this post is about grieving, death, in particular the death of both parents. i guess it also touches on covid and the pandemic, but that's just when things happened.
death in the family wasn't exactly a new concept to me, growing up.
dad's parents had died around the time I'd been born, my aunt slowly degraded to brain cancer in my early teens, and my mum's parents had all died by the time i'd turned 18. i wasn't exactly prepared for the death of my mum, but i wasn't that surprised, either.
sometime around 2006 i had abandoned university, lucked into a job, moved across the country, and three months in, i found out my mother was dying.
at 3am, i was in a bar, drunk and sobbing. it wasn't a surprise. she'd never recovered from meningitis, and around that time the "post viral flare up" was much worse than usual. it was kidney cancer, inoperable, metastasised, terminal.
i eventually moved back to scotland, did some paliative care. work told me i could continue to work from home until the funeral. how kind.
to say that my mum's death affected my twenties is an understatement. it defined them. i spent years waiting for the final bad news to drop, and then spent years just trying to deal with it. it wasn't until my thirties that I finally felt like I was doing more than just coasting from one bad job to the next.
at 30, i'd moved to london, i'd actually left the country, travelled a bit, found new friends, actually managed to go on a date or two, and even though nothing really worked out, i'd tried to make a change in my life, and to some extent, i'd even managed to repair things with the family, but that's another story.
the story i want to tell you is this:
it is january 2021, and i joke in discord that my dad might be dead. he isn't answering the phone (again). one week later, i'm replying to a week old message. it looks like i spoke too soon.
i still don't really know how he died. again, he didn't really like answering the phone. the last thing i got from him was a curt email explaining "i'm not ill" three days before he passed. i don't really know much more about it than that.
he died at the peak of covid deaths, and there's so many bodies requiring post mortem that it's another few months before we hear "inconclusive results." it's probably covid, but it doesn't really make much of a difference. i can't leave the house.
lockdown wouldn't be lifted for a few months more, at least. i cannot go to the pub. i can't drive, and there's no way i can get back to scotland. it'll be months before i can sit in a pub and grieve, months before i see a friendly face, and even longer before i'm vaccinated for travel.
all i can think about is how the first person i'll get to talk to, in real life, about my dad, is probably going to be my dentist.
it was. i talked to him about it. his dad died in january, too.
he also felt weird about it. it's hard to talk about death in the midst of a pandemic.
everyone else was grieving, too.
--
and that's the story.
when mum died, it was a tragedy, when dad died, it was a statistic.
