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When my parents died, it was a relief to say goodbye
Kathryn Flett’s mother and father passed away just over a year apart. She struggled to come to terms with her complicated emotions – and discovered grieving is a work in progress
Not every aged parent is their family’s wise, kindly and greatly beloved “Captain Tom”. I loved my complex father and mother, and in their own ways they loved me, too. However, there is no doubt that my relationship with my parents is why I am both allergic to sentimentality and alive to the complexities of modern “mourning”.
When the world shrank to the size of our homes in the spring of 2020, like everyone else I battened down the metaphorical hatches in order to set sail safely through the stormy pandemic seas. Yet, despite having all the normal pressures of everyday life effectively removed, I was already exhausted.
It was hardly surprising – the first half of 2019 had seen my 82-year-old father, who had cancer, lose touch with what I shall euphemistically describe as “his best self ”. As his only child and only close relative, I was dealing with my father, GPs, consultants, palliative care providers, hospital psychiatrists and potential care home managers daily while attempting to cram the rest of my life around the edges – and I struggled. I very much wanted the end of Pa’s life to be calm, dignified and resolved but, busily raging against the dying of his light, he wasn’t remotely interested in what anybody else wanted for him.
On a Monday in July, after months in and out of hospital (and precisely one night in a care home; he hated it and bolted), Pa fell at home and was admitted to hospital: “So sorry,” the consultant told me, “it will be just a matter of weeks now.”
In the event, it was days. Pa and I had our last conversation – unexpectedly and blessedly light – on Friday evening and by the next day he was slipping in and out of consciousness. When the hospital chaplain appeared at the door of his room on Sunday morning and said: “Is there anything I can do, for either of you?” I seized the moment.
In the corridor, I confessed: “I know that hearing is the last sense to go yet I’m just wittering on about nothing. It feels so fake.” The chaplain nodded, understanding. “If there’s anything you need to say, now is the time to say it. Be kind, of course, but also be honest.”
I took the advice. And then at around 10pm the ward sister told me to “go and get some sleep. We’ll look after him, don’t you worry.”
I kissed Pa’s forehead and said: “If you’re still with us tomorrow, I’ll be back, Dad. Goodnight.”
I was in the shower at 8am when I missed a call to say my father had died. If I wanted to see him, they said, they would wait for me to come in. I felt strongly that the essence of my father, the bit that really mattered, had now left the building, so the answer was “no”.
The funeral was a warm celebration of a life well lived: standing room only. Afterwards, I drove home to the East Sussex seaside with waves of relief washing over me like the tides at the end of my road. I was wrung out, yes, but I was also somehow stronger and braver – emotionally tooled up. I recognised, too, that the baton had now been passed; I was not only the ultimate boss of myself (perhaps for the first time; my father had been a large and controlling presence in my life) but also, assuming the order of things remained correct, next in the queue.
However, this liminal post-funeral space was followed within weeks by the sudden diagnosis and death from cancer of a good female friend. Then, as if 2019 hadn’t been stressful enough, in the week before a Christmas I felt was barely worth celebrating, my little cat, Mu-Mu, died – and so, after a year of coping, the tears finally flowed.
However, because there is no “right” or “wrong” way to feel about death, and because it is in my nature to grieve without sentiment, when 2020’s TV news broadcasts became effectively a nightly death toll I switched off.
While it was clearly necessary to be informed about the course of Covid, I didn’t feel the need to hear the details of the deaths of strangers, of other people’s people; it felt grotesque. So, as the media waged an anti-Covid “war”, I just kept on caring for a houseful of vibrantly alive teenagers.
Then, last August, on the first day of a much-needed week in Cornwall after restrictions were lifted, my Australian half-brother called to say that our mother had had a stroke. She had moved back to her native Oz in 1980, when I was 15, and I’d last seen her eight years ago, so I kept tabs from a distance, sending flowers for her birthday on September 1. However, by October my brother told me the prognosis was “not good”.
“If she wants to speak to me, I’m here,” I said. Five minutes later, my mother called. It was a brief conversation: “I’m saying goodbye,” she repeated over and over, sobbing.
Separated both physically by a pandemic that had closed Australia’s borders and emotionally by the four decades since my mother had walked out of my life meant there was no hastily booked flight followed by a deathbed reconciliation. The things that could have been said by either of us under those circumstances would now remain unsaid; this was no movie, just messy, compromised Real Life segueing into messy, compromised Real Death. So, I told my mother only what she
wanted to hear – a gentle “I love you” with no caveats – before I said “Goodbye, Mummy” and ended the call. She died a week later, her son by her side.
I left it a few days before texting my brother about funeral arrangements. I hoped to be able to contribute somehow, from a distance, and wanted to send flowers, but there was no response. After a fortnight, confused by the silence, I asked him to call.
“Mum was cremated last week. It’s what she wanted,” he said. In my shock I didn’t think to ask if not telling me was something she also wanted – which is probably just as well.
Just over two years on from my father’s death and less than a year since my mother’s, my grieving remains a work in progress. On the one hand, I’ve yet to scatter Dad’s ashes in northern New South Wales’ beautiful Byron Bay, because Australia’s borders remain closed. On the upside, the Order of Things hasn’t been disrupted by my parents’ deaths; they were both in their early 80s so there is the sense of time passing “correctly”. And with that, inevitably, one reaches the head of the queue.
When my Pa’s estate was finally settled (and frankly Lockdown 1.0 was highly conducive to dealing with piles of boring paperwork), last summer, on that trip to Cornwall, I bought a little two-bedroom villa close to Newquay and have refurbished the space (mostly via WhatsApp and a very patient builder during Lockdown 2.0) as a homage to my childhood home: all varnished pine, cork walls and 1960s posters.
With its powerful breakers and easygoing Antipodean-style surf culture, Newquay’s Fistral Beach has connected me viscerally with my Australian parents. And while my sporty youngest son has enthusiastically taken up surfing, I’m “stoked” just sitting on the beach. It has become my new go-to happy place, even as it recalls memories of the time I spent living in Australia as a child. I suspect I may end up there.
Ultimately, then, whether your loss and mourning are dealt with publicly and performatively, quietly and contemplatively, or somewhere between the two extremes, feelings around the deaths of family members can be very complex and nuanced.
For some of us, processing those emotions can be a lifetime’s work, starting long before a family member’s death; I effectively “lost” my mother when I was 15, spending the decades since coming to terms with it – which meant that by the time I really did lose her, I was… OK.
Or, to put it another way (and as my father, the brilliant professional lyricist would have appreciated) “grief ” rhymes with “relief ”, and if we can balance both emotions, it’s also perfectly possible for us to reach our own personal version of the proverbial “better place”.
I was wrung out, yes, but I was also somehow stronger and braver – emotionally tooled up