Childhood Loss
I've never really found a community of other adults who lost a parent as children. I have friends whose parents divorced and they became estranged from a parent, and other friends who have sadly lost a parent as young adults, but it's not quite the same pain.
On Father's Day last weekend I felt a bit sad. Nothing major, and nothing that prevented me from getting on with my day. Just a bit sad. It's a pain I carry always, that part of me frozen in time on the Sunday afternoon when my dad died in 1993.
On this year's Father's Day, I wondered if anyone had an idea how I feel, to the extent that anyone can given how individual an experience bereavement is. I'm eager to seek common ground in all human experiences lately, and a community of this kind has a particular draw for me.
When my granda died in 2004, my mum told me she finally knew how my sister and I felt. But we were children. Her trauma was a very adult one culminating three years of intensive caring after far too many previous challenges. My sister is four years my senior and I can only imagine how vastly different our experiences were at 12 and 8. I have fewer memories and had a less-established relationship. I cannot recall the sound of my dad's voice. I am 35 now. The longer we live, the more he has missed of us. There's a sense of what could have been being taken away from you. There's no choice in it. It happens to you.
And then there's context. In the place and time of my youth, many children lost parents because of conflict. This is a different and complex kind of pain intersecting with stigma, collective trauma and injustice. That's when the violent, painful death is done to you whereas your body no longer working (the broken down 'soft machine') happens to you without intent or malice.
Over the years I have met others with whom I might have connected in common-ground pain, but the opportunities never took. I had a friend in my year at primary school whose father had also died and we formed a strong bond. I wouldn't understand why for many years, but her mother moved them to England and I lost all contact. Her father had been an RUC officer.
In my late teens/early twenties, I was colleagues with the mum of a girl I'd been through secondary school with who told me that her husband died the same year as my dad. This girl had taken the path of acting out. She was one of my many torturers at school. Nothing serious, more low-level annoyances, but her behaviour was a factor in me hating just about every second of those seven years. I'd had no idea. Would things have been different if I had?
Then there was the time a fellow PhD student - a man more than twice my 25 years - told me about his wife dying of cancer a couple of years before and I offered to chat with his two children who were in their early teens if it would help to know someone who'd also lost a parent young. He took this as an invitation to grope and come on to me - advances that I couldn't have been clearer were not welcome. He then told his new partner - another member of our cohort who was pregnant by him, and who I later found out had been spreading nasty rumours about me for the previous year - that I'd tried to seduce him and he had resisted, because, you know, it is a terrible habit of mine, molesting the hands of older men with my body. One of the biggest regrets of my life was backing out of the official complaint because the other women he'd done it to wouldn't get involved in case it ruined his career. But that's a rant for another topic.
From these examples, it's safe to say finding this niched community has so far eluded me. Normally I'd have a search through Twitter, but it's an absolute trash fire at the moment. Maybe I don't need it, though, and I'm doing okay as I am. It's a lonely kind of sadness and it would just be nice to chat with someone, about anything at all, who has an idea of the feeling and it doesn't need to be explained or dwelt on.
It was one of those days when it would just have been nice if someone (an actual person, that is, rather than unsolicited WhatsApp spam) asked me how I am, and would also be okay with me speaking the truth rather than simply saying 'fine'.
Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair.
On Father's Day last weekend I felt a bit sad. Nothing major, and nothing that prevented me from getting on with my day. Just a bit sad. It's a pain I carry always, that part of me frozen in time on the Sunday afternoon when my dad died in 1993.
On this year's Father's Day, I wondered if anyone had an idea how I feel, to the extent that anyone can given how individual an experience bereavement is. I'm eager to seek common ground in all human experiences lately, and a community of this kind has a particular draw for me.
When my granda died in 2004, my mum told me she finally knew how my sister and I felt. But we were children. Her trauma was a very adult one culminating three years of intensive caring after far too many previous challenges. My sister is four years my senior and I can only imagine how vastly different our experiences were at 12 and 8. I have fewer memories and had a less-established relationship. I cannot recall the sound of my dad's voice. I am 35 now. The longer we live, the more he has missed of us. There's a sense of what could have been being taken away from you. There's no choice in it. It happens to you.
And then there's context. In the place and time of my youth, many children lost parents because of conflict. This is a different and complex kind of pain intersecting with stigma, collective trauma and injustice. That's when the violent, painful death is done to you whereas your body no longer working (the broken down 'soft machine') happens to you without intent or malice.
Over the years I have met others with whom I might have connected in common-ground pain, but the opportunities never took. I had a friend in my year at primary school whose father had also died and we formed a strong bond. I wouldn't understand why for many years, but her mother moved them to England and I lost all contact. Her father had been an RUC officer.
In my late teens/early twenties, I was colleagues with the mum of a girl I'd been through secondary school with who told me that her husband died the same year as my dad. This girl had taken the path of acting out. She was one of my many torturers at school. Nothing serious, more low-level annoyances, but her behaviour was a factor in me hating just about every second of those seven years. I'd had no idea. Would things have been different if I had?
Then there was the time a fellow PhD student - a man more than twice my 25 years - told me about his wife dying of cancer a couple of years before and I offered to chat with his two children who were in their early teens if it would help to know someone who'd also lost a parent young. He took this as an invitation to grope and come on to me - advances that I couldn't have been clearer were not welcome. He then told his new partner - another member of our cohort who was pregnant by him, and who I later found out had been spreading nasty rumours about me for the previous year - that I'd tried to seduce him and he had resisted, because, you know, it is a terrible habit of mine, molesting the hands of older men with my body. One of the biggest regrets of my life was backing out of the official complaint because the other women he'd done it to wouldn't get involved in case it ruined his career. But that's a rant for another topic.
From these examples, it's safe to say finding this niched community has so far eluded me. Normally I'd have a search through Twitter, but it's an absolute trash fire at the moment. Maybe I don't need it, though, and I'm doing okay as I am. It's a lonely kind of sadness and it would just be nice to chat with someone, about anything at all, who has an idea of the feeling and it doesn't need to be explained or dwelt on.
It was one of those days when it would just have been nice if someone (an actual person, that is, rather than unsolicited WhatsApp spam) asked me how I am, and would also be okay with me speaking the truth rather than simply saying 'fine'.
Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair.
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