Where does my dad’s death leave me?  This is a selfish question, but it is the overriding question that I keep asking myself.  Is a daughter without a dad still a daughter?  How do I love and cherish my children when I am hurting and lost inside.  How do I keep functioning when I don’t know which way is up at the moment?  I want to show my children that grieving is normal and that we need to talk about things to be able to gain true acceptance of a situation, but I can’t.  I can’t allow myself the luxury of grieving, as if I start I fear that I may never stop.  I have to protect my children, I have to remember who is where at what point and who needs what so that they are happy.  I have to be the one who my children look to so that they model my behaviour, someone who they feel safe and secure with.  But at the moment I can’t.  I either keep it together or I fall apart, these are my 2 options.  My dad was my guidance point. I knew he if approved or disapproved, valued or rated something before I had even done it.  He was always proud of me, but I knew his standards.  Will I be able to keep those standards without him here?  Will I lose that guidance point?  I sometimes feel that I am stood next to the self destruct button.  I haven’t pressed it yet, but that is it, it is only that I haven’t pressed it yet, not that I won’t.

I want to keep my mum safe.  I want to keep her close.  Why is this so important to me?  What is it that I need?  I have always been an independent person.  Too independent at times.  I have gone off travelling alone.  I have gone the unconventional route to gaining qualifications, often to my detriment but just because I didn’t want to be told what to do.  So why now do I need my mum to be close?  I may have lost my dad, but if she is close will I gain more of her?  If I can keep her, then I still have something of my dad left.  Am I selfish for wanting my mum to be there for me?  What does she need?  For her to gain support and healing from her friends and other family members is good for her.  So why do I need her to gain it from me too?  I don’t want my mum to be dependent on me in the long term, I know that it is important for us both to have our own lives.  So what is it?  Do I need to know that I am important still?  Do I need to feel safe and secure?  Having both my parents in a loving and healthy relationship has provided me with stability.  I knew that if it all went wrong for me, I had a safety net.  I had a secure place that I could go to and feel supported and I would receive help no matter what.  Why do I still need to know that?  Do I not trust that I can do this?  Do I not trust my own life and my own judgments to be able to live a happy and healthy life?  Why is it so important to know that I have someone there to catch me if I fall? 

My life isn’t complicated.  My life isn’t full of traumas and regrets. I don’t have a past, or a present that needs help.  I am a normal person.  Mother to 3.  Wife and business owner.  But I am struggling.  I know that grief needs to be worked through and experienced to be able to move forward.  I know that to be able to live a life of acceptance I need to learn to accept.  But how do I do this?  Others also know this.  Everyone knows about grief…”cry if you need to”…”take time out if you need to”…”you are normal”…so why does it feel like  people want me to instantly feel better?  This is their need, not mine.  So why do I beat myself up for not being the perfect mum who keeps it all together?  What would happen if I dropped something?  What would happen if I forgot to send my child to a birthday party, or forgot to bring in the sausage rolls for a class party?  Nothing.  Nothing would happen, but I would feel like a failure. So why?  Would I be less of a mother or a wife if I sat on the sofa and cried?  No.  But I know I can’t stay like that.  I need to sit on the sofa and cry on some days.  But to be able to truly live, I can’t stay like this.  So how do I do this?  I knew my dads standard of what to do.  I knew what he would do.  I knew how he would expect me to behave.  I had a standard to aim for and I could do that.  It was safe and secure.

When my dad was dying, I kept saying that he was dying with dignity.  He died, as he lived.  There was no exceptional change, or mass disruption to the way he behaved with us, but he accepted and lived his death.  I valued this.  I saw the joy he had in his work.  The joy in his family.  The joy he experienced from relationships. Am I scared that I won’t be able to say the same?  Is my life not good enough?  Am I living up to my true potential?  What is that?  How will I know when I have achieved it?

I don’t know how to live without having my dad as part of it.  This has never happened before!  So what now?  Do I just go back to what I was doing before?  That just doesn’t feel right.  I need to do something amazing.  I need to do something that means his death wasn’t wasted.  Or do I? What will that achieve? Will that mean that his death wasn’t for nothing?  Will it justify my existence?  Will it make me feel better?  Probably not.  But what should I be doing?  I can’t go back to doing what I was before as everything has changed now.  But I’m not capable of doing something amazing as I don’t have the capacity.  I can function, but I have nothing left after that.  Is just functioning enough?  Or do I need to do more?  Who am I doing more for? For me?  For him?

My dad was brilliant.  There were many times that I didn’t see that and there were times that I was embarrassed by him even.  His crazy mad professor hair.  His eclectic dress sense. The fact that if others did it, he probably did the opposite.  I remember going to an interview for my nursing course with him.  All the other parents sat in the waiting room giving words of advice to their children, giving them a pep talk about how there were going to be amazing in the interview, and my dad sat in the corner typing on his laptop.  Why couldn’t he just be normal?  Why was my dad the one that was different.   It drove me mad.  But there was the time I went to work with him in London when I was fairly young.  I sat at the back of the lecture theatre where he was teaching and I realised that there were people who were listening to him.  People were learning from him.  He was valued, and he was my dad.  He didn’t do things because others did, he did them because they were important or they were the morally right thing to do.  I’m not sure if I can do that, as I don’t know what I want anymore.  I want my family. I know that much.  I learnt from my dad that relationships are important.  Real true value in people is essential to be able to live authentically.  To connect.  But as for what I do, I’m lost.  My value is lost.  When I knew that my dad was dying, I kept trying to think of the really big life questions that I needed answering.  I remember sitting with him desperately trying to find a philosophical question that would set me up for the rest of my life.  Something that I could refer back to.  Something that I could teach my kids. A way to live my life.  But the only thing that I could think of to ask him was…”how do you work the coffee machine”!!! That was it. That was the the big life question that I needed answering.  At the time, I was so cross with myself.  Why wasn’t I smarter, or more creative.  Why couldn’t I connect with him in a big dramatic fashion?  It is only since him dying that some of these bigger questions have wondered into my head.  Things that I then get upset about as I can’t ask him.  I regret the times that I wasted where I could have asked him, I should have recorded his every word.  I should have paid more attention to what he was saying.  But then as I sit and cry, and as I get angry for him being taken too early I hear his voice.  I need to sit quietly to cry.  I need to feel sad.  I need to do this so that I can then listen.  If I don’t cry, if I just carry on and get on blocking out my feelings, then I block him out too.  If I make sure that I don’t feel sad or hurt, then I don’t feel him.  It may be painful, it may make me look like a mess at the school gates, but it means that I still have my dad.  I have to learn to accept.  To accept that it is ok to fall apart at times.  It is ok to forget the sausage rolls for the class party.  He answers the big questions for me, I have the answers as he taught me.  He bought me up with his standards and they are the ones that I will strive for and the ones that I will teach my children.  To grieve, to hurt and to be sad are all part of knowing that he is still living. If I feel pain then he is still real. If I am sad and I miss him it is because he was an influence on me and I want to him to continue to be part of me and my family.  But, I also know that I can’t stay in this state.  There is joy in life and to deny myself and my family that joy is the complete opposite of how he lived. To ensure he continues to live, he must do it through me and my family, and that can’t happen if I don’t feel.  So, where does my dad’s death leave me?  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t leave me. It lives in me.  And for that I can keep my dad close, I can listen to him and enjoy him.