It has been forty two days since my dad died. In terms of a number it has no real meaning, not in the sense of it being aligned to a specific date, like a month or two months, or even a birthday or an anniversary.
It is another day of losing him again. A day, like the forty one before this one, where I reach for my phone in the middle of the night to check he’s okay, or plan my daily visits before I have fully opened my eyes in the morning. These invalid actions are a fraction of a second lived with the comfort of not knowing what is coming my way.
But come my way it did.
I am in Rathlin now, where dad was born and lived until he set off for Glasgow in search of work when he was a young man. I’m writing this from my window at home on the island, looking directly over to the house where his 91 year journey began. In doing so, I’m asking the question, do all beginnings have to end? Can a beginning become entwined in generations and forego the finality, instead becoming a life lived in the hearts and minds of others?
Perhaps existence can be frameless, free of the lines that define a story’s last words, etched to a memorial stone that will fade with the wind and the shifting of family from those who knew, and those who didn’t.
As I search for an answer, I reach into the pockets of my dad’s pyjamas, clothes I have been changing into every day since he died. Despite the vastness, my hands don’t feel out of place in his pockets and l stumble forward a little. It feels like a contradiction, this coming together of the past and present in a space where I can’t feel the edges. And yet, that’s what I’m searching for, a circle; lines which were never defined in the first place.
In the last wee while before Dad died, his hearing aids weren’t working so the only way to communicate with him was to write (in very big writing) questions and messages in Notes on my phone. I was searching for an unrelated note earlier today and came across lots of forgotten snippets of conversations I had written to Dad across days and weeks of visits to the hospital. My first thought was to delete the notes, too afraid they would be painful to consume, but the reality is different. It is illuminating reading them.
This is an archive of a critical time in our lives. A period I want to be able to remember, and this will help me to do exactly that. Every little note tells a story; the messages taking me back to a memory of a conversation shared. On the surface they are about appointments with Specsavers, or Celtic results and all important scorers, or wee narratives about where I’m going, what I need to do and when I’ll be back. And at a deeper level they detail updates from the nurses and doctors that Dad had struggled to hear.
But they are also so much more than this. The notes are evidence of a life, in real time, as we lived and breathed it.
The notes, and the life, will live on in me.
Margot McCuaig 