A voyage with my father’s ashes
One day in
June 2014 I finally ran out of parents or in the words I first spoke to my
husband ‘I have just become an orphan
at 50’. Becoming your own grown up is a funny thing. Losing both your parents
can be cathartic; it is a one way street, a note in your own timetable of
mortality. It seems that whilst one parent remains you can somehow cheat
yourself of responsibility; there is always someone around more senior to you
holding back the waves. So how do you approach the grieving process in these
circumstances?
In my
opinion all the theories on the process of grieving or books of personal
experiences, can never really capture or anticipate your own deeply personal
reaction. Sure enough there may be something that rings true, hits home, and is
a reflection of your emotions or thoughts, but that would be to miss a vital
element; your relationship to that person was individual to you and only you
and therefore your grief will be a unique experience.
Finding a
way to grieve can be difficult and can be dependent on a whole range of
factors; the circumstances of the death, (sudden, unexplained, violent, slow)
your relationship with the deceased (close, highly dependent, estranged, secret)
your previous experiences of death, your economic situation, your spiritual and
cultural beliefs and values and finally the attitude of society (family and
wider community) around you to that death.
Being able
to express your grief the way you want to has to be a positive thing. Having
the right space and time (as little or as much as you need) is in my opinion a
human right. It makes me wonder for
example, about a society that believes having a week off work for the death of
your father, husband etc. is ok. Sure
enough you need that time to race around arranging funerals etc. but where is
the acknowledgement of the time needed to grieve? The grieving process is
therefore about finding your own way to miss that person, dealing with the
initial shock, working through the emotions and ultimately finding a new way
for you to be without that person in living form. It can be a process of exploration not only
of yourself but of your relationships with other people. This need not be a bad thing but a moment of
personal growth and life affirming.
When my
father died then suddenly at the age of 84 I was completely surprised by my own
reaction. The initial shock was a flood of speechless emotion. In a way I
realise now that I was waiting for the call, had anticipated the practicalities
of my father’s death but no one can anticipate the way you will feel. During
the last few years of my father’s life he had begun to develop Dementia, but
refused to acknowledge there were any difficulties. This created all sorts of
practical problems as we lived more than 150 miles apart; from managing his
financial affairs to dealing with the various people trying to help him who he
managed to alienate to the decay of his house and his own person. This was an
extremely intelligent and capable man wanting to disappear into his own cocoon
and this is what he achieved with great aplomb.
It did however, along the way build up a sense of tension between us and
regretfully a sense of distance. He was not the father I wanted him to be with
his family and especially following the death of my stepmother, we were not
able to rekindle the sense of closeness we had had when I was a child. Whenever I went to see my father there was
always a feeling of deep emotional pain, mixed up with a never expressed anger
at the loss of the man I remembered.
Following
the initial pain and shock of death I set my mind to the practicalities. Being
an only child it fell to me to look after everything and I was glad to do it. It
meant having control of creating the funeral I wanted to give my father, a
celebration that showed the world who he really was not the recluse he had
become. I trod the path of humanism and so was able to put together a
celebration of his life, a ceremony that included no words of religion but
words and music that gave a picture of his interests, achievements and beliefs.
In going through this process I was able to revisit what I loved about my
father and my early childhood, re connect with people who had known him and my
mother(who incidentally died in my teens), find a new closeness with my family,
as well as find out new aspects of my father’s character and life. This for me
was the first step towards altering my relationship with my father; a
revaluation of who he was by listening to other people who knew him and having
the sort of honest and open conversations with family that you may rarely
venture upon but in times of stress.
I decided
then as my father had left no instructions, to have his body cremated.
Throughout this time I was deeply conscious of some kind of internal
conversation between my father and myself, I felt very close to the essence of
him, as if he were telling me what he wanted to happen. I knew that he had
always retained a huge fondness for the home of his birth and therefore part of
my own spiritual journey had to be a trip back to that country with my father’s
ashes. Practicalities intervened when I saw and felt the weight of a human body
in cremated form, far too heavy to lug on a short haul flight!
It was then on
a crisp autumnal morning that I found myself and my 18 year old son driving up
to the Derbyshire Peak District to the family’s original home. The aim being to
scatter most of my father’s remains in the river Dove in Mill Dale nr
Alstonefield, a place of enchantment and memories of Cray fishing for me as a
child and my family. Fate however has a
strange way of intervening. Turning a street corner in Ashbourne I bumped into
my cousin and his son. One lunch and one brilliant suggestion later found us
all traversing the bleak but beautiful fields over the tops to Mill Dale
chatting away. My father in a rucksack on my cousin’s back, enjoying a last
walk in the countryside of his maternal roots. An hours hard walking found us
hooting and shouting at my waiting Aunt and Uncle below, oblivious and sipping
tea from flasks in the cold.
Clear in my
mind then is the moment we self- consciously gathered in a small nook below the
little pack horse bridge next to a rapidly
flowing river and complete with curious walkers. Filmed by my son I can be seen
shaking a large white bag repeatedly over the water, watched by my family, not
in reverential silence but with a verbal curiosity regarding the flow of the
contents or rather their refusal to disperse but rather to clump on mud and rocks.
My father would have found this all hysterically funny, even my Aunt (my
father’s sister) standing next to me peering quizzically. Then we do then what
people do on these occasions; we chatted, looking at each other in the manner of
members of the same tribe, drinking overly scorching tea from paper cups,
hugging and saying goodbye in the setting winter sun. The long walk back to the
car was brisk with the knowledge impending darkness and the need to keep warm.
This was my
way of beginning to say goodbye to my father, it is my personal story and
certainly as a counsellor and working with bereaved clients this has affected
the way I view death. It did in fact
take me over a year to go through the series of rituals I had planned as my way
of paying homage to my father and for me to memorialise his memory.
The process
of grief can be a complicated and entangled thing. Sometimes we need others to
help us untangle and make sense of it, to listen to our story, sometimes we
just need to create our own way of saying goodbye that is meaningful to us,
even if that relationship was not a happy one. What we do all need to recognise
is that we are all unique and this needs to be respected. That however long it
takes to adjust to the space that person’s death has created in our lives we
can as human beings find new ways to live and even flourish.
www.cruse.org.uk is a charity working nationally with bereavement and
has trained counsellors.
Michelle Krethlow Shaw
Counsellor, Psychotherapist and
Hypnotherapist.
