Heh.

I’m currently finding it difficult, for example, to not just tell chuggers to fuck off, and to restrain myself from simply pushing people out of the way whom I deem to be ‘dithering about like a fucking moron. Dear lord, what the fuck are you for?’ I realise that this isn’t a massive departure from my usual demeanour but I’m beginning to worry that rather than biting my tongue, I’m just going to chew it off.

I was making a sandwich today, as you do, and for reasons unknown was treated to a whole slew of poorly informed statements regarding what my father used to think of sandwiches and what he’d say if he saw me making one. I didn’t quite have the heart to point out that what was being said was utter bullshit, but it did make me realise that sandwich making wasn’t the strangest topic I’d been lectured on of late.

I’m guessing that it’s something to do with the coping process but I can’t, as of yet, explain what the point of it is. You don’t do the same thing with the living, so why the dead?

Seems like a lot of effort though.

Clicky.

Word.

Excellent.

Oh god. oh god, oh god.

Yet I suspect that we all feel that way about ourselves at times; all feel the pull of regret and opportunities missed. I don’t know if my father ever felt that way because, from the outside looking in, he lived a good life and never complained. Well, he’d grumble if it turned out there was no pudding or we were out of biscuits, but otherwise seemed perfectly content with his lot. I realise there’s a dull inevitability to lionising the dead, but still, I find now that I envy him. Or rather, envied him. Not his current absence of vitality, obviously – though once that may well have been the case – but the simple fact that he achieved the one thing I have long doubted that I ever will. You see, rare as it may be, my father was a happy man.

Written down that seems an insufferably hackneyed thing to say, yet it remains true. Somehow, in a world where I struggle to see anything particularly worthwhile or good, my father found love, happiness and contentment without any apparent effort. I don’t recall him ever being angry or irritated, though I’m sure there must have been times when this was the case, but rather predominantly pleased or amused with the simple things in life and possessed of an ability to let things go that I wish I could emulate.

I thought about this as I stood watching the man in the Mac; thought about the church so full of people that they were standing at the back, at the front and wherever else there was room. I thought about all those who’ve shared their memories of my father with me, the people who’d said what a good man he was and the ones who just hugged me and sighed. I thought about my childhood, family holidays and all the silly little things you forget until something momentous happens and I smiled, in a half-assed kind of way. That might seem incongruous, and I suppose it is, but I’m not as sad that he’s gone as I am happy that he was my Dad. It’s a strange equation, but there it is.

That said, what a fucking shitty two weeks. There’re apparently five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. However, given that I more or less live at stage four, I’ve simply spread out and built an annexe in stage two and am finding it really hard not to be seethingly unpleasant to every single person that does anything even vaguely irritating. I am, make no bones about it, incredibly displeased with the world as it stands and the more pricks I have to deal with, the deeper the displeasure. This, I freely admit, is petty an irrational. The problem is that I simply can’t be doing with other people’s banal shit at the moment and, while I feel slightly guilty about it, I can’t say that I feel unduly ashamed at the need to quash the urge to just bellow at people until they fuck off.

Ultimately, it was a phone call I’d been expecting every time my phone had rung since the news, two months ago, that my father’s cancer had metastasised from its original location to his brain. I’d like to say that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part when it came, that I was overcome with emotion and rendered insensible by grief because, typically, that’s what you’d expect. It’s certainly what I expected of myself when the time came. But then, when the call finally did come, it turns out that everything you think you know about how you’re going to react to something like this is wrong.

There was no shock, not really, not given his condition – a part of me feels ashamed about that – instead there was a sort of creeping numbness, like I’d taken a blow to the head and was slowly blacking out. Now it’s more like one of those dreams where you’re not quite sure if you’re awake because everything looks the same but feels subtly different. Surreal is the word I’d use.

I don’t really know how to say the rest of what I want to say, not without going on for pages and pages. My friends have been amazingly supportive, something that’s served to remind me that I’m not such a bad guy after all, which has made the whole experience much more bearable. Family, well, they’re family and they’ve done what family do. It’s the rest that have surprised me. See, I’ve always thought of my Dad as a good guy – I mean I would, being his son an’ all – but I never realised just how many friends he had, or how many people thought so well of him. It’s quite humbling in a way. That’s something of a cliché, obviously. But it’s still surprised me nonetheless.

Then again, when I think about it, there’s something that’s hard not to like about a grown man who’d insist on playing Pooh Sticks at every opportunity, would check under bridges for trolls and maintain, in all seriousness, that all movies were true stories. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss him.