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Prologue

 

 

Everyone has a plan before they get punched in the face.

Everyone has a Dad before his number comes up.

Everyone knows about heartache.

 

Heartache is loves answer to the common cold. It’s English breakfast, Builders and Earl Grey. It’s fish & chips, sausage sandwiches and chicken tikka. It’s dickie-ticker, cancer and pneumonia. Villages. Suburbs. Cities. Smiths. Jones. Davis. A taxi. A bus. A hearse passing you on the road as you walk to the station. Grief is as common as muck. There’s a big bucket somewhere and we’re all gonna kick it. 100% of all people die: you, me and them. It’s as time-honoured as the feet at the end of your legs and it felt like someone pulled the rug from underneath me, violently, with purpose. I fell like a lead balloon in concrete boots with a pocket full of change and an anvil tattooed on its bastard neck. 

 

And there’s nothing extraordinary here apart from the pain. Back then the sum total of me was black and blue. A confused bruise masquerading my way through the aftermath, an angry bruise with questions, a helpless bruise witnessing an adoring wife’s world capitulate. My emotions became a grimy pirate station that my brain tuned into with a ‘don’t touch that dial’ mentality. A hobo-radio-station regularly transmitting from concrete tenement blocks with piss stained and stench filled stairwells. I felt isolated and alone. Excluded from familiarity by way of this hole I found myself in, out of the blue and into the black. I hated the notion of being full of self-pity, yet couldn’t shake the internal bleeding. I wanted explanations but found only questions. The person I used to call for them was gone. I wanted a shortcut, some insider knowledge. The person I used to call for it was gone. After a while I realised that you can’t cheat grief, but you can spit in its dinner.

 

This is the story of the most difficult challenge I’ve ever faced. This grief manual, if I may call it one, is to provide an understanding of why we’re utterly rubbish at dealing with the true commonality of the human condition. It’s about taking death back to the day-to-day experience of life, not keeping it hidden. I thought our stiff upper lips inhibited open discussions about the feelings surrounding grief but I found out its way bigger than that. I hoped that by chronicling my experiences I might change this in a small way. It’s not just about someone I admired dying, it’s about supplying us all with enough saliva to collectively spit in the Grim Reaper’s dinner. It’s about the breakout of hope and feeling everything differently. It’s about growing up and holding on, once and for all.

 

Memories were once the bridge that pain travelled over and separating one from the other was complex and at times, thorny. For our family Spain had always been a passion, yet their Spanish village was twinned with the best and the worst of times, of continent-to-continent hospital dashes and then poolside reclined, blue skies, blue emotions. More than anything else Spain represented a glorious completion for my parents, of wishes, of dreams, of their life together. A decade in the company of carne salsa and pimentos de pardon, longs days tending to crimson Bougainvillea and each other, mountain ranges and wide open spaces: a vista to die for my mother termed it.

It’s criminally hot in Andalucía come August and I can still feel the searing heat on the back of my neck as my sister Lindsey and I stood on the terrace watching Steve, her husband, and our Dad throw her twin boys, Jacob and Edward into the pool, both fathers edging them further skyward every time. ‘My dad’s better that your dad’ I shouted as Jacob achieved a new level of poolside orbit only to be silenced when Steve chucked Edward higher still, ‘My dad’s better than your dad’ was their amplified, unified response. This then is for Jacob & Edward and for countless more people picking through the bones of an irreversible loss.