Moralistic he did not remain, however. At 71, my dad stunned
his little tribe of three by confessing, first to his wife, then his two
daughters, to an on-going affair with a mentally unstable colleague. My mother’s
world was turned upside down, as was ours – was right still right, or was it now wrong? What, of all that
we’d believed in, was still worth believing in?
Death, however, is the get out of jail free card for
forgiveness, and callous cancer reifies the need to blame and punish, revealing
petty hues. This new exonerating circumstance gave our anger permit to
soften. We were able to experience a moment of grace with this man, seeing him
for the first time as fallible, vulnerable, human. His dogmatic values of an inherited source no longer applied, allowing our timid hesitancy to be taken over
by a confident sense of our own discretionary consideration. Taking care of him
in the final months required non-wavering compassion, mixed with ruthless
conviction of daily life-or-death decisions. Having my father’s life in my
hands has been the single most powerful experience of my life, in the sense
that any doubts I’ve ever had about my capacity to be a caring, loving person,
responsible for another, have been thwarted. Now, at least, I had proof of the
seed of good in me. Perhaps I am to be trusted, along with my instincts.
With the turmoil and chaos of my repeatedly deconstructed
reality - firstly by the betrayal of trust, then by unconditional giving, and
finally loss - I expected the finality of death, when it finally came, to serve
as relief; a definitive remover of inhibitions, a tremendous motivator. I felt this
was sure to be the moment of clear perspective, when I finally stand up renewed from
the ashes, and pursue my true purpose. But here something was still undeniably blocked,
like a corked barrel. My loss, my grief, only managed to shake the barrel and
effervesce the contents. However the cork would not dislodge. I couldn’t
understand what more was required to provide a final straw. I had realised that
any significant change would not occur during the initial shock phase, and
fully expected to have to wait it out. But the process of grieving had taken a
disheartening turn, as the pain of losing my closest male friend, my ally in
eye-rolling at family gatherings, my confederate in introspective nihilism, my
enabler of the darkest of humour, intensified, rather than subsiding. The solid
stability and core structure my dad’s presence bestowed upon my existence acted
as a mould, without which the contents, jellylike and formless, spilled out, proving
impossible to re-gather and reshape.
I felt paralysed, powerless and lost. Utterly unable to
even begin relocating my path. All that I’ve managed to achieve since his
death, in terms of real change, had been increased propensity towards
self-destructiveness, a sense of listless aimlessness, and a desperate need to
set my course for terra firma of my aspirational dreams. My jelly, it would
seem, would inevitably have to form into an entirely new mould. Although what shape
that mould would take, I had absolutely no idea.
This has not been my first encounter with cancer and its
life-altering path of destruction. But unlike this current craving to surrender
to spontaneous flights of fancy, eight years previously my adventure and travel
lust pre-existed the illness. A round-the-world trip I was about to embark on had been recontextualised by these new circumstances in a
way I could not have foreseen. What was meant to be a carefree expression of my
newfound freedom, and transcendence into full blossom, became an
introspective journey of darker hues. Or perhaps it was always going to shape up that way. You
can plan and make provisions for the way forward, but after all, it’s the impulsive
decisions, wrong turns and detours that eventually shape our lives, and rarely
as predicted.
This time round, sitting on the
stairs, I could not see over the edge of the bottomless hole I fell into. Alone and in the
dark I summoned a route out.
