Hit and Running

This is something that I feel like I have to share even though it’s about something really personal. If you’re the sort of person who can’t be doing with deep and meaningfuls, I suggest you look away now. Everyone else, if you want to learn something about me, carry on. I ultimately want this to be a positive account but it might be a bit dark to begin with.

For the last 13 and a bit years, I’ve been labouring under the impression that I am very emotionally retarded. That I’m not really capable of a genuine and appropriate emotional response to any situation. As a result, I steer clear of giving emotional support to people (friends or colleagues) who express themselves in an emotional way rather than in the logical and concise way that I’m more comfortable with. I can sit with someone and talk them through the issue they’re experiencing, but I won’t do the whole arm round the shoulder, give you a tissue thing. If you’re going to get upset and irrational, I’ll walk away and give you some time to yourself.

I’ve believed this for thirteen years because of my interpretation of the emotional response I showed when my Dad died. I was fifteen at the time, and, though I find it a bit difficult to admit to the world at large, when he died, I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry at his funeral, and I think in the three years afterwards I only cried once on a related subject. It’s hard to acknowledge, even so many years later, that when he died I wasn’t upset.

I’m a self-analyser anyway, and for a long time I’ve been trying to come to terms not so much with his death, but with my almost total non-reaction to it. Initially I thought that because I was quite young, and everything just carried on as normal, that I didn’t deal with it at the time. Everything that’s happened since that’s been less than perfect (dropping out of uni, not exactly pushing myself to get a challenging job etc) I’ve put down to the fact that I’m still dealing with it.

A few years ago (probably while I was in Australia) I started to realise that life goes on. That I can’t keep using what happened when I was a kid as an excuse for any crap that happens now, just because I’m scared of failure or whatever. I started to reanalyse and decided that my problem was not belated grief, but guilt. Guilt at not being more upset at the time, guilt for the way I handled everything. Dad had been ill for a long time, and we knew his condition was terminal. At that point, at fourteen, I effectively started counting the days until we could put it all behind us and move on. I was actually looking forward to ‘life after Dad’. If that sounds callous, I’m sorry, it’s just the way it was.

Since then, until much more recently, I’ve been dealing with the fact that I behaved like a shit toward my terminally ill father, even if I didn’t do so to his face, or within the family. I can’t change it, so I’ve learned to accept the way my fourteen year old self processed what was going on. I’ve actually managed to work through that in my head now to a point where I can put it in writing and not worry what other people think. While I can process the guilt about how I was before he died, I’m still having difficulty putting to one side the guilt about my apparent indifference at the point of his death.

To put this into context, my Dad died late at night on 22nd December 1995. On the 23rd I did my paper round as normal ten minutes after Mum told me he’d died. I went back to school on the 4th of January. His funeral was on the 5th, I played the trumpet, and was grinning away to myself through the whole thing because I’d played quite well. On the evening of his funeral, the 5th, I turned up to play in a school concert. Nothing stopped, nothing changed, not even a pause.

That's life

Then, a few weeks ago, I realised something.

When he died, I didn’t cry. The reason I didn’t cry wasn’t because I’m not a normal, emotionally functioning person, it was because I wasn’t sad. It occurred to me, it was like I’d already moved on. I had a eureka moment. I’ve always thought that I didn’t grieve after he died, and thought that I’d probably carried on trying to for about the next ten years. The fact is, I wasn’t behind everyone else. I was ahead.

We found out he was terminally ill in March 1995. Though I didn’t show Mum when she told me, I was distraught. The doctors didn’t think he’d make it to Christmas. They reckoned September was being optimistic. I was so upset at school the next day I got sent home. I know now that for me, the grieving process started then. I went through all the usual stages and dealt with it in all the normal ways, I just did it before he actually died. The person I’d known as Dad was already long gone, and all you’d see were occasional flashes of the old him.

After he died, and in the last couple of weeks before he did, family who weren’t so close to the situation would try and get me to show an emotional response, telling me things like ‘it’s ok to cry’. I had cried, more than they knew, but by December I was ready, to put the past behind us and get on with life as it would now be.

If you’re reading this, and thinking that I must have spent the last 13 years being miserable and thinking about this, then you’d be wrong. Life has gone on, but I’ve always felt like there was something unresolved, and I’d always wondered why I wasn’t more upset. Now, I’ve worked it out. And it feels great.

2009 is going to be an outstanding year.

Posted on January 2nd, 2009 under Personal • Tags: Dad, Family. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback