Every Story has an Ending

In the early hours of the 4th of January 2022, my world stopped making sense. There had been a few uneasy moments a couple of days before. Early warning signs, I suppose you’d call them. The tremors before the quake. Dad’s neuralgia had gotten far worse. He couldn’t eat or speak without shocks leaping through him. He’d had to spend New Year’s Day in hospital, having blood tests and being told it was time to start taking newer, stronger painkillers. On the Sunday, however, he’d called and we’d talked. He’d been fine. He’d been better. Monday saw even more improvements, from what I’ve been told since.

That Tuesday, the first of the year, was already mapped out in my head. It was our first day back at work after the Christmas break. Not, by any means, a fun day. Just a necessary gear change to ease us back into reality. We’d barely passed midnight when our landline rang and reality started to pack its bags.

Now, two weeks later, it’s hard not to think about that night over and over, in the quieter moments. The message I found from my mum on the answer machine because I’d just been dozing off when she’d called. Returning the call, my hands shaking. A very calm, very apologetic paramedic answering, telling me we didn’t need to rush.

That drive was one of the strangest of my life. It was quiet. Both in the car and out on the road. It was close to silent in the world. All we saw was slumbering lorries and small flurries of rabbits fleeing from our headlights. Houses dressed in darkness, happily asleep. Whereas as we were awake, dazed, unsure of how real this was. It was so easy, travelling down those dark roads, to imagine I’d dreamt the entire thing. It was far too simple to convince myself that we were going to end up sitting in Mum and Dad’s house apologising to both of them for me suffering from some daft, stress driven nightmare.

Later on, I’d find out everyone else kept suspecting the same thing. Certain that this was all some terrible dream we were somehow sharing. I think we’re all still having days where it feels like that.

In the early hours of the 4th, however, that hopeful illusion was shattered the moment we saw an ambulance parked outside the house. Dad was gone. The slow hours that followed the sight of ambulance are never going to leave me. Not fully. Whenever I try to remember Dad now, they’re always there, a part of a shadow that lingers with him. Sometimes it stands behind him in my memories and sometimes it pushes its way to the front. It isn’t exactly the same size as him, but it can cover him when I’m at my lowest. I suppose that’s how grief works. It’s a wound carved from absence, after all.

Those hours after the paramedics left and we waited for the undertakers to arrive, as we watched the sun rise through the open curtains, that’s the shadows darkest heart for me. That’s where it was born. Its first words were the phone calls which followed, when the rest of the world had left their beds behind and we began to pass along the unwanted secret, letting it loose from the house. One by one, we began to tell people that Dad had left us all behind far too soon.

It’s never going to be easy for any of us to shake off the pain of the past two weeks. There is one lifeboat, however. One escape hatch Dad left for us – we have so many stories of him to share. They’re going to be the strongest link we’ll ever have to him, as we go forward. Not the photos. Not the keepsakes. No, I think his stories will become his myths, taking on a life of their own in other people’s telling of them. They’ll be the most social fossils a person can live behind. Unearthed when they’re needed. Cleaned of our fingerprints as best they can be, before they’re held up to light away the overwhelming darkness. They’ll be the constellations he left for us to scatter over an now far emptier sky, helping us chart a course through our loss to a shore waiting somewhere over the horizon.

Of course, the stories can still hurt at the minute. They’re a little too raw. A little too tender. And, for someone who says they want to write, I can’t find the words to tell them properly right now. Not easily, anyway. Not with the real words I want to say. For a fortnight now, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that there’s a perfect sentence out there, waiting for me to find it. A few words, written or spoken in exactly the right order, which will somehow help me to contain this wound. Or explain it. Or perhaps even take it away.

Dad’s death managed to change the scale of so many ordinary things I used to do every day. Nothing seems as relevant or as close or as important as it once was. It’s also got me thinking a lot about stories in general. Stories and endings. I know that all stories come with an ending. It’s part of the deal. It’s why we tell them, I suppose. It might even be why we enjoy them so much, deep down, at the cores of ourselves. After all, stories don’t have to behave like real life. They only have to pretend they do. They’re substitutes really. Shadow plays. Magpie constructions, borrowed from our lives and built into the sets for engaging distractions of how we’d like things to be.

We go to a story to escape. We watch something or read something, or we listen to a song, looking for a chance to see something conclude properly, with most of the loose ends tied back together. Real life is rarely so neat. There is no freeze frame here. There are no credits. No sequels. No reboots. Real time doesn’t work like that. The clock always keeps on ticking, regardless of our victories or our defeats.

Of course, this does still feel a little like a story. If only because it’s still hard to reconcile the fact I’m living in a world without him. It’s something I can’t think of as an actuality yet. A solid fact. Instead, we’re living in a new normality, that’s perched precariously on the swing bridge between truth and the unreal. Maybe it’s the wording we’re using. Except that’s too easy an excuse. Words and ceremonies are how we’re going to find our way through the start of this grief, whilst the wound is still too tender for the more technical, clinical terms. The strongest versions of the past tense. He’s still too close for any of us to think about leaving him under their cold care. There are times when we’ve all found ourselves feeling like he’s just left the room. If you watch us, you might even catch us glancing towards the door.

He’d had plenty of ailments over the years. He’d carried pills and sprays and throat sweets. More than once, his stomach had doubled him over after a meal. Or a neuralgia shock had caused a deep flinch. Or a panic attack had left him parked by the side of the road, trying to remember that he’d come through the last one. Still, though, he always made me feel like the unhealthy one. The hypochondriac wimp. I can remember him telling us the story of how he couldn’t stop chuckling when the doctors went to give him the anaesthetic, just before he had his stents fitted. The staff had asked him what was so funny and he’d told them he couldn’t stop thinking about Dr Nick from The Simpsons.

‘What de hell is dat?’

After that operation, he wouldn’t watch The Simpsons for a while. He’d said he had to wait until he was strong enough to laugh that much and, to be fair to him, the man did laugh at full force. In the same way that his sneezes made people jump.

I like to think, in art galleries and museums across this country, his sneezes are still touring the corridors. Sneaking up on people and making them pause their audio tours. Probably apart from the Tate Modern. He really didn’t hold with their taste. The first time we went there, we stood looking at a completely blue canvas and Dad turned to the woman next to him and said,

‘I wonder if they know they’ve hung it upside down.’

Then, in truly glorious moment, we all watched as she slightly tilted her head, just to check for herself.

Don’t get me wrong. Dad wasn’t cruel. And I don’t think anyone would ever have accused him of being loud, either. At least, not in the aggressive sense. We occasionally had to ask him to turn his latest CD down. Or there was the Christmas me and Sam stayed with Mum and Dad. That Boxing Day morning, Sam woke to an air show going on under our bed, because Dad had plugged the TV into the stereo to really hear the planes roar.

Dad was always a listener. He loved to meet people, to share some time with them, to learn something new. He certainly left people feeling like they’d learnt something from him. After all, he came with so many stories and so many interests. Some of them funny. Some of them fascinating. My dad was the king of rabbit holes. He’d devour interests with a feverous relish. I remember his sudden obsession with the Crystal Palace exhibition centre. Or Victorian 3D photography. Or Pre-Raphaelite painting. Or his many, many photos of old gravestones and gates.

One time, we went to a National Trust house and, while we were walking around the garden, we lost him. Everyone else around us was taking photos of the flowers. Or the buildings. Or each other. Dad, meanwhile, had his camera aimed at an old yard, tucked behind an outhouse. There, he was taking his time to get the angle just right so he could capture all of the old debris, the gutters and the creeping weeds, whilst waiting for a clear shot. We spent a lot of time waiting for that. A photo with no people in it. Somewhere in my parents’ photos albums, there’s a photo of Whitby Abbey in the evening light. A small blur is running across the front of the frame. That was me. Determined to try and get into one photo that day.

When Dad used to talk about his own childhood, he’d stay clear of the painful memories if he could help it. He didn’t often mention his problems with his bones or a couple of truly painful losses he’d suffered. He didn’t like to dwell on them. Instead, he would talk about family. Family and friends. The large Christmas gatherings and his cowboy hat, which he managed to sneak onto the occasional photo. The many TVs slowly taking shape out the back of their house, as his dad built them or repaired them for people.

He’d try to avoid any mention of his appearances onstage at Rugby Theatre as boy, if he could get away with it. And he’d certainly try to avoid the photos. He’d talk about going to see Elvis movies with his sister, and only really enjoying Jailhouse Rock. He’d talk about seeing The Great Escape on the big screen and being blown away by the sheer scale of the motorbike chase. Or there was his true cinematic obsession – 2001. He’d seen it around 20 times in cinemas, a least. Once at an Imax. Once with his uncle, who’d rolled his eyes and said it was nonsense.

Or there was the first time Dad heard The Beatles or The Goons or the reel to reel tape machine he’d used to capture the crackly moments when Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the moon. Having to watch Monty Python in a different room, because no one else in the house could stand it. His numerous trips, during his uni days, to a little first floor record shop where Richard Branson’s empire was just starting to plant a few roots of its own and Dad helped out, as best he could, by buying more than a few records for his collection.

Music was always more than just a hobby or a passion to Dad. It was up there with breathing for him. His stacks of LP cases. His shelves of CDS. The boxes and boxes of tapes.

One of Dad’s favourite claims to fame was appearing on the cover of Leicester record shop’s catalogue once, caught in the act of perusing their shelves. The fact he was in there on a weekday, when he probably should’ve been working, always made the memory all the sweeter for him. Then again, this was a man who’d had to attend phone training at work and was caught by the instructor setting the phone on the floor and commanding,

‘Sit!’

There wasn’t a day of his life allowed to slip by without him listening to something. Whether it was jazz or folk. Rock or a movie score. Gilbert and Sullivan or Captain Beefheart. Recently, he’d been watching Get Back and revelling in all the unseen Beatles footage. Although he never saw the end of it, as far as I know. He was saving the last part, reluctant to reach the end of that intimate access to one of his favourite bands.

Maybe one of his strangest musical interests for me was when he decided he loved Radiohead. During my teenage years, he’d asked me to turn Radiohead down more than once, if not off completely. Then, a few years later, he would occasionally ask to borrow an album. I could never fathom why. It would always be returned with a shake of the head and a shrug. Until, one day, they were suddenly his favourite band in the world. Before I knew what was happening, he’d bought documentaries and video collections. He had limited edition re-releases of their early albums, t shirts and kept insisting we went to see them live, no matter the cost of the tickets.

We never did get to that concert. Or to see Tom Waits. He’ll never get to see how Better Call Saul ended, either. Or where the third series of The Mandalorian will go. They’re such small things, I know. All the little pop culture fireworks we won’t be able to share now. I guess they’re just going to have to seem a little less dazzling for a while.

Dad gave so much of his time to suggesting things I might like to try. He politely turned off Top of the Pops when I was younger and suggested we tried some Jimi Hendrix instead. He got me into Lovecraft and Milligan and Douglas Adams. He left a copy of The Shining out one day and said,

‘Whatever you do, don’t watch that. It’s far too scary.’

And I must’ve been the only boy who went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 90s, trying to remember to keep an eye on the cinematography, because his dad had suggested it always worth watching how people shot a movie and thinking about the choices they made. The only vice he ever failed to plant under my skin was football, and that wasn’t for the lack of trying. Besides, he still went to matches with some of my schoolfriends and their parents when we were living in Leicester.

Losing Dad has left me in a sort of limbo right now, because he’s still here. He’s in the pages of books I was writing. He’s in my favourite scenes of old movies. He’s definitely lingering in my CD collection. And I don’t mean to sound selfish. It’s only been two weeks. He’s still with everyone who’s lost him and I’ve barely scratched the surface here. There was the summer we spent hunting for Neolithic burial sites. His love hate relationship with camera timers. His years of service babysitting people’s pets and gardens, and the occasional rabbit who didn’t make it. His love of Star Trek and so many other classic TV series. Only the other year, he’d sat every morning watching old Avengers episodes with his breakfast and then reading a book about how they were made.

There was his tug of war relationship with his mother and her occasional threat of trying to drag him onto the Generation Game. His dad leaving him to get home the first time his bike ran out of fuel, promising calmly that he’d never do it again. Or the fact Dad always secretly missed that motorbike. And the cigarettes he’d given up more than once in his life. There was his love of animals. His hatred of earwigs. His staggering network of friends. You could never go far without meeting someone he knew. Or, maybe more to the point, you could travel for miles and still someone would spot him and come over for a catch up. Some old school friend he hadn’t seen in decades or a builder he’d worked with back when he was at the county council.

In some ways, we haven’t really lost him at all. He’s waiting for all of us in our calendars. There are going to be a lot of birthdays and anniversaries and work reunions ahead with an empty seat around the table. A tale untold over a meal or a freshly poured glass of red wine sitting alone, because they forgot it was no longer needed.

Dad shared his life in so many places. He was one of those special, prototype people who was busy inventing social media long before there was ever any of this messy need for technology or GDPR. Instead, he talked to people and he listened. He listened intently and he cared and helped wherever he could and, looking back now, I love that fact there was never a sense of greed to any of his interests or his friendships or really to him at all. He wasn’t ever rushing or competing or trying to show off. He approached everything with his eyes open and his curiosity primed.

For now, I suppose it’s going to be easier to talk about the memories. Or the things he loved. As we move forward, the pain of January 4th is going get stronger some days. The shadow is going to block him out, for a few hours at a time. And that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. We will always have a lifetime of memories to treasure and, over the coming months, they’re going to help keep us afloat.

I know there are going to be times ahead when I’m going to sense a little lapse in a busy conversation at some gathering or other and feel it was exactly where we would’ve shared a joke or just a look. I just hope those are the places where I remember to help share the myths of my dad. They’re where I’ll need to make the effort to talk about him with the people around me, instead of keeping his shadow to myself. Perhaps that will help to make those the times less painful. Perhaps they will be the times where I can use the bright, shining points of his life to chart a course forward, without him being able to stand here beside me any longer.