – blissful, after fifty years. I’ve never known a couple who are more truly happy and in love. Relationship goals.
The flamboyance and “oh yes, I read two inches about this in The Times and now I’m an expert” stuff: those two things used to drive me mad, but a few years back I made a wholly conscious decision to stop being annoyed by them. I love him, and who knows how long we have left to love our best people?
He’s great. I hope he knows how much I love him. I tell him, often, because we’re that sort of family, but I just hope he knows.
My Dad died when he was 56. I was 19. One of those shy men who blossom into vivacity and silliness in the company of loved family and close friends.
A working class Northumbrian he became a Telegram boy on leaving school and then a country postman for the rest of his life after his national service in the Coldstream Guards in post-war Palestine. He told a story of escorting Menachem Begin into custody during that time but I’m not sure if that’s true.
He worked hard. After hours in the afternoons he ran a Painting and Decorating business to keep the family ends met. Most of the time he was tired. If I think of him now I see him in his armchair in the evening still in his white stained overalls fast asleep. Because he was tired he was often grumpy and irritable, but he wasn’t an angry soul.
I was the last of three children by some margin. A quite obvious ‘mistake’ – my brother is 14 years older and my sister 10 years. I don’t think he quite got over that. Another one to see through childhood when he may have been hoping to see his first two up away and out soon. He loved me though I could tell I frustrated him sometimes. I was shy and sensitive. Not very boyish or rambunctious and a bit of a softie. We had some good times laughing together alone with each other but I sensed I slightly disappointed him. We became a bit distant with each other during my teens.
Because he was old fashioned and he took not one iota of interest in his general health and diet he had an almost fatal heart attack at 54. It hollowed him out. He was forced to retire from work completely. He became depressed as he, and we, all realised he was on borrowed time in spite of the heart bypass surgery that had saved him. Incredibly, the surgeon who operated was a boyhood pal he hadn’t seen in decades.
He never fully recovered and his personality and essence disappeared. He had another heart attack a year or so later and was admitted to hospital. It was there that he first really opened to me. We shared the same speech impediment. A stammer. Sitting with him he told me of his youth and his deep shame and anger at having one. He told me tale of a bully of a Sergeant Major who would make him speak publicly and wait for him to falter then berate him. It had been breaking his heart that he knew what I might be in for but he simply hadn’t the first idea how to say so till then. He died very soon after in his hospital bed with his sister holding his hand.
A good man, flattened by his frustrations and responsibilities and disregard for his own well being. My Dad.
Fuckin ell lads, what a thread this is.
I have put together a piece about R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People that I was going to post as a Feature on the 30th June but it belongs on this thread. Beware. It’s a Feature length.
Pop music is meant to be disposable, ephemeral, of the moment, but there are certain records that are so important to us as individuals, they become part of the fabric of our lives, deeply engrained in our hearts and souls for a lifetime. Automatic For The People is such a record for me. It landed a few days after my thirty-fourth birthday, officially an adult with a responsible job, a large mortgage and two small children to care for. An album about leaving childish ways behind but anxious about the uncertainty and burden of growing up was bound to appeal. I felt gratified that Michael Stipe, a little younger than me, had come out as a fellow baldy. It was unusual for such a well-known Pop star to do so and bitter experience taught me that it could precipitate an existential crisis, posing difficult personal questions about ageing, sexual attractiveness and inner confidence. R.E.M. had found success on a major label with their previous release, Out Of Time, and its single, Losing My Religion. Automatic For The People is more than a consolidation, it’s the product of a band working together at their peak, able to reach out to a large audience, while still retaining their indie edge and air of mystery. R.E.M. was a band that had matured, no longer needing to compete with the youngsters, most of whom, in 1992, were playing grunge. They were an established, successful act with nothing to prove. They could flex their muscles when they wanted to but the sound of Automatic For The People is mostly mellow and reflective.
It is also an album obsessed with death and my father was dying. He never really knew his own father, who died of stomach cancer when my dad was very small. He was indulged by his mother whose money came from a greengrocers business. He went to art school, the same one John Lennon enrolled at but never attended. He struggled to find work. He became a photolithographic retoucher, a job soon taken over by machines. He spent long periods unemployed. He was a sensitive soul, prone to depression, who ended up drinking regularly and smoking all his adult life. He did not believe in god but allowed my mother to send his two boys to a Catholic school, to mass every Sunday and confession every other Saturday. In late 1991, he started to have difficulty swallowing. Scopes revealed nothing. I remember the meagre meals he used to put on a small plate to make them look more substantial. A liquid diet suited him better, especially if it involved whisky. The weight began to fall off. By August and September, he had numerous tests and his third camera in twelve months revealed an oesophageal cancer. He spent most of October in hospital. An attempt at inserting a stent had no effect. He was put on a drip and end of life drugs via a syringe driver.
The hospital was a twenty minute drive from work and then thirty minutes back home, the perfect length of journey to listen to Automatic For The People from beginning to end. It became the only CD I listened to in the car throughout that time. Fortunately, I’d had time to familiarise myself with it before my father became really sick. During the period of familiarisation, it was all about me, fearful of my duties at work and at home and regretting the lost opportunities of my youth. But, once I started the car to go to the hospital and pressed play, R.E.M. gently took me through the stages of grieving and guided me towards resilience and hope.
Drive is a downbeat, melancholy beauty of an opener. Its melody and some of its lyric is based on David Essex’s best single, Rock On. Bill Haley also gets a mention. It is written from the point of view of an elder statesman sighing with resignation and wagging a finger at the kids of today. They are reckless, as all adolescents are, partying hard, taking drugs, driving without due care and attention. Stipe’s admonishment goes unheeded and the clocks keeps moving relentlessly towards payback, tick-tock. It was the ideal song to start my journey, its measured pace and calm acoustic sound facilitating safe driving. My father would have approved. He always loved cars and built a classic MG TD from scratch, but he was a careful driver, keen to avoid any injury to his beloved metal. Drive bides its time to deliver the most dramatic moment when Stipe mumbles a nursery rhyme and John Paul Jones’s string arrangement lifts Peter Buck’s electric guitar solo into a state of majesty. The irony is that I actually met David Essex when I was a reckless teenager myself. A gang of us visited a friend at Leeds University for a wild weekend. On Saturday afternoon, we were nursing hangovers from a night that merged into morning, playing table football in the student’s union. In walked David Essex and his entourage. By then, he was past his prime playing the university circuit. Nevertheless, he was charm and chaisma personified. The girls melted to his cheeky grin and it was settled, we were going to the gig. My mate and I spent the whole time carrying young teens who had fainted out to the back of the hall to recover. Most were soon back in the mosh pit, swooning again. It was strangely satisfying work, better than paying close attention to the actual music. Drive is a complex song that provokes even more complex emotions in me. It sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Try Not To Breathe was a tough listen in October 1992. It is a jaunty tune, almost buoyant following Drive but its subject is someone on their deathbed, having lived a full life, who is now ready for the end and no longer wants to be a trouble to anyone. It is said to be about Stipe’s grandmother. “I’ve seen things you will never see” is reminiscent of Roy Batty’s final soliloquy in Blade Runner when the replicant finally accepts death and, in the process, saves Deckard’s life. The problem was that my father was never ready to die. He was only fifty-six. There was a terrible moment when my mother asked a priest to bless him. Having been in a coma for a few days, he screamed as soon as the holy water hit him as though it burnt. He yelled at the priest to go away, almost managing to sit up. There is an element of optimism in Try Not To Breathe, a hint of a positive, smile-inducing memory, but the memory of his horror haunted me for a long time.
The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite was welcome light relief in comparison. It’s an old-fashioned cult-hero R.E.M. performance, obscure lyrics, jangly guitar, an unintelligible chorus and lots of high vocal noises. A sidewinder is a thick, coiled wire that connects a phone receiver to its box in a pay-phone. In 1992, there were few mobile phones. If you didn’t have a landline, you had to use the phone box and you needed to be sure to take plenty of coins with you. There was one outside where I worked, which was used mainly by people scoring drugs. They’d make a call, then wait until the drugs were delivered by a youngster on a bike. This song struck me as about a failure to connect with a dealer. The narrator is so desperate, he’s willing to sleep standing up in the phone box. Superficially, a light nonesense song featuring Dr Seuss’s cat in the hat, turns out to be very dark indeed. Still, it’s a toe-tapper, or at least a fingers-on-steering-wheel-tapper.
Most people have had their fill of Everybody Hurts. However, it is a tender, delicate classic whose power to move is preserved. Its simplicity gives it tremendous inclusivity. The main songwriter is the drummer, Mick Berry. His efforts, the clear vocal delivery by Stipe and John Paul Jones’s string arrangement keep it on the right side of mawkish. It is an anti-suicide song for young people but, for me, it concerns any kind of painful experience. My days and nights were long. I felt alone, even though my brother and mother were going through the same experience. Being an uptight Englishman, I cried at night when there were no witnesses. However, Stipe was there to support me and the swell of strings and loud guitar gave me comfort. If you haven’t listened to it recently, give it a spin. New Orleans Instrumental Number 1 was a soothing balm, a moment of quiet contemplation to end my initial journey. A few deep breaths and I was at the bedside.
Sweetness Follows, a funereal lullaby, takes up where I left off. On vinyl, it ends the ‘Drive’ side. For me it summarised my previous hour or two, sitting with my mother and brother watching the clock tick slowly. Beside a deathbed, every second feels like an hour, every minute a day and every hour a week. You closely observe every breath, every bead of sweat, every flicker of the monitors. Are things slowing down or speeding up? You wish time would pass more quickly, then feel guilty when you realise what that means. Any chat is very superficial. Each of us were lost in our own worlds, as the song says. There had been no falling out but my brother and I had led seperate lives for a long time and the parent I got on with best was my sweet, tolerant, non-judgemental dad. All this swirled around my brain until R.E.M.’s beautiful melody helped me to come to some resolution and believe there was a sliver of light at the end of this darkness. It was as if Stipe understood.
The so-called ‘Ride’ side begins with Monty Got A Raw Deal but, on CD, the album simply rolls on. By all accounts, Montgomery Clift was a kind, affectionate man, an original Hollywood method actor along with Marlon Brando and James Dean. He had a long friendship with Elizabeth Taylor. There were rumours of an affair. There were rumours he was gay. One day, when leaving her house, he nodded off at the wheel and drove into a telegraph pole. He injured his face, his main source of income. He still got parts but was rendered unreliable by addiction to prescription drugs and excess use of alcohol. The song is a sympathetic, melancholic tribute, backed by mandolin and wheezing accordion, Berry’s drumming controlling an irregular rhythm with ease. It’s really about unfulfilled promise. Clift died young of an alcohol-related heart attack aged forty-five, an under-appreciated talent. My father was a talented artist but never believed in himself. When I was small, the week before Christmas, he’d put huge sheets of paper on the walls and draw cartoon characters, such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, The Flintstones, all in Christmas settings. They were magical, much more magical than any shop-bought decorations I’ve had to make do with since. His job involved drawing, by eye, the three primary colours that together make a picture, so that they could be plated out and used for a print run. He rarely painted. When he did, it would take weeks or months but he never liked the end product and would destroy them. There were few left after he died. One of my most precious possessions is a doodle I found in a sketch book, a drawing he probably spent a few moments completing then forgot all about, now framed and on the wall, worthless, but totally invaluable to me.
Ignoreland is a much needed howl of rage, out-grunging Pearl Jam. Some think its mood is incongruous in the context of the album but, at this point, I was well up for some shouting and swearing. I didn’t know much about American politics. The eagle-eyed will have spotted that I overlooked “bush-whacked” and the reference to Ollie North in Drive. However, that did not matter because I could relish yelling lines like “up the republic my skinny ass” although I have never possessed a skinny ass. “I’m just profoundly frustrated by all of this, so, fuck you, man,” is so typically Stipe, it made me laugh. On an LP full of compassion and empathy, the real sore thumb is Star Me Kitten. It’s creepy and manipulative. If you really want to be freaked out, take a listen to William S. Burroughs performing it. The only redeeming feature is the reference to Goats Head Soup, an album both my father and I enjoyed.
If Everybody Hurts is a classic of its kind, Man On The Moon is transcendent, possibly R.E.M.’s finest song. It has a lovely cadent melody and a big chorus, featuring impressive slide guitar by Peter Buck. Andy Kaufman is another talented man who died young, aged just thirty-five, of lung cancer. His humour was conceptual and frankly odd, perhaps a product of his autism. He didn’t tell jokes. He enjoyed pranks and wrong-footing his audience. R.E.M. probably remembered him as a professional wrestler, from his controversial appearances on Saturday Night Live and Fridays and playing Latka in the sitcom Taxi. Because of his pranks, many believed he’d faked his death, allowing Stipe to speak directly to him in the song as though he were still alive. Although Kaufman hadn’t registered with me, most of the other memories chime with mine: Mott The Hoople, The Game Of Life, Monopoly, Twister, Risk, checkers and chess. Egypt was troubled by the horrible asp. My father was fascinated by the pyramids. He had a book he shared with me that looked at their mathematics in great detail. He made a cardboard pyramid with a plinth, all in the right dimensions, and positioned it on the bathroom window ledge, orientated to the stars on Orion’s belt. Its purpose was to keep his razor blades sharp in the same way the Egyptians preserved the mummified pharoahs. Stipe is subversive, flirting with conspiracy theories, with the line “If you believed they put a man on the moon.” For me and my father, there was no doubt. Together, we had watched the grainy black and white coverage of the moon landing on 20th July 1969, equally engrossed. The Eagle definitely landed in The Sea Of Tranquility and Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface uttering his immortal line. Years later, I was lucky enough to holiday in Florida. Among the visits to Disney and Universal Studios, one day was spent at The Kennedy Space Centre, partially to honour my father. It was a disaster. It was baking hot and the kids were uninterested, bored and miserable. I did manage to buy a pen that works in zero gravity. Dad would have liked that. Man In The Moon is set in the seventies, giving us the chance to think of happier memories with an affectionate nostalgia that makes us feel good. Automatic For The People, as my drive home approached its end, was coaxing me to set aside the image of a cachectic body with multiple tubes, clammy pale skin and erratic breathing.
Nightswimming is another beautiful song, harking back to the past, concerning the fleeting nature of life and the loss of innocence. Teenagers are behaving recklessly again but, this time, Stipe is one of the miscreants. It’s not a song I specifically relate to having never gone skinny-dipping myself, literally, metaphorically nor euphemistically. Mick Mills’s piano and the strings give it a classical, stately feel, a companion piece to Everybody Hurts. Find The River is the perfect conclusion, bringing us full circle back to Drive. Another life is coming to an end, the cycle of life is completing another rotation. The imagery is quite beautiful, set to the acoustic backing of many of the other tracks. “My thoughts are flower strewn, ocean storm, bayberry moon.” Find The River effectively summarises the album, attempting to communicate important life lessons to the young: slow down, even though life passes by quickly, find your own way, watch out for hidden dangers but rejoice in all the wonderful experiences coming your way. It’s a proxy for the deathbed conversation my father and I never had. The vocal is special, sung without bitterness or regret, ending with strength and courage. The lyric obviously means a lot to Stipe. Find The River quietly peters out, drifting away without a fuss, just as my father did a few days after the incident with the priest.
The title, Automatic For The People, is the we-aim-to-please motto of Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods eatery in Athens, Georgia. The austere cover photo is of an ornament from outside the Sinbad Motel in Miami. R.E.M. have form for strange covers and references to their home town. Murmur’s front cover is a Japanese weed dominating the landscape and the trestle on the back became a landmark in Athens. They are also fond of including rejected album titles somewhere on the cover. Reckoning has File Under Water on its sleeve and Document has File Under Fire. At one point, Automatic For The People was going to be called Star, which goes some way to explain the cover image. Their most impactful album cover is the rather ordinary looking Out Of Time. On the back, they included a petition for Rock The Vote, a campaign to make it simpler for Americans to vote. Tens of thousands were sent to senators. The bill was passed in 1993, in no small part due to R.E.M.’s lobbying.
Afterwards, for a long time, I couldn’t listen to these songs. I didn’t feel I could relive that car journey. When I finally did, I discovered an overwhelmingly kind, warm, intimate album that actually eases the pain by bringing some joy. It makes me think of cartoons at Christmas, an MG TD, a hair-brained scheme to keep razors sharp and watching the moon landing rather than syringe drivers. It reminds me that the love is always there although the loved one isn’t. It’s a grown up album, tackling grown up themes. We should talk about death more. Too often, it takes place behind closed doors, almost in secret, and much too often in a hospital. However, death happens to us all and the way R.E.M. handle it, in a clutch of these songs, is affirmative and constructive, even celebratory. There is so much to extract from life for the brief time we are alive and the cycle of life is wondrous, even when we are the ones ageing on the downside. If Pop is the squeal of tween and Rock the roar of rebellion, can a Pop/Rock album help someone become a man? Can it address some of the biggest questions and come up with sensible answers? During this phase of listening, Automatic For The People soundtracked me behaving more like an adult. R.E.M. accepted their position as elder statesmen of Pop at a time when they were the biggest band in the world. I could, therefore, accept my position as a father and a leader at work. I had to curb my drinking. In the eighties, I was either drunk or working, sometimes both. I was a nasty drunk, unlike my father who was funny and amiable until the mornings when he was withdrawn and depressed. It wasn’t easy but I’m pleased that my children can barely remember me ever being the worse for wear with alcohol.
Today, Automatic For The People makes me contemplate my own death. I’ve outlived my father by a considerable amount already. Do I have the courage and wisdom to support the next generation to find their own river when things aren’t going my way? Will I have the strength to try not to breathe and accept the end when it comes? When I’m comatose in my deathbed, what music will my family play for me? They don’t know what I really like. My grandchildren know that I love T.Rex and Tamla Motown. Chic and Earth, Wind & Fire are enjoyed by pretty much all the family. The Beatles will definitely get a look in and my T shirts of Steely Dan, The Average White Band, John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix should give them more clues. However, I doubt anyone will think of R.E.M., which is a shame because I would like to hear Automatic For The People under those circumstances.
Music affects people in different ways. We all have our own emotional reactions and clinical opinions and it it depends on how and when we listen. My experience of music used to be communal, a social event. I went to friend’s houses specifically to listen to records because we could only afford a few each. Gigs were attended in a group. Shared taste in music was a proxy for compatibility with potential girlfriends. Parties and discos were collective euphoric events. The only people I listen to music with these days are grandchildren to unleash the pure fun in Pop. As I’ve aged, my consumption has become more private and solitary, often under headphones or alone in the car. I have never listened to Automatic For The People with someone else present. My relationship with it is intensely personal, more so than any other record. I love it so much it hurts because I love and miss my dad so much it still hurts. I can’t say that Automatic For The People has given me a great deal of pleasure over the years but it has given me so much more. It’s a vessel into which I can pour my confused feelings and shape them into something that makes sense. It has helped me become the person I am. It’s biggest impact was during the Autumn of the year it was released, when my world was very bleak, but I have always felt it was there for me, whenever I needed it over thirty years. Scarily, life does, indeed, pass by quickly. I’d better take R.E.M.’s advice and make the most of the little I have left.
The gold standard of Afterword writing @Tiggerlion. Beautifully expressed about your father, meticulous on REM. Wonderful heartfelt stuff.
This subject has certainly prompted some excellent posts, not to mention a reminder of HP’s beautiful poem.
🙏
I’ve just read this, Tiggs – now sitting with tears in my eyes. Nothing to do with my father: but that album meant a lot to Margaret and me, especially when we first got together – we played Find the River at her funeral.
Quality writing, my friend.
Thank you, fitter. Find The River is a beautiful song, intensely moving and perfect for a funeral for someone deeply loved. I bet there wasn’t a dry eye at the time.
Funnily enough, I can’t remember much of my dad’s funeral. It was a Catholic ceremony despite his atheism. There were hymns, for sure. I don’t know if there were songs. I’ll ask my mum.
Beautiful piece about a beautiful album, but “Mick” Berry? And Star Me Kitten is great
Oh, classy.
Just pointing out something he may want to correct. that’s all.
That’s fine. I need all the help I can get. 😄
As for Star Me Kitten. It’s a clever song but its theme is very different to the rest of the album and, as a result, it jars with me. I’m sure you can understand that in the context of the circumstances I listened to it.
Yes, I get that. maybe (B side) Fretless could work better in this context?
Or Photograph with Natalie Merchant?
Great thread. I’ve ummed and aahed about chipping in, but what the hell.
My Dad is, mercifully, still with us. He’s a very impressive human being; he rose from less than nothing to have an extremely impressive career (albeit the impressive bit came after I left home). He’s smart and knowledgeable and gentle, and he always treated my mother with huge respect. He has lifelong friends, and can charm any group he wants to. He’s a brilliant and incredibly classy person, who I’ve learned a huge amount from by simply watching.
All of that said, he wasn’t the world’s greatest father. He probably couldn’t have been: he grew up without one himself and I always got the sense he felt he’d ticked the box of bettering his own experience by the simple virtue of not dying prematurely. He was emotionally absent the majority of the time, and he’s not much of a talker. He probably suffered at times from comparison to Mum, who is all talk and all emotion. He was neither, and those were often the things I really needed as a kid.
Somewhere in my mid teens I figured out how to do for myself the things he patently wasn’t going to do for me, and to accept that I wasn’t going to impress him any time soon, or at least that he would certainly never let me know if I somehow did. I figured I’d have to settle for impressing myself, which has been a good strategy, because – frankly – it’s easily done. I also learned to appreciate the good of Dad (of which there was a great deal) and to skate over the bad. That involved letting go of a certain amount of anger, and accepting the simple fact that he did his best. That’s love sometimes – the acceptance of a person for who they are and will always be, and finding the joy in it.
These days, we get on well. I don’t see a huge amount of him, but when I do, we have a good chat. He likes hearing about what I’m doing at work, and I can tell he takes a certain pride in it. I know his boundaries and I don’t intrude on them. I’m not waiting for some kind of big conversation where we chop it all up and go over the past, because I know for a fact that will never happen, and that it would probably be unbearable for him if it did. He has given my siblings and I so much more than he ever received himself, and he has had more than his own share of pain with which to wrestle. Simply put: he did his best, and that’s all that can be asked.
And yet…. I always thought I’d understand him better when I had my own kids. And then my eldest was born, and I took one look at her and realised I was never going to understand him at all. Not really. And that’s OK.
I love him, and I know the day will come when he’s not around any more. God knows what emotions that day will bring. In amongst the grief and the pain, I suspect I will wish, not for the first time, that I could have met and known him as someone other than his son. Maybe in the next life.
What a wonderful read of the innermost of, mostly, sorry @locust, older males beginning to contemplate, through their fathers, their own mortality, the then perceived false steps and perspectives put through the wringer of personal experiences, thus offering belated understandings and acceptances.
My Dad would be 117, were it not he died 35 years ago. Another graduate of the Japanese finishing school of 1940 – 45, he had, clearly, a bad war, and never spoke about it. Just the odd snippet would drop, such as, as an eager med student, I excitedly told him how they were again pioneering the use of maggots in chronic leg ulcers, as they only ate the “bad stuff”. “Not on the railroad”, he said, “everyone was that malnourished, all of them was bad stuff, and the larvae rattled through the lot.” Ugh, the years and my experience magnifying that statement’s significance over the years, not least as that was al he was prepared to say on the subject. I later learnt he contributed to a paper in an august medical journal, based on the methods he and his medical colleagues had had to improvise with in the jungle, his research all documented and hidden. I only discovered this after his death, together with the fact he had been mentioned in dispatches for some bravery in defending his patients from the demands of their captors that they be working when they couldn’t.
A quiet man, he preferred his own company to that of others, content with a crossword book and a sandwich. He was never a tactile man and not one for overmuch ostentation, happy to potter about in retirement. i think he despair of my wildness as a young man, unable to know what to say, so said nothing, his disapproval all the louder through that. So he was delighted as I managed to pass my exams and follow in his footsteps, although I feel he was of the generation that looked down a little on GPs. (Ha! Like now!!)
A massive stroke nearly polished him off first, as he stolidly started to teach himself to write with his left hand, his right no longer working. He was doing quite well, when the second walloped him for having the temerity to fight back.
Too young to appreciate him as much as I wish I had, as I age I think of hime more frequently. It is difficult not to, given he looks at me daily, whenever I glance in a mirror, his apple undoubtedly having made the bulk of my gene-pool, I having his looks and my mother’s Gaelic temperament of day dreaming and whimsy.
I wonder what they will both have to say about how my life panned out after they went, my mother spending ten long years a widow before herself dying, another oesophageal cancer, like Mr Tigger’s Dad.
Gosh, the pollen count is high today……..
Comments removed at the Author’s request – Mods
Family is complex. As the man said, we chose our friends, we live with our family.
On a lighter note, a top song about a dad –
Ha! It sounds as if you took the worst qualities of both your parents you’d end up with my mother. But that’s a whole different story.
I did laugh at that.
I love this thread. Thanks for the brilliant contributions.
A great thread – a struggle to read in places, I wish I could add something eloquent to this. My dad is alive and reasonably well, considering how spectacularly badly he has looked after himself. Like most people my feelings are complicated. I love him and he’s been a great Dad* but I honestly think he stays awake at night dreaming up new ways to irritate me. On the evidence of this thread I have nothing to grumble about – I’ll see him for a bit tomorrow, we’ll have some laughs about the same old things and we’ll both feel that life is good and that all-in-all we’ve been lucky.
(*not least because of his record collection)
My Dad died of muscular quicksand. That is how I think of it. A variant of Guillaume Barre Syndrome – the nasty one that is nasty if you don’t get onto it – and he didn’t – and can kill you – and it did.
It was misdiagnosed due to ineptitude and his refusal to see doctors or be candid with them. So it started in the feet and headed up rendering his muscles less able progressively. He got various treatments including transfusions costing thousands a pop all on the Govt tab. But he knew he was fucked and I did too.
He was alert to the end which is why I see it as quicksand. Throughout, our conversations were commonplace, avuncular matters. He never said any thing more deep or confiding, an uncomplicated fellow to the end.
When he died none of us were there. When I saw him , still in the hospital bed I picked him up and hugged him. That cold hug has never left me.
Brought up by my father and aunt, as my mother died a week before I was two (it wasn’t until I was eighteen I found that she’d taken her own life, it had been kept from me so as not to upset me).
Also as I was an only child we would go off and do things together, much as I do with my son (concerts, gigs etc).
He was an excellent father, non judgemental especially during early adulthood, a friend’s house had been raided and drugs found. It made the local paper, my father read the paper and asked
“Is this the Chris you know?”
“Yes”
“Hmm I thought so” that was it.
I recall him opening my bedroom door when I had friends round on him being engulfed with blue dope smoke. Again not a word.
He was 74 when he died, he’d gone home from hospital I’d wanted him to move in with me but he insisted on going home. A couple of weeks later I’d had to get the doctor round who had him sent back to hospital. We were told on the Friday if he’d survive the weekend there was a good chance he’d get some respite from the prostate cancer. The Saturday he’d really perked up asking for this and that to be brought in. Visiting on the Sunday I knew he was dying, I held is hand as he died and told him I loved him (the only time I did, would that I had said it more)
He was born in India I hoped to visit his birthplace with my son in his hundredth year, somehow things got in the way.
Cheers Father.
That’s lovely Hube. So many great stories here.
Thanks @Twang.
Indeed some wonderful stories here.
Lovely thread.
I shared my birthday with my Dad & when I was a nipper I used to ge really excited as May 24th approached.
While I was serving in the Royal Navy I would always wonder what he would be doing on our birthday, but I already knew. He would be thinking “I wonder where our Les is & what he is up to.
He has been gone nearly 18 years & not a day passes when I don’t think of him.
Next Tuesday will be a happy day, but as ever, very poignant.
I miss him so much.
Now please excuse me, my lips seem to be quivering.
You’re not alone Jack.
My dad would have been 100 last birthday. He passed away back in 2002, and myself and my sister were with him virtually right up to the end, for which I am eternally grateful – I shall try to explain why.
Firstly, my dad and me were never really close – temperamentally we were quite different, and we had such different life experiences. He left school at 14 and went into engineering, where he was for most of his working life. He would cycle off in the morning and be back for tea each evening, regular as clockwork. He did a spell in the army towards the end of the war, voted Tory, and bought a suburban house where I enjoyed a happy childhood. I never remember him being off sick once. I went to a grammar school, did O and A levels and became a teacher (amongst several other jobs), ending up in software development and business analysis – we had our differences! But everything he did was for us – it was only after he retired that they managed proper holidays. They never owned a car.
In later life, he loved my children and I saw a side of him that I didn’t really remember growing up – the delight he showed in playing with them was a revelation. We moved away to the West Country, so we saw less of my parents, but time inevitably caught up with them and my mum eventually had a fall in the bathroom and was hospitalised with a broken wrist, so I was up and down to Essex regularly (luckily my sister lived near them). My dad had been fit as fiddle, but had suddenly become quite thin and was starting to have some tests…a he was lifelong smoker, so we could have told the doctors exactly what was wrong.
So…I arrived at my sister’s and we decided to go and see dad before we had a drink, rather than leave it to the morning. Arriving at their flat, the lights were on but he wasn’t answering the door. Then we saw a hand raised through the bedroom window, so we let ourselves in and found him collapsed on the floor. We called the ambulance and had to persuade them to take him to hospital. For the rest of the evening we were with him in A&E – there didn’t seem to be any particular cause for alarm, until he suddenly couldn’t talk properly. There was a blur of activity as the medics were clearly alarmed and asked me about his medical history; I remember telling them he didn’t have one, although he was awaiting those test results. They rushed him into IC….and we were ushered into the ‘family room’, and we guessed exactly why. A short while later we were told he’d passed away.
The next morning we had to go into another part of the hospital and tell mum that she’d lost her husband of 53 years. She never came out of hospital and died 4 weeks after our dad.
To this day, I shudder at the thought that if we hadn’t gone round that evening he would have died alone – we were with him until the end, and at least I got to comfort the man who had worked so hard to give us all a life he could only dream of.
That has just prompted a guilt I hold about my fathers death. When he took his 2nd, fatal stroke, it was perhaps 4pm and I was at work. My wife phoned me to let me know she had taken a distraught call from my mother, so I did what anyone would do. Or not. Having just started evening surgery, I said I would finish that first, and then drive down. Hence a delay of maybe two hours before I set off down to Portsmouth. Midway, the clock in the car suddenly stopped and I knew I was too late. Which was indeed the case, he, spookily having died at much the same moment as the clock.
I still beat myself up. Sure, he would have been unconscious, but he would have been more alive than the cold corpse in the mortuary, whose forehead I later kissed. Possibly the only time I remember kissing my father.
David Sedaris’ new book is in part about his relationship with his father in the last years of his long life. I read this passage this morning. It resonated with both of us, and may articulate the feelings of others who can stop fighting ogres who are no longer alive to know.