My father was the first person I told I was pregnant. Partly because I’ve always been a daddy’s girl, but mostly because he’s an excellent secret keeper – owing to the fact he died eight years ago.
I sat by his grave one day last spring and told him my big news. And then I cried like I hadn’t in several years.
When someone you love dies, in the beginning, the grief is all-consuming and constant. It sucks the colour out of the world and forever marks that moment in time. When I look back on my life, I can easily date any event that occurred around those years because there’s a dead-dad hue to all my memories.
This monumental moment seeped over everything like dye over cloth.
And then, slowly, it gets easier. Remembering doesn’t hurt so much, you stop feeling guilty for enjoying your life. And for a minute, you naively think that maybe grief slowly shrinks across the years, that there will be a time when the death will be so long ago it will fade into obscurity.
But as anyone who’s lost someone can attest, grief is constantly shifting and moving to fill the space.
Flora, with baby Jesse, said the arrival of her son has unlocked new feelings, memories and realisations about the man she thought she knew so well
Flora as a baby with her father, the writer and critic AA Gill
When my son, Jesse, was born in November, it created a gap for my grief. Suddenly I was painfully aware of my missing father – the grandfather my son would never know.
Because you don’t just miss the person they were, but also the person they never got the chance to become.
My own child has made me reflect on my relationship with my father, the writer and critic AA Gill. The arrival of my son has unlocked new feelings, memories and realisations about the man I thought I knew so well.
As a child, you take for granted all the little things your parents do distinctively. As a nostalgic adult, you can start to properly appreciate those details – the added extras and traditions that made your childhood special.
And then, when you have your own sprog and need to fill their life with little details, all the ones from your history come flooding back. Things you’ve not considered for decades.
The nicknames your parents called you are on your lips, the songs they sang to wake you up echo through your corridors each morning, you’re even buying ingredients for the snacks they made you after school.
When I was little and sick, my mum would make me hot Ribena and stroke my hair in front of the TV.
My dad had a ritual of making porridge in the morning for me and my brother, carefully stirring thick oats in the pot with slow, deliberate movements as he spoke to us.
Before bedtime, he used to tell us epic stories. The Tales of Scarface Conga, a pirate who lived in the Cornish Caves but travelled to each new country as we did. My dad would weave elaborate tales, blending bastardised stories stolen from Shakespeare and The Iliad, reformed for a child’s ears.
Each night we’d go to sleep to a new chapter carefully constructed by him, often leaving us on a cliffhanger to spill over into our dreams (and sometimes our nightmares).
I wonder if he thought about them in advance. If he knew what would happen before he started talking, or if they just came to him, improvising off our reactions.
Writing is what my father and I had in common and I can’t wait to bring that pirate back to life in a new child’s imagination.
I’ve written a lot about death, and sometimes I feel guilty.
My loss is so commonplace – all I have is a dead dad, something most people will experience in their lives. But it doesn’t feel common. It feels extreme and absurd. And every time I write about it, I receive replies from people who feel the same.
Often all people want is to tell stories of the loved ones they miss.
Those lucky enough not to be a part of the dead dad club sometimes ask me what they can say or do for a grieving friend.
There’s only one answer. Mini muffins are a close second, but the number one gift is
sharing memories of the person who has died. It’s the only thing that truly helps – allowing you to feel, even if only for a brief moment, close to them again.
Somehow my son, born several years after the death of my father, is rekindling memories I didn’t know I had.
I’ve always put my dad on a pedestal, in that slightly unfair way daughters so often do with the fathers they idolise.
And in death, that reverence has only grown – my memories glorifying him to god-like status.
It’s the classic story of a child of divorce, where the father gets to take on the role of the ‘fun parent’ because the mother handles all the mundane tasks.
From my point of view, my memories of my dad are incredible and storied: dyeing my hair red with henna from an old lady in a Marrakech souk, sneaking me into the Moulin Rouge in Paris, taking me porcupine hunting with a tribe in Botswana, or tearing me from my seat in a plane crash before we hid behind a fallen tree.
None of my memories include dentist appointments or school parents’ evenings. But there was a brief time in my life when my dad was the primary caregiver – when I was a baby.
Before he became a writer, he had no real job. He made money selling the odd painting and occasionally teaching cooking classes from his kitchen.
My mother was the breadwinner. After her maternity leave she went back to work and my dad stayed at home, taking care of me.
Now, as I take care of my son, I find unexpected comfort thinking about those days.
It’s not just memories of my childhood that my son has unlocked, but a new appreciation for the many acts of fatherly love I can’t remember.
I’ve never really considered those months when, like my son is now, I was useless, floppy, crying and pooping on repeat – and my father kept me alive and cared for me.
I imagine there would be fewer teenage screamings of ‘I hate you!’ and fewer adults blaming their failings on their upbringing if we could all remember the sleepless nights and patient, endless feedings our parents endured for us.
Because no one is more loved and supported than a baby. It’s selfless and exhausting.
Parents wreck their bodies, sanity and social lives for a child who will never remember and won’t feel grateful … until they go on to do it for their own child. What you miss about a person doesn’t stop when they die; it keeps growing.
There are the little things – the movie you know they would have loved, the restaurant they never got the chance to hate.
And then there are the big things – the life events they left too soon to witness.
A big one for me is the title of grandfather, which my dad never claimed. I’m my dad’s eldest child, and this would have been his first grandchild. His first promotion, and he would’ve excelled at it.
I feel sad that my dad will never know the grandson he would have adored, and my son will never feel the warmth of a grandfather who would have told him the best stories.
But just by looking after Jesse, and seeing the wonderful way my husband cares for him, I’m reminded of how much my father loved me. I understand it in a way I couldn’t before.
When you have a baby of your own, your childhood stops being just memories – it becomes a blueprint.
My son won’t remember these early days, but one day he may have his own child.
And in the repeated traditions and retold bedtime stories, he’ll share the whispers of a grandfather he never knew – but whose love he still felt.
