4 Things my dad has taught me since he died

The keyboard sized slabs of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut and novelty golf club covers filling Tesco right now tell me that Father’s Day is approaching. It’s a day that I usually remain fairly indifferent to, but this year I’ve been getting a bit emosh. I haven’t been breaking down in tears every time I’ve come face to face with a pair of novelty cufflinks whilst out shopping, but I’ve felt, for the first time in 9 years, like I’ve wanted to mark the occasion by doing something dad related, so this is it. This is the dad related thing.

In the fourteen years that I had my dad as ‘my dad’ for, he taught me a lot of stuff. Just off the top of my head, he took care of teaching me how to draw people really well, teaching me the lyrics to I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, teaching me how to take the shell off a prawn really, really quickly and, I suppose, teaching me how to walk and talk. But, without sounding like a movie shown on Channel Five at 3pm in the week, he’s taught me a fair amount of stuff since dying too. It’s all stuff that I would have preferred to have learned another way, in an ideal world, but sometimes you’ve just got to deal with what you’re given, haven’t you?

So yeah, here’s the stuff-

1. Awkward social situations are inevitable and fine
A gift given to all people who lose a parent earlier than is expected is the deliciously awkward moment when you have to tell people that you’re actually part of the one-parent club. There is literally no way that you can tell people that your dad is dead without making them feel awkward and, as a result, I am completely comfortable with the awkward silence that follows - just call me The Atmosphere Killer.

I tend to favour a bulldozer approach when the time comes and tend to make people flinch by actually using the word ‘dead’, but I have to. My dad didn’t pass away. ‘Pass away’ implies that he lay in a bed with too many pillows, surrounded by his family, saying inspirational yet funny things. Reality wasn’t like that - one day he was here and then, after a poorly timed chicken bake from the Greggs at the hospital, he was gone. It really was as quick and as brutal as the word ‘dead’.

Prize for the best response to hearing the news goes to the guy who I was on a second date with, who, upon me telling him that my dad died when I was fourteen (I’d like to say here that I generally try to keep the whole ‘dead dad’ thing out of light-hearted, filtered-version-of-who-I-really-am date talk, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, unless for the purpose of the date, I pretend that my dad is alive, which is weird) said “Oh, well at least I don’t have to worry about meeting him!” Now, I know that he was joking - he just wasn’t joking very well.

2. Anything can be funny at any time
I like funny stuff. I like funny people and funny tv shows and funny places – I’m all about funny. However, when someone dies, you accept that for a while ‘funny’ is going on sabbatical from your life and its replacement is a polite, tight smile.

Well, ‘funny’ left my life for about 48 hours.

I don’t know whether it’s because grief exhausts you, and you get a bit delirious, or whether it’s because you’re so relieved to find something funny but the smallest thing can set off the kind of laughing where you actually think that you might be sick as a result. For me, that moment came when my mum, sister and I were shopping for black coats a few days before my dad’s funeral and I found myself stamping my foot in temper in H&M, saying “Mum! I just don’t think this coat looks sad enough.”

I, er, I think you had to be there.

3. Everything will be, mostly, fine
You can be forgiven for thinking that, most of the time, I do not think that things are going to be fine. I cry, really a lot. Old guy in Sainsburys buying a lot of ready meals for one? I’m crying. The stray dog that was running around our street but ran off before anyone could catch it and never got found? Yep, I’m crying. Boy I like doesn’t like me back? I’m crying. I make a relatively minor error at work? I’m crying. Anyone says pretty much anything to me at the wrong end of any given month? You betcha, I’m crying. I’m not afraid to cry, even when I should be. I’ve thought about this a lot and for a while I thought that I was, to use the medical term, completely fucked up, but have since realised that I’m just not bothered about feeling sad, whether it’s for seven minutes or seven months. I’m happy to feel sad, because I know that I won’t feel sad forever.

I can remember the night that my dad died so clearly, which is frustrating because I feel like I remember everything that happened before that less and less every single day, but I remember very clearly that when I lay in bed that night, not able to close my eyes because they felt so sore, that I accepted that I would always feel sad from that day on. Nothing would ever be good or right because my dad wasn’t here, so how could it be? Turns out, that everything does become good and right again and if everything that can be mostly fine after that, then it can always go back to being mostly fine after anything else that happens, can’t it?

PS
Things I forgot to say-
3.5. Always have your picture taken with people, one day you’ll really want those photos.
4. Never cry at school because some kids are saying that your dad “talks funny.” I would love to hear my dad say “batter” instead of “butter” now.