Grief maybe

All my current excuses

My father died last year. I haven’t mourned him. I don’t miss him. The feeling could be grief but I can’t define it or articulate it as such.

The week he died, I had a biopsy on what turned out to be a cancerous tumour in my bladder. He died at home of bladder cancer on Monday. On Friday I was on the ward where he was first diagnosed, carefully folding my pants and socks.

The surgeon recognised the name but not me. I didn’t remind him who I was. I had met him several times with my father but I had generally remained silent at each meeting.

While putting on my robes in preparation for the operation, I couldn’t help but wonder if the gentleness with which everyone treated me was something to do with my father. That they remembered him and me and knew what I was going through.

Perhaps not; the nurses have a practiced air of calm and tenderness that they extend to everyone in their care. I felt seen and cared for, almost loved.

By their kindness and ability, I felt no trauma, no fear, no expectation. I was gently ushered through the halls like a prince in preparation for an indescribable calm. A smiley anaesthetist injected me with fentanyl.

Then I floated back to earth, unaware of the traumatic event that had just happened to my body.

It is an unpleasant but transcendental experience to contemplate my death as something potentially immediate. I have regularly contemplated death, but usually in the abstract.

I have never feared it, but rather found the concept quite compelling. The ultimate unknown thing, akin to the root of existence.

I am still intrigued by what lies beyond. But now I have a child, the idea that my death may come sooner than expected comes with a foreign pain.

I can’t explain the pain. It is not obviously pain. It’s in my cells. It’s just there, peeping behind the everyday.

The love for my daughter feels like an ancient biological necessity. As old as evolution, it is ungraspable to my tiny human mind.

Instead, it is felt by my whole body, an emotion I cannot adequately articulate. Simply, to contemplate not being here for her, hurts.

But my imminent death is not certain. They took the cancer out. I am monitored every six to nine months to see that it doesn’t return.

But the seed of mortality is now rooted in my skull. All I can do is be here for them. My wife and child.

The best version of me I can manage.