Some days it feels like I’m all doing is chewing this same mouthful of feeling over and over and over again, until the flavour is just a ghost but the substance of it isn’t reducing at all. I’m thinking of my father more, not less. I’m reminded of him more frequently, several times a day now, and the reminders are hurting more, not less. And I’m tired of jawing over this, although it’s only been a month since his funeral. What a day that was! I thought it had put a neat, clean, joyful lid on what had been a horrific experience; but the warm memories are seeping in like a crippling frostbite.
I don’t want to remember him decorating the Christmas tree with my unhelpful assistance each year, when I’m trying to watch The Snowman with my children. Oh god, is this the best my memories can do? Christmas? The last refuge of the sentimentalist? Fine: I don’t want to be jumped by all the things I want to show him, or ask him, or talk to him about, even though I’d stopped caring about his answers years ago. I don’t want to remember how desperate he was to live, now that he’s stopped living and won’t ever live again. I bore myself with these pitiful thoughts, looping around on repeat.
My neighbour and I have a long, good conversation about selfishness. About how valuable it is when you have kids, about the vital necessity of carving out your own time, your own work, your own identity. Selfishness was the thing that always made me happiest when we lived in London, and it was the main part of what made me such a good parent: the clear-cut time I had with the children was entirely ours, and I shared it joyfully. Now there is so much to do - freelance work and housekeeping and school runs and friends and countless other obligations that mean you don’t go unmourned when you die - that the selfishness has slipped down to the bottom of the list, and grips on only in name. I *am* selfish. I *definitely* do stuff just for myself.
I think of my dad and the long weeks and months he left my mother while he was training around the world, living up in the sky while she raised his children and moved us from country to country on her own, driving their home across a continent. Did his selfishness make him happy? Did it help us love him?
I’m chewing and chewing, but the mouthful never seems to shrink at all.