Grief is a strange, unpredictable beast. It follows you around like a stray dog, forlorn and loveless but somehow comforting. Once you open the door to grief there is no turning back. When my father passed away in June I expected a defined period of grieving and a speedy return to normality. But his death has left a huge chasm in my life – a keening absence I had never anticipated. I often hear something funny on the radio and want to call him.
We often chatted about books. “Have you read so-and-so?” he’d ask. “He’s a mustard writer.” It was his favourite compliment.
A few weeks before he fell ill we had a long conversation about Albert Camus, the French existentialist. “What a marvelous writer,” he said. Dad, who had left school at 15, was a voracious reader and a curious one.
A graduate of the school of hard knocks, my father worked every day of his life. He was still running a furniture restoration business at 88 and had recently taken on an apprentice. Like many men of his generation Dad was more comfortable at work than at home. Babies terrified him. Young people annoyed him. Lots of things annoyed him.
When I presented him with my youngest son, Myles, four years ago he said bluntly: “Bring him back when he’s ready to go to uni.” But when I look at those photographs today I can see the love and pride in his face. He was a marshmallow in an iron glove.
Sadly, for much of his life my father saw family primarily as an obligation, rather than a source of joy. As a child he’d been a distant presence in our lives, always working, always pre-occupied. When he came home, the fun ended. There were no dinner parties, no BBQs. “Don’t think of me as your father, but as your bank manager,” he once said. I never went to the pub or the football with dad. He once took my brother and I hiking on the English Moors for a couple of days – that is the only act of father-son bonding I can remember. We ate Irish stew from a tin. Luxury.
Too often ours was a combative, fractious and generally awkward relationship; my fault as much as his. As a teenager I hated his politics and he hated my music. “The Beatles are rubbish,” he said with finality. “How can you compare that to bloody Mozart.” Curiously, my parents had met at a local dance in the 1950s jiving to the latest American hits. “I noticed him as soon as he walked into the room,” my mother once told me. “He was so handsome in his RAF uniform, with this mass of blonde hair. I told my girlfriend ‘He’s mine -- you can dance with the other one’.”
I can safely say that Dad was my sternest critic. He didn’t approve of my career, my girlfriends, my jet-setting lifestyle (as if) and my spending habits. But he often complimented me on being a great father to my two boys, Courtney and Myles. While genuine and heartfelt, I also saw this as an admission of his own failure as a father, a role he just felt emotionally unequipped to perform.
But my dad was a good dad. He was caring, supportive and generous with his time. I’d always seen his awkwardness and lack of physical affection as a type of rejection. They weren’t. That’s just the way he was.
Towards the end of his life Dad, the most non-tactile person I’ve ever met, became a serial hugger. “Come and give your grandad a kiss,” he’d say to Myles whenever we went to his house. I don’t believe there are bad or second-rate fathers, just absent ones. And my father was always there for me.
