disintegration
When I wrote the first entries of The Diary of Being Alive, my father was still with us. But his disintegration had begun.
Dad was diagnosed with three rare diseases. The first, the most horrible and consequentially the fatal one was Motor Neuron Disease, with frontal lobe dementia. The second was Myasthenia Gravis and the third was Para Thyroid. Each of these conditions would singularly cause challenges. Together they set my father’s brain on fire. His condition was heart-wrenching. He died 1 year after his diagnosis. But we lost a part of him with each passing day.
On THE dISINTEGRATION OF oUR fATHER
Whole you were – loud – out there –
THERE
We could not miss you,
Nobody could.
You were the IT in a crowd.
Your laughter rumbling loud.
Louder again if the joke was your own.
And Even That
Was amenable.
Even That you got away with.
Who laughs at their own jokes & is still liked by people?
Liked even more – because of the self-congratulatory laughter,
& not
as one would think,
in spite of it?
It is a marvel!
A wonder in itself
But then …
So are you.
So were you!
When you silenced yourself
you silenced us too.
We silence in the gasp of your silence.
‘How could such a storyteller cease to speak?’
That’s what everyone said.
If it were anyone else, we could accept it more.
But your silence – first of your mind
and then of your body
was unacceptable.
Your silence was empty. A sadness of where you should be.
A hole where your whole should stand.
Whole you were – loud – out there –
THERE
We could not miss you,
Nobody could.
And as you shrunk our world you shrunk too.
A mythical being whose power was stripped.
Who disintegrated bit by bit as the silence endured.
A metaphor of our loss:
A shrunken body and a silent life.
Once so heavy it would take two of us to try to elevate your leg a single inch.
Children balancing the whole weight of your singular limb under
our entire selves
& achieving nothing but laughter & knowledge
that our daddy was so strong.
Then suddenly & forever we could fold you in our arms.
Your legs twigs beside mine.
Your legs that had been trunks.
A metaphor for all we lost.
A tree of aging. With wisdom. Knowledge & Adventure.
A tree that leant its branches for children to swing from.
A trunk that allowed laughter & joy to reach our core,
to fill the space & stretch high above us.
Now a twig, tiny & fragile.
A twig that must be held & protected.
A twig that is so easily thread upon.
A twig that couldn’t last long.
Your season came to an end too quickly.
It was a passing night.
And you were gone.
Your breath and words gurgled in your chest.
A sound so terrible
we will never forget.
Your disintegration.
You left us with silence and in silence.
We never got to know what you felt.
But we saw your fear as your branches weakened.
We tried to hold on to those failing limbs.
We tried to cradle those twigs.
To carry you
as you carried us.
But as they weakened and broke
we knew.
We knew you had to go.
Your season had ended.
It was not yet winter. But your season had ended.
It ended in Autumn.
Three fundamental things changed in my life in the last years.
Dad’s death ceased my writing. I haven’t written one word in two and half years. Well until right now. The series, Diary of Being Alive naturally latched on to Dad, perhaps because he was already ill or perhaps because dad was very much an anchor and ever present in my life and thoughts. I think I did most things with my father in my mind and I think I still do. Once he died, I lost the topic.
That latch that had started it all. As with most things we never really know where writing will lead us and what will take a center hold of a tale. To honk the cliche my world has been spinning on an axis that I have no physical understanding of ever since Dad passed away.
It is why my computer cursor blinks accusingly at me when I sit down to write and why my brain cannot access, or refuses to access, a way to express myself ever since.
The simplest and probably the truest reality is that I have changed. I understand the world differently since my father left it. I understand myself differently and I consider life differently. So, how could I possibly write when, in many ways, I am brand new? What could I possibly have to say?
Two and half years later however I feel less new – I feel that I understand grief in a way I never cared to understand it and I feel that I do not understand myself as well as I thought I did anymore. Grief has taught me humility. This is a good thing. It has taught me that I am, in fact, without knowledge and that has changed everything. That has made me better.
The first fundamental change was leaving my job and finally finally stepping out of a classroom after sixteen and a half years.
The second was people entered my life. (People that should never have entered – no one truly tells you how grief can lead to temporary madness).
The third was an unravelling (although that did kinda happen in conjunction with rest).
So, let’s start at what we know is a very good place to start:
The Beginning.
I left my job – my job was complex, demeaning, controlling and abusive. I knew all this and I had known it for years. But the moment I decided to leave it was the day I sent an email to say:
‘I am sorry for the inconvenience but as my dad will pass away in the following hours, I will need to extend my time off, following the midterm break.’
My dad passed away on October 31, 2022. The school I worked in was closed, for midterm holidays, until November 2 2022. In order, to be home for his wake and funeral I needed the remaider of the week and the days following to fly back and reorient myself, after a year of horror finally reaching a poignont completion, (as in I didn’t need to use every holiday to fly home and offer my sisters, brother and mother respite from their care of my father anymore).
‘Do not forget to post all your lessons and work for the students on Managebac. Mel.’
I received an email back from my then boss.
‘You have put us in a tricky situation….’.
I don’t need to explain the rest as she used personal details about my colleagues and their respective sick relatives to emphasis why I must immediately return to work.
This email came through on my phone (yes, I kept my work notifications on so that I could continue to assist my team while away), while standing beside my father’s open coffin, in what was my childhood bedroom, and shaking hands with one of the thousand people who had come to pay their respects. In this moment my school was still closed, and we were still technically on holidays. Another email quickly followed… (without salutation) …
‘Do not forget to post all your lessons and work for the students on Managebac.’
Well, I didn’t forget. In fact, I had already posted it all on our online platform, Managebac. When my father was diagnosed, I spent every weekend creating back up lessons for ALL my classes, in the sad eventuality that I may miss work at any given point. I felt two things in this moment:
One was that I wished I had not made this pre preparation and
Two was that I would most certainly leave my job.
But something more significant shifted in me that day. Something that I believe other people fully learned long before I did – that people can be fuckers and never put your life and soul into a job you do for someone else.
Oh and by the way I am simply not going to miss to take this opportunity to highlight the reality of teaching.
I assure you your eyeroll is also misguided. Hating on teachers is not the hill to die on.
I see this job as one of the most highly criticised. It is fundamentally (not slightly), but shockingly underpaid by the government and it is ridiculed by societies who talk about holidays and teacher complaining and so on. What I have written above and below is a biased and an unbiased view of this job. Holidays are an illusion and as far as I can see basically a reallocation of overtime and teachers are by in large some of the most human people on this planet and some of the most exploited (isn’t it a vocation, shouldn’t you do 60% of the workload as a volunteer?).
I was an inconceivable student during my high school years and the first to admonish teachers – I am a teacher for eighteen years in total now (the last year and half have been outside a regular school and I can see even more clearly the abuse occuring in the school systems) and so I tell you – I was wrong when I was a student and young teacher, and you are wrong.
(If you find yourself eye-rolling at the defense of teachers I can tell you that, absolutely, there are misguided teachers (although minimal) out there and a misguided system (most likely the problem) that does not support all types of learners.
But I assure you your eyeroll is also misguided. Hating on teachers is not the hill to die on.
All because the pressure from the top was too heavy to fight against. Both me and my students suffered the consequences.
I didn’t leave my job in November – I handed in my letter of intent to look elsewhere and worked like the “good” teacher I am until June 2023. It was irreconcilable to “abandon” my students and my exceptionally overstretched colleagues. Although I fundamentally knew that I was not emotionally equipped to stand in six different classes a day of twenty-five students each, I equally felt that I would be in rebuke if I admitted this fact. And so ensued the worst period of my life and I probably created damage to my students that will stay with them forever.
When I finally did leave, I intended to leave teaching altogether, but I got a job offer to work in a school that was built on one-to-one learning, a 39 hour week, 7 students instead of 125 and so naturally I leapt at it. I learned the joy of teaching again, but I was so unequipped to deal with the time I had. In the last sixteen and a half years every second of my day was taken up with tasks. My holidays simply prevented burn out and suddenly I felt myself having evening and weekends to myself. I didn’t know what to do (aside from staring at the wall) and felt extreme guilty for taking a salary for working a “mere” thirty-nine hours. I had a crisis and thought I would use this extra time for writing, traveling, pursuing projects, but, realised quickly that I was so brain-washed by teaching culture that I felt like an imposter to have freedom. So I did not use my freedom at all and, instead spent it in spells of self-admonition.
One and a half years later I am getting better at accepting that this is general working life and I am entitled to be paid and to have my free time, while not getting repeatedly sick in holiday periods.
But it has been a slow unlearning and a slower “unbrainwashing”.
I stayed in my job months longer than I should have – at the detriment to myself and my students. But I made a second error and that was an emotional one. I let people into my life. On the surface these people seemed good for me. They carried me away on ideas, explorations and adventures. they showed me a different way of viewing the world and in many ways I believe I latched onto their friendships. And there was a guy who was carefree and impulsive. He brought spontaneity in my life in a way that I felt no one had ever done before. I believed my father had sent him to me. The misguided error of grief.
Grief made me look for signs everywhere – it made me see only the positive. I knew my father’s life had meant something and I wanted his death and afterlife to mean something too. I could not see that these particular people were opportunists, cheaters (in every sense) and a player of a game where humans are the pawns. But that is okay – they brought a certain amount of distraction and adventure at a time when that is what I needed and when my temporal maddness subsided i was able to extricate them from my life with bruising rather than scarring. This is grief. That’s okay.
My judgement was clouded. The point I want to make is that I learned that when we lose someone it is so tempting to search for their hand afterwards but the reality is that we need to accept that they are gone and likely do not have the power to bring anyone or anything into our lives.
As with my job I was misguided
The Unravelling of self
Both these situations resulted in a slow unravelling of myself. In the last two and half years I have changed my life in many ways. I will not regret my decisions or chide myself because they are what I needed to do to find myself here.
What I realised is that grief is a process that can pull the wool over our eyes – reality and non-reality become confused and most of the people around us generally have no understanding. The beliefs we hold on to can be trickery and lead us on the wrong path entirely. The ways we wish our loved ones to be here do not always manifest, but it does not mean they are not still here.
I feel my father on my left shoulder every time I walk by the sea.
In every bird that chirps hello, he is there; in every whisper of the wind, I hear him. But he did not send me this person and his death did not mean that my life would suddenly stay on course. Instead, I learned that grief makes us vulnerable to opportunists and forces us to change equally. But that route is truly horrifying and just as painful. It may mean seeing people as terrible, absent, or negatively consequential to our life course, but it also shows us who to trust, who to walk life with and who to let go.
If you have watched someone disintegrate you already know the complex reality that ensues – if you haven’t, yet, then rely on those who have, to guide you.
I feel my father on my left shoulder every time I walk by the sea.
And now? I’m going to keep writing. This entry is chaotic and wild but it is me writing again and so I will continue. I am going to keep travelling (effectively using that free time that is so precious). And I will never step inside a classroom again.
