Losing my father has left me clinging to the wreckage

Ihave been absent from these pages for some weeks because my father died. It’s no big deal in the scheme of life: everyone’s parents die sooner or later, and in my father’s case it was late-ish. He was 75 and besieged by cancer. He had done more with his life than most of us can hope to: written eight books, found a job he loved, married a wonderful woman, raised two happy daughters and welcomed seven grandchildren into the world.

It wasn’t a sudden, violent or untimely death. It was, for want of a better word, “normal”. And yet to me, nothing seems normal any more. The closest experience I can think of is childbirth: that feeling of having stepped through a portal into a different realm of human experience. I remember going for a walk in the park two days after giving birth for the first time, unable to think about anything but the psychedelic intensity of labour, the pooling blood and the fluorescent lights and the sensation of being picked up by a huge celestial pair of hands and wrung out like a flannel.

And yet all around me in the park were other mothers – women who had survived the same metamorphic experience as me – carrying on as if nothing had happened. I looked at them, gossiping in the playground in their Breton stripes, and felt a bewildered awe. Why weren’t they rocking on their heels and rending their clothes, or shuffling about wearing sandwich boards saying THE END IS NIGH?

Now I feel the same way about everyone who has ever lost a parent: how do you carry it so discreetly? How do you go back into polite society having watched the person who gave you life struggle for his final breath? Once you have pressed your nose right up against the window of mortality, how do you re-engage with the necessary trivia of everyday life?

For 45 years I was luckier than many people in having a father whose love was unconditional and whose company I adored. His explosive pride in my achievements (and, indeed, my failures, which he insisted were a mark of good character) made it a pleasure to see myself through his eyes.

Everything I wrote was for him to read: I would lay a joke or a neatly turned phrase at his feet like a cat placing a dead mouse before her master. Now that he is gone, who am I chasing mice for? Do I even like the taste of mouse, come to think of it? If I can no longer see my reflection in his rose-tinted spectacles, do I actually exist at all?

Everyone who loses a parent, whatever the state of their relationship, goes through some version of this existential angst. I am learning this now because – like the Breton-striped mothers – the bereaved only really talk among themselves. Seeing a fellow sufferer, they gather shyly round to compare notes and offer solidarity. It changed their lives, they say: it brought on a nervous breakdown, or a divorce, or a new determination to enjoy their own remaining years.

“It’s like surviving a shipwreck,” said one friend – and I know exactly what he means. I am clinging to a piece of driftwood, watching the ship I was sailing on disappear beneath the waves. All around me is a cold, empty expanse of ocean. Somehow I need to pick a direction, muster my courage, and swim.