LOSS; THE GUILTY STING

LOSS; THE GUILTY STING

I watched a film about grief just now, not a very good film but I was glad to see it and to see the rifts that death can create and also the bringing together that happens in the end because such films need good endings!

Somehow despite my fear and deep belief that my inability to be what I wanted to be when Wendy’s dad was dying and my own cold remoteness when my dad died, we never experienced that rift in affection. I very much doubt it has much to do with me and though it is a pedestal I create, am so glad that it was Wendy with her wisdom and sense of fun that I went through this with.

When I had finished watching my film, I tidied my plate of veggie sausage sandwiches away, took Dash out for a walk and almost, by accident, made three crumpets which I smothered in butter.

No one else is here so Dash is confused. He knows it is bed time but does not know where to sleep so, having started off on the sofa bed in the kitchen he has come upstairs to the bed up here. I like that. I like that the children were wild beyond imagining in the car when I took Wendy to the station. I like that I knew their shrieks and tears and sobs were all make believe, designed to get us angry with them so they could burst out laughing when we told them off. I like that Wendy stayed in the car until the train arrived in the station and that the checkout person in the Co-op recognised me when I come in to buy bread and milk.

But I find myself a little bit lost when I think of my son because those insignificant details are absent. It is so long since he has been in my life that I have even forgotten his birthday and year of birth. I thought he was thirty a year ago but think it was actually this year. Thirty is traditionally a time when people wake up with a shock to real live adulthood and the need for babies and careers and whatever being adult means to them.

I have no idea what Calum woke up to on his thirtieth birthday, or his twenty fifth or his twentieth or eighteenth. I do remember his seventeenth and it was wonderful.

The bit I really don’t want to admit is that maybe I lost the right to know about his life years before I realised I had lost it. I don’t know how that happened, despite the years and years since then, I still don’t.

Was it because I didn’t believe I had any right to his love when I left his mum and that I didn’t deserve it, should not fight to keep it? Was it because I didn’t stand up for myself when I left? Or that I couldn’t see outside the arguments and hatred and thrown glasses to the effect on my son trapped in his life with us. Or that I just didn’t believe I could be loved? That I always thought I was some add on to the family? That I believed the bad things and did not recognise and treasure the moments of tenderness and joy?

He lives in Kyrgyzstan now. I haven’t the slightest idea what his life is like. I know he avoids family. I know that when I said goodbye again after a very, very, brief time together eight years ago, I did not know if he would welcome my awkward hug on his thin, black clothed body.

I haven’t a clue if he has friends. I don’t know what his values are or if he is happy or angry or bitter. I don’t know if he ever thinks of me or if he is gay or in a relationship. I don’t know is he has friends or if his work is fulfilling or if he likes whatever food it is that people like in Kyrgyzstan. If he is rich or very poor. If he wakes in the night to a terrible hollowness or if; ever in my life, I will ever see him again.

And that is my grief; I cannot articulate it or know if it is the sort of grief that people would respect and understand or think was self-centred, self-created and full of self-pity. Though I would welcome him in our home; be delighted in that way where I wouldn’t stop thinking and pacing at the thought of seeing him again if I knew he was coming to see us. I really have no idea if we would like each other now and feel somehow, the bonds of that distant time when I was a father and he was the son I had promised the very, very, best of a loving upbringing to and who I must have let down so terribly.

I do not know what this emotion is. Yes it is grief and it is regret and shame and such a feeling of how I wish I knew some of the things about him the waiter in the café, he maybe goes to in the mornings, would know about him in a way that I will probably never ever know again.

Unlike the films; grief and despair does not always lead to healing or understanding or catharsis; it just dulls to a slow painful glow that occasionally I wake to. It is realising that the shame of not being whatever was expected of me and losing almost by accident, that most important of all connections which drags its claws into me until my mind is in ribbons but I remain unaware of it. I wake in the morning, go to work, love my new life, drink the whisky, eat the crumpets. But when I am alone again, I call forth memories that day by day fade away but return at odd moments like this, to sting me with a barb I can never remove and which I know I was somehow responsible for.

(Photo: Dumbarton Castle April 2022)