‘I never saw you cry before, Dad’

WHO knew it would be the 6th class graduation on Zoom that would be the catalyst? I didn’t even want to go, if ‘go’ is the right word for something on Zoom. But I went. I went to the couch and sat with them and peered into the screen.

And somehow the heady combination of sincerity, enthusiasm, idealism and emotion got to me.

I think the actual trigger was the montages of pictures set to sentimental music. And there it was. Eight years of her little life summed up in a few minutes. And in a way, in the real world, it passed by in a heartbeat too. And their commitment to everything, from friendship to the shows they put on every year, their earnest little faces in all of it, it just killed me.

“I never saw you cry before, Dad,” Anna said afterwards, with a hint of awe. I explained to her I wasn’t crying, just a bit teary.

Of course, like all of us when

Diana died, I was probably crying for myself too, for time passing, which is the most exquisite sadness there is. And also it was the Zoom graduation that somehow crystallised everything that happened in the last few months.

It was the WTF moment, when suddenly all my locked-down, keepcalm-and-carry-on, stoic, determined coping suddenly gave way. And it gave way to this realisation that while we all got on with it, something very sad had happened these kids.

Most of them were probably lucky that a life, or a job, was not lost.

But still, it happened, and it might not be over yet. And somehow the graduation acknowledged that. This thing happened. And everything changed. And all the things that happened are not going to unhappen any time soon. We will get on with it in some way. But things will not be simple.

I envy those people who used the lockdown to better themselves, who didn’t mind it, who saw it as an opportunity for personal growth. I didn’t grow. It was all I could do not to shrink.

Italian is unlearnt, books are unread, the ukulele is unstrummed, The World at War is unwatched, all those pictures on my various Apple devices remain unprinted, the new recipes I intended to master are uncooked. I remain unimproved, not broadened but narrowed.

I don’t know where the time went. Did you find that? Somehow the endless days were shorter. Maybe it was work bleeding into everything, everything bleeding into work, and then there was all that time spent eating much more than usual.

I am indeed the only one in this house who hasn’t grown as a person or in some kind of creative way during the pandemic. The kids have progressed into their own two unique schools of drawing.

My wife has even taken to basketweaving. Well, I call it that to annoy her. It’s more like crocheting with raffia. The first bag she made was going wrong so she turned it into a beach bag for me. Since then, she has been making more finessed bags for various people.

I call her Etsy now. She has also, in the latter part of the lockdown, become a black market hairdresser. I say black market, but she doesn’t actually charge. She’d been trimming the side of my head for a while and I feel I had schooled her well in it. She didn’t appreciate it at the time, but my mansplaining of the art of hair trimming has stood to her.

She now services the odd caller too. She casually did someone’s eyebrows the other day. Took ten years off him. She draws the line at noses, though.

She didn’t even make a big fuss about learning all these new tradwife skills. If I started weaving bags, everyone would know about it. There would be serious tomes everywhere about the art of raffia. There would possibly be moods, depending on how my latest bag/project was going. But the wife came in under the radar. One day, we were watching TV and I suddenly noticed she was counting intently to herself and there she was, silently clacking away on a navy tote.

And me? Well, I guess I can run for half an hour. It doesn’t get any easier but it definitely clears the head. And I guess I’m slowly noticing that I started a new job and a new life, and I survived.

In fact, I barely noticed it all really. And then I stopped, and peered into a screen, and heard the last eight years of my little girl’s life summed up on Zoom by her classmates, all the happy memories, recited year by year, until, just near the end, when it all came to a shuddering halt and their innocence was lost.