My Dads Deader Than Your Dad
Chapter One
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. I’m black and I’m blue. All I am is a fucking bruise. I’m having trouble navigating around my own emotions and the various states of shitness that my Dad’s death has shoved me towards. I feel excluded from my friend’s lives by a marked difference in our parental status. I’m young enough to hate it and old enough to care. It is suggested that I seek professional help. During a grief counselling session I’m informed in a professional tone that the wasteland I inhabited wouldn’t last forever. Grief has stages she told me. She’s giving me fucking grief I thought. To the jolting rhythm of an internal carnival of despair, I laughed a smug laugh.
How the feck did she know?
This pain was electric, fluorescent and omnipresent.
She neither knew my Dad, the bond we shared nor the life-busting vacuum that had suddenly hoovered’d up my soul. It was both cordless and rechargeable, Martini like, available anywhere and anytime. My emotions had become a pirate radio 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 hated quitters yet considered suicide. Never going as far as the planning but the longing for the desensitizing, the mind numbing questions and those feelings to end was a force to be fucked over by each and every time. Feelings that now, almost two years on, words fall woefully short of expressing. I wanted them complete and I wanted their voice in my life to fall out of earshot, I tried to block them out, I wanted to shut the stable door on them now the man that sired me had bolted.
It had never occurred to me write a book and I didn’t think I’d be opening a can of worms by doing so. Thoughts or daydreams that I was either capable or had anything of interest to write had eluded me with the permanence of markers. In chunks of my psyche I remained the Essex kid in special education classes at both junior and senior school. I was nobodies fool but everyone’s jester. But make no mistake of it reader, grief’s no joke.
Aside from the scathing album reviews I occasionally write under nomme de plumes on Amazon.com or the online dating profiles I create for Mel Gibson this is my first attempt to write for public consumption. This is story of the most difficult challenge I’ve ever faced: my father’s death and being daft enough to attempt writing my first book about it. The grave the grieving the ridiculousness of it all. Its content is brutally honest and butt naked. At first, I denied the catharsis writing afforded me and eventually it would hang over me unfinished, a Damoclean force of distraction dressed up in a Mac Book Pro. After a while I time a realised that you can’t cheat grief but you can spit in his dinner. And steal his girlfriend.
Five stages my councillor told me. Grief had five stages. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had studied it and broadcast it to those fortunate enough to have read her cannon. The last stage was acceptance and that should involve doing something positive with the emotions of the preceding period and this is my attempt at that. I thought our nations Englishness inhibits open discussion 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 any small way. Emotions need to be seen for society to be understood and we’ve long since operated a policy of don’t ask don’t tell.
Who the fuck is this Kubler-Ross lady?
How the fuck can Jung help me?
Carl Jung declares that healthy grief feels like you’re going mad. I’ll second that.
Mental dysfunction was it’s standard. It became my daily grind. So here I am, a stranger with something in common. In your inbox in your house. That I’m afforded the opportunity for inclusion in your grief and your life would make my late father proud and it is pride that pulled my socks up every morning. It’s pride and acceptance that made my grief feel just and worthy of my father passed and the experience of loosing someone important in your growth. Document how grief feels I told myself, how it felt and most importantly how the love that my parents provided will live on though my actions and my unborn children. Be a good ancestor I though.
I’m still trying.
Before Dad died and whilst reading the Weekend newspaper supplement, I stumbled across what looked like a quaint hotel; it’s décor calm with understated utility, clean white walls and an emerald green blanket folded neatly upon a functional bed. It turned out that this was no ordinary three-star vacation-destination; it was the premises for Dignitas, the assisted suicide organisation in Zurich. As I read the article I felt a sense of kinship with their clients. Dad was deteriorating for a long time but without the drastically debilitating or incurable diseases the families in the article were faced with: supranuclear palsy, terminal cancers and motor neurone diseases.
Heavy stuff.
My mind googled and I read and consumed information before coming to the conclusion that, when faced with the degrading, the debilitating and an incurable finality, we should be allowed to take our own lives. I took a view that it seemed appropriate for the state provide to a place for this in our society, a place staffed with the compassionate and the caring. Surprise-surprise, religion, antiquated law and the fucking Daily Mail are stopping progression yet again and disabling what should be a basic human right.
When I decided to write this book, a large part of my reasoning behind it was to share my experiences and provide a pragmatic grief manual for the freshly bereaved. If I ever finished it, I would press some up copies myself and send some to Dignitas to give to their clients’ families. During the writing process I learnt that the concept of a grief manual was near impossible: you can't cheat grief, but, you can spit in its drink. Upon completion of the first draft, I wrote to Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli and our correspondence is below.
Von: Austin Wilde [mailto:TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT]
Gesendet: Montag, 26. Januar 2009 19:40
An: Dignitas
Betreff: a grief manual
Dear Dignitas,
I lost my father two years ago to a heart attack.
He survived his first attack but the damage caused was severe enough to prevent a bypass or surgery of any sort. The doctors informed us that he could be with us for ‘three months or six years’ and we set about adjusting to a life with a Dad with disintegrating health and abilities and incoming death upon the horizon. It was around this time that I read about Dignitas and Euthanasia in the Guardian Weekend magazine, I felt both a kinship with the people you help and rage at the British legal and religious systems for preventing humanistic progress in the country I live. I decided I would try to help in some way.
The loss of my father hit me pretty hard in the balls and in the subsequent months. I experienced grief in a variety of ways, some debilitating, some funny, others made want to kill myself and some made me want to reach out to people in similar positions. During a particularly black spell I attended grief counselling and they informed me about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ ‘On Death and Dying’ and its stages of grief. During a particularly positive period I decided to write a book, an honest attempt at a grief manual to help the bereaved and to tell the story of how it gets dark and eventually light until the whole thing happens again.
I attach a first draft of the book and I would like to discuss sending you some copies of the finished article for you to give to the families of the people who visit Dignitas. It would mean a great deal to me to do this as it would create a positive ending to a black period for the family that I am now the man of.
Sorry about the language barrier and I look forward to hearing from you.
Keep up the good work.
Austin Wilde
From: Ludwig A. Minelli [mailto:TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT]
Sent: 08 February 2009 22:39
To: Austin Wilde
Subject: AW: a grief manual
Dear Mr. Wilde,
Thank you for your e-mail.
Do you really think that it is appropriate to the item of assisted suicide and grief to use four-letter words?
We dot not.
Best regards,
DIGNITAS
Ludwig A. Minelli