The adage goes that nothing is certain in life but death and taxes, and for most of us, that is true (bar the CEO’s of multinational corporations, of course). Yet despite the inevitability of death, we shy from it as a society, siloing grievers in a bubble of solitary despair while the world carries on.
I became an unwilling member of the Dead Parents’ Club (DPC) at 24, when my dad finally lost an eight-year sparring match with cancer. It was a loss so profound I’ve never quite found the words to portray it. The best I can do is say that when I felt his frail chest rise and fall for the final time, there was a molecular shift in me. My life is now defined by this moment – there is before him and after. The question was, how the hell would I carry on when the foundations of my life were gone?
Losing a parent is a universal experience, a tragedy we are all destined to face at some point in our lives – yet when you’re in the thick of it, grief feels so definitively lonely. I didn’t want to wear the DPC badge publicly, especially at a time in my life when I was supposedly at my prime. But my glassy eyes and aura of abject melancholy branded me as a griever despite all my attempts to act normally. While my friends threw themselves into careers, relationships and once-in-a-lifetime OE’s, I was a spectre, moving through the motions of living, trying to stitch my seams back together.
A three-month haze surrounds his death. I can tell you that it was summer, but the persistent January sun in Tairāwhiti did nothing to warm me. I can still smell the perfume of hundreds of white lilies that decorated our house like a florist's shop. And, I can still taste the reheated rubber of frozen lasagne, prepared by loving friends who knew my mum and I had lost the will to cook.
Fast forward three years, and I’d be lying if I said I had it all figured out. They say grief happens in stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, yet I never found a cohesive order.
Denial still strikes when I instinctively lay the table for one too many at Christmas – waiting for the guest of honour, his ghost. Anger still radiates from my bones every Father’s Day, when the onslaught of Bunnings and Mitre 10 ads feels like a malicious reminder that yes, my dad is dead. And depression visits me often, usually in my luteal phase, or rendering me non-verbal when I hear All I Want by Kodaline.
But what I have found in the ugly, festering mess of my grief is the undeniable comfort of a friend, or a stranger who wears the DPC badge too. Aotearoa is a nation of concrete pills and pulling our socks up – admitting when we are drowning is not an easy thing to do. But ironically, it’s the only thing that ever helped me.
I’ve never been a club-type person. I’m notoriously terrible at team sports and the only thing that interested me about Girl Guides as a kid was the cookies. But the DPC truly has kept me afloat. There’s nothing quite like sitting in silence with someone who understands why everything feels so heavy, sending morbid memes to your DPC besties or having someone to vent down the phone to when your car battery dies and you curse the fact you didn’t ask your dad to teach you more practical skills.
Losing someone you love to a terminal illness is a razor-sharp double-edged sword. On one hand, you know that their days are numbered, so you can cherish every last moment with them. But in the same vein, time becomes a torturer as you wait for the end. There isn’t a guide to grief, but hindsight has given me the cruel wisdom of what I wish I’d done differently.
I wish I’d taken more videos. Memory is a fickle thing, and with every year that passes, the exact tenor of his voice fades. While pictures can capture the way he lovingly looked at my mum, they don’t capture his laugh, his party trick flik-flaks on the front lawn or the way he’d swing my baby sister between his legs up onto his shoulders.
I wish I’d spent afternoons asking him about his life before me, recording his stories on my voice notes. I wish I’d written down his goddamn passwords so accessing his accounts wouldn’t require Lisbeth Salander. I wish I’d taken more time off work and spent my days by his bedside. I wish I’d told him sincerely how much I loved him when he still had the faculties to hear. I wish I’d asked for his pinwheel scone recipe and his tricks to growing perfect cherry tomatoes.
If you’re reading this as a member of the DPC or are soon to be, my only wisdom is to lean on those carrying the same weight as you. Cherish their memories and know that one day you’ll catch yourself smiling at their face on your phone screen, when once hearing their name would have completely undone you.
