If you don’t have an active religious faith, you have to be able to take some other comfort somehow from death People’s thoughtfulness and kindness, in these first days of grieving my Dad, provides much of that ✒️ LucyMangan
How you can be fine one minute and crying hard enough to rupture an organ the next. How you can choose from an array of hearses for the funeral without a bother, and then be undone when you have to move his slippers upstairs because he won’t be needing them again. How everything looks exactly the same but completely different. I would also like to note the bizarre phenomenon of three people being able to agree instantly on which coffin would “suit” Dad.
The kindness of people is extraordinary. We have had such beautiful letters, flowers and messages from family, friends and – because I let my Twitter followers know – strangers offering condolences, memories, prayers, to raise a glass. We cherish – and that is the word – every word of every one of them. Some of his friends have sent photographs we’ve never seen, sometimes from 50 years ago or more, before we were born and you realise he lives on in more people’s memories than you will ever know.
If you don’t have an active religious faith, you have to be able to take some other comfort somehow from death, otherwise the sorrow will crush you. People’s thoughtfulness and kindness provides much of that. But we also know, we feel it in our very bones, how lucky we are in our particular grief. We are lucky to have had Dad for as long as we did.
Of course our grief is huge. But it is easy and straightforward and that is a great gift. So many people have to navigate complicated histories and relationships that give rise to as much rage as sorrow, or other awful obstacles – someone dying young, perhaps, or by violence – in the way of full-hearted, cathartic mourning. A parent dying is at least the natural order of things for a child. The other way round is, always, an abomination.
I don’t – being pretty much only nanoseconds into the thing – have any advice to give about handling any of this grief and bereavement business. But I do have some words of wisdom from someone else to pass on. They came from a friend of a friend who heard about Dad’s death and, having recently lost both her parents, sent me a text. “I promise,” it read, “the love stays with you.” I feel the truth of that already.
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