Good Grief:Looking for Dad

Dad aged around 17, in the Australian army This is the photograph that sat on my bedside table until very recently. Countless times I have pored over it, sometimes furtively, by the light of my lamp after it was safe and my husband had turned over to his side of the bed. I absolutely love this picture.  Mainly, my dad's youth, his face still transforming from the podginess of early teens to a more defined structure of late adolescence. Secondly, his nonchalant stance; hat upturned and gently tipped to the right; cigarette laconically perched inside his left upper lip; arms crossed, fingers interlaced, thumbs apart and resting on his chest; a stance that projects confidence. Finally that expression; pupils just visible, as though glancing up; a mixture of indifference and uncertainty.  I do wonder how he did feel at this moment. And that is one of the most difficult aspects of death to digest.  You simply cannot ask that pers...

'It took a hurricane to bring her closer To the landscape' Grace Nichols, Hurricane Hits England Grief can be horrible; suffocating, interminable, heavy, bleak.  Sometimes it feels like you're teetering on a precipice of a cliff. In the fog. At night.  You want to have the temerity to step forward, but are unsure and afraid.  You are looking around for familiarity, but it can be hard to see further than your own hand. But it would be impossible to feel that way 24/7. Exhausting. No, instead these feelings exist mostly as an undercurrent to the daily mundanities that make up our existence. Getting in the shower, entertaining the kids, making tea, driving to work. Some days they come to the fore when nothing but a massive, heaving cry will ease the blockage, and others they murmur away in the background, making everything you see and touch seem just that little bit out of kilter. At least, that is my experience. It sounds draining; it can be draini...

Where to begin?  Well here I suppose, though really this story starts 37 years ago.  Scratch that, make that 74 and 11 1/2 months.  But let's not split hairs.  This story, this journey to find dad, started 2 months ago after a shocking family tragedy jerked me into action; or should I say, jerked me out of the inaction that had allowed me to procrastinate for so many years. And now I am here, on this Saturday tea time in late August, and on the advice of my good friend, P.B., trying to find somewhere to start.  So here goes. I am on a mission to 'find' my dad.  My father. 'Daddy'; that childish nomenclature that, despite the fact that we his children are adults, and most of parents ourselves, still use when discussing this significant absent being. But he is not lost, or missing; not divorced or voluntarily absent, or at the leisure of HMPS, but in fact, no longer with us.  You know?  Up there?  On the other ...