Still dead. And other moments from life without.

Ruby found my dad after his stroke. She woke me up on a Wednesday morning to tell me Grandad was asleep on the floor, before leading me upstairs by the hand to show me. I allowed her to parent me, aware I was about to see something I wasn’t ready to, wouldn’t ever be ready to. She was three years and nine months old; my dad, 80. I mention the months for her because they seem more significant when someone’s years can be counted on a single hand. But really it all matters, however old you are. Of course it does.  

My dad was 80 years, 6 months and 12 days old when he died.

He was 46 when I was born; his mam – my Grandma Hart – had died two weeks earlier. I arrived during his second marriage to my mum. Kids at primary school would often think he was my grandad, mostly on account of the grey hair he’d had since his twenties. I suspected he’d die when I was relatively young because he’d already had so much life. I never took it for granted that he would meet my kids; I don’t think he did either, every moment a bonus, savoured.  

His last four days were with us in London, observing the progress of Georgia’s hand, foot and mouth outbreak. It was quite the spectacle, her lesioned body shedding sheets of skin and an endless stream of snot. She had just turned one and was clinging to me, constantly complaining, not comprehending. Dad was quietly sympathetic – knowing nods and scant regard for contamination. On Tuesday, I remember him saying, it’s reached its peak now.

There was the usual request for me to cut his hair which I dismissed as ill-timed.
Is there ever a good time? he joked. I’ll do it in the morning before you leave, I said, as usual. I think about this – that I let him die without a haircut. I hope he wouldn’t hold it against me, but I’m not sure.

He asked me about the first piece of freelance work I was struggling with after a year of second time motherhood. I don’t have time to explain it all now, I said, frustrated that he seemed to have no concept of time, preoccupied as he was with gaining ever more understanding of the world around him. I spent over two hours that afternoon crafting an article on something I can’t recall while my parents took Ruby up to Wandsworth Common and Georgia napped at home.  

I think about the fact he died here – later that Wednesday after my daughter found him – in St George’s Hospital, Tooting, having spent almost his entire life in Thornaby on Tees, North Yorkshire. How strange, I remember thinking, as I signed the death certificate at Wandsworth Town Hall six days later.

His body had to be collected; a courier arranged by the funeral directors to ‘bring dad home’. I couldn’t connect my dad to the corpse I’d sat beside in hospital with my mum and two sisters, who’d made it down to London. No half about them, though they came from his first marriage. No. Our dad couldn’t be brought anywhere; he was no longer contained in, or by, a body. I had seen him leave it behind when he died. A departure, a transition. An event so seminal it called to mind the births of my daughters.

And yet leaving his body alone in that hospital room had felt wrong. Us outside, searching for our taxi, speechless. We returned to our house to find his coat hung where he’d left it, his battered old gardening shoes by our backdoor. Yesterday he wore them, gave our grass one last cut before the Winter.

But we were meant to do drawing! cried Ruby when we told her on Thursday morning. How do you explain to a small child that the person who was stunned by her ability to grasp syllables just 36 hours ago is no longer here? I think I’d better stick to the drawing, he laughed. I thought about the semantics of the word here. If not here, then where?  

Young children are so intensely in the now they can’t dwell on the dead for long. Half of the gene pool that made me was gone, and a pit had formed in my stomach. I discovered how it felt to be hollow, and I howled for him and the part of me that had died alongside. And yet: mama, mama, mama. I was still inexplicably complete in the eyes of my children. They needed me as they’d needed me two days earlier, when he was in our house, and I was both their mother and his daughter.  

Months later, round the kitchen table, Ruby, now four: Mammy, you know when we were driving up North…, bright blue eyes flicking between me, her dad and my mum, When Grandad Peter was still, still, still dead…
Out followed a question, or an observation, I can’t remember. The laughter caught me off guard. Delerium. Disbelief. Comedy, undeniable. Still dead.

More months later: Mammy, do you miss your dad so much?
So much, sweetheart. Sometimes, though, I feel like he’s here, around me. I don’t know if that makes sense?
YES! she said. He’s invisible.
Her words enveloped me like the presence I’d tried to explain while she drifted away to find something to play with.

Mam came to stay recently. When I told Georgia that Grandma Jan was coming, she looked at me and – with her new powers of speech – said, Peter? We must talk about him more than I realised. I hope she remembers him, even though he died half her lifetime ago.  

Her big sister came home from school with a picture for me. Black A5 paper with small green, red and gold shiny squares stuck to it in random fashion. It’s Grandad’s ashes! She said. Seeing my surprise, Your dad’s ashes! she added, for clarity.
I love it, I said. He would love it too. (I’m not certain, he was quite squeamish about death – especially his own.)
Later that evening, looking again at her artwork, I felt a surge in my chest. Reluctant at first, then forceful. Laughter. Wave after wave of it. Couldn’t say why, or at what exactly.

Recently, I looked at some photos of my dad over the years and felt familiar hot tears pool. Tectonic plates shifting, threatening a tsunami. The fucking audacity of him, to go and die like that. To suddenly stop being of this earthly existence.
Where are you? I ask nobody.

I think of Georgia, almost two, who would have entertained him for hours. How she speeds round our kitchen so quickly on her trike that one of the back wheels leaves the floor when she takes a corner, how she’s taken to trotting when excited. Her big eyes have turned brown, and they project an inner strength he said he sensed in her when she was a few months old.

I never got to tell him: you were right, Dad. The hand, foot and mouth had reached its peak. She took her first steps a few days after you died. Maybe she knew we needed something to cheer about: the relentless progress of the young and healthy; the antithesis of what we’d witnessed.

I think of Ruby. How she absorbs and processes her experiences of this world and presents us with considered, often comical insights on this absurd existence we share. Eyes that sparkle with stories and mischief and the sheer thrill of self-expression. New, and yet familiar. She who found you, who keeps bringing you back to me.   

There you are.