Two weeks ago, my 77-year-old dad did something quite unthinkable: he died. One day he was sitting at our dining-room table having lunch and four days later we were kissing his cool, pale forehead for the last time and pulling the shroud up over his peaceful, resting face. And the thing about dads, especially when you’re a daughter, is you kind of believe they’re invincible. Mine was the
kind who built bicycles from scratch, rode a big, noisy motorbike and could construct or repair just about anything he put his mind to. He could tell you the species of bird, the origin of tree, the date of the battle and the name of the author. He spoke in a deep, authoritative voice, gave long, strong hugs and just wasn’t the kind of man who did things like dying.
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So the days following his sudden departure passed in a blur of shock and pain and, for brief moments, panic. Who would I ask when I wasn’t sure of the grammatical structure of a sentence? Who but him would know the details of the ships that went down off Cape Point? And how was it even possible that his easy chair in the corner of the lounge, the one only he ever sat on, would from now on ever be empty? And while I realised how fortunate I was that, in my mid-forties, I’d never lost anyone I really loved, the immensity of the sorrow that I would never see his face again or hear him calling me ‘darling’ took me by surprise. At times the pain grew so heavy I couldn’t stand upright with it and would have to succumb to its weight and lie down for a while.
And while you’d like to stop the world for a bit so that you can catch your breath and adjust to this new, changed reality, bizarrely the sun rises as it always has and you have to get up and be part of the world of the living and buy food and fold clothes and put petrol in the car. But grief heralds a time of introspection where you try to make sense of the sadness that grips your soul. And, clichéd as this is, I turned to the lyrical writings of someone who was popular in my dad’s era, the prophet Kahlil Gibran, and was reminded of a few beautiful and important truths: that death is really no different and no less miraculous than birth, and that if we are able to observe the wonder of our sorrow in the same way we can observe the wonder of our joy, our sense of loss and injustice becomes less. Because without deep sorrow we would never know the depth and extent of our love.
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On days I wanted to climb under the covers and escape from the world, my husband would force me into the car and drive me to the sea. In the first week we must have visited every beach in Cape Town. With tears streaming down my face, I would wade into the water, inviting my dad to join me in this wondrous thing he hadn’t done for so many years. And in the cold, green waves of the windswept West Coast and the happy shrieks of my children, I was reminded that I was alive, and just for a short time felt able to give thanks that my dad was allowed to slip gently out of his tired, broken body like clothes too old and worn to be of use any more. And that, for the first time in a long time, he was free to be with us, frolicking in the waves and feeling the wind and the sun and sea spray against his face.
Afterwards we would sit in the sun and drink cold beer and eat soul food, and while my sadness ebbed and flowed like the tide around us, I understood what Gibran meant when he said pain is the ‘breaking of the shell that encloses our understanding’ and forces us to look deeper and see the unseeable. It is really only in periods of deep distress that we take the time to look beyond what we know and try to figure out what it all means, this journey of life and death, and how unlikely it is that the fire and energy that make up the human spirit can simply cease to be. Its journey on earth ends, but its travels are far from over, and the ones we have loved deeply never truly leave us.
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What I have learnt over the past 14 days is that, like waves that thunder towards you and for a moment you panic that their might and force will knock you off your feet, the only way to the other side of grief is through it. You might lose your footing, but you will find it again. And in those times of struggle where you are flailing and feel like you have lost all direction, the love that surrounds you becomes the compass which gently guides you home.
Susan Hayden is the voice behind the popular blog Disco Pants & A Mountain
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