Dead and gone, lady

Boohoo I miss them isn't even the half of it

This is a picture of me (on the left) with my brother, Colin and my dad, Jim. Our Billericay back garden in the early eighties. I love my dad’s Briers vibe in his flared jeans, kneeling on the grass, probably checking those wires at the back of the flower bed, waiting for sweet peas (or possibly Williams) to climb up them.

He’ll just have removed his gardening glove while mum takes the picture.

Colin’s looking at something in his hand; I think a ladybird, his long eyelashes casting a slight shadow over his cheeks. I always envied those lashes.

It looks warm, so it wouldn’t have been far from our birthdays in July - we were born within a year and a day of each other, him first - and it might even have been the year we got to visit Hamley’s in London and had our picture taken with a monkey.

I am the only one in the picture who is still alive. Colin died of cancer at 41 and Jim died just before his 80th birthday, a year and a half after his son. That’s the wrong way around.

I saw a production of Hamlet once, (I’ll never get tired of seeing Hamlet) and the grieving children, Hamlet and Ophelia (spoilers) wear their dead dad’s clothes as a kind of comfort or regression. It struck me as just right.

I got my dad’s signet ring when he died. And my brother’s university hoodie. I wear the ring all the time but I haven’t put on Col’s sweatshirt yet. It never feels like the right time.

I remember dad came to Col’s funeral in a wheelchair with a carer and we held tight to each other’s hands as Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne played in the crematorium. It was funny. It was supposed to be. Colin designed the whole thing so we’d have something to laugh about as they carried him away in a box.

Outside as the hearse had arrived, Col’s biker friends lined up and span their rear wheels, the tyres sending a giant plume of smoke into the early Spring sky. It might be the most moving thing I’ve ever seen. He’d ordered that too. Like he was saying, “Remember this, this is cool”.

If you haven’t done death yet, if you’re still just catching it out of the corner of your eye, never looking right at it, you might read other people’s stories (or avoid them), or listen to Cariad Lloyd’s excellent Griefcast or watch films about people dying of cancer and think, “That’s sad” or “I don’t know how they cope”.

I think that’s what I used to think. I do remember I was always afraid of death and wouldn’t look right at it. When I met him, I made my husband promise me he would never die.

Why would you engage with death? What if it caught you looking and came for you next? I think I know now.

I once heard a friend relate a story of some woe about someone else they knew to the people we were sat with, having drinks. Without thinking, she said, “We’re talking Raeside levels of tragedy” and it genuinely took me by surprise. I didn’t know that’s how other people saw me. She meant it kindly, like “what she’s had to deal with”.

I still read about other people losing people, too young, too cruel, and it makes me cry at the unfairness. Small children clutching teddies, not understanding, saying goodbye to their dad. Then I think of my niece and nephew, teenagers now, slowly losing touch with memories of their dad. Col’s wife trying to move on with life after such awful, altering loss.

It happened to us. It really did. But it didn’t feel like I thought it would, inside the strange bubble.

I always think I have cancer. Early on, after Col died, when I heard people talk about survivor guilt, I couldn’t relate. I didn’t feel bad for still being here, even when Col had no choice but to leave everyone he loved. I wondered why I didn’t feel guilty. Should I?

Instead of guilt, what I feel is constant vigilance. Every muscle strain, bout of indigestion, constipation, aching boob, back pain is a dark shadow. When they diagnose me, it won’t be stage one. “If we’d caught it earlier,” they’ll frown, holding my scans up to the light.

This is going to happen to me, I know it. Even though no one has told me that, there’s no gene for it, my odds are just the same as yours. That’s what I have instead of guilt. Grief, for me, is waiting. If I don’t shake off this waiting soon, I’ll miss living all together.

It’s not all the time. But every year in the weeks leading up to the anniversary of Col’s death, I get a pain in my shoulder. It’s real. I can sleep fine, but when I wake up, the pain is there and it nags at me all day, when I sit still for too long, hunched at my desk, when I forget to go for a walk because I’m writing something I have to finish.

The same time every year. I would not believe it was anything other than the same shoulder pain that killed Col. Cancer in his bone, disguised as a sore shoulder. Disguised so well that his upper arm bone was almost all cancer by the time they cut it out.

It’s not nice, reading about cancer. How it changes your cells from good to evil, like a game of Othello, flipping white to black.

I remember how sad I was when I read that Michael Handel had died of brain and lung cancer. He was an Othello champion who sold double glazing for Coventry’s fourth biggest replacement window company in the nineties. He came to my attention on Fergus O’Brien’s extraordinary documentary series, The Armstrongs.

If you haven’t seen it, watch it now. Watch all of it. It’s about a couple flogging conservatories in the West Midlands, but it’s also about life and how to almost completely avoid living it by looking the wrong way.

Handel’s hang-dog expression is unbearably poignant as Ann and John, the married owners of U-Fit Windows, bark orders at this quiet man with a brain the size of a planet, earning his keep in telesales while they urge him to be more enthusiastic about windows. Ugly, plastic windows.

He won prizes for his brilliantly strategic mind. It’s all wrong, even if you don’t know that he dies in the end. Life is all wrong sometimes.

Looking at that photo now, in Billericay, in the 1980s, I don’t know if my life is wrong or right. It just is.

The ladybird flew from Col’s palm and maybe straight into the blades of a Flymo. Would it have done things differently if it had known? Would Col? Or dad?

On my office wall hangs an acoustic guitar, a Höfner, made in the tropics with specially treated wood to stand up to the humidity and warm temperatures of that climate. I think dad bought it in Borneo. It was in a shed in mum’s back garden when he died and we asked if we could have it.

A man on Denmark Street took weeks to repair and restring it and now I am learning to play it. My husband recorded a new album with his band recently and only dad’s Höfner had just the right sound for one of the tracks. I couldn’t begin to tell my husband how much it meant to me that it would be on a record.

You see what I mean though. The guitar lived, went to die in a shed. Lives again. My dad would love that it was still being played.

After he died, a friend of his from his RAF days got in touch and said he had lots of stories of the two of them as young officers, getting up to adventures. Would I like it if he wrote it all down?

Paddy, his friend, has Parkinsons and writing is hard, but he was determined to do it. Under a month later, pages of handwritten A4 arrived, different coloured pens, whatever was to hand, varyingly legible scribble depending on tiredness and the time of day. And Jim lived all over again.

This young man, driving around the countryside in a flash car, crashing into dry stone walls and sheepishly putting them back together before the farmer caught him. Lurking in Soho pubs, visiting the Windmill Theatre “for the comedians”. And a totally new piece of information - he played that Höfner in public. At folk nights in a pub in Norfolk near his RAF base. A bit of Woody Guthrie. He lived again. He does every time I read Paddy’s words. It’s beautiful.

Sometimes life is all wrong. I don’t watch films about cancer. I don’t need to now. I can’t demand the right life, the one without the tragedy. So, you didn’t see the Flymo coming. Was it a nice day?