17. Chapter 5
Diversion: How Unresolved Grief and Trauma Take Us Away from Ourselves
*This book was set the be published by the publisher of my first book, but after years of struggle and many other reasons, I decided to release it on Substack instead. Each week, the 52,000 word book which was tentatively titled “Be A Force” will be dropped here online. The sections will start with number 1 and then progress over the 52 weeks of the next year. The Chapter title will be placed in the post description for clarity.
I can still remember the moment my father took his last breath. It was April 6th, 2004. I was nineteen years old. and he was lying in a single hospital bed that we’d pushed into my bedroom because my room was the only one on the ground floor of our home. Understandably Dad didn’t want to spend his remaining days in a hospital surrounded by strangers, harsh fluorescent lights and the lingering smell of bleach. I stood holding his hand which felt like holding a cluster of brittle chicken bones. My mother, her brother and my sister bordered the rest of the bed along with the Silver Chain nurse tasked to take us through this most intimate of moments. My mother was keening, a kind of primal, animalistic crying that I’d only ever heard and seen before in documentaries of women in Africa who lost their children in famine. My uncle, her brother, as if in a trance kept repeating: “Robbie, don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.”
At the time, I still felt like child. Watching these authority figures be so vulnerable was terrifying. I just couldn’t look, and so I turned my attention away from them to look at my dad. I squeezed his hand. And as I did, he inhaled and his chest puffed out. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he sighed and as he did, something left him. Something which deeply human. Some religions call it a soul, but all I know is that once it’s gone, the genie can’t be put back into the bottle.
It is surreal to see someone die in front of you. When my 19-year-old self had watched movies, seeing an actor take their last breath was dramatic, but there was always an emotional distance. Something about knowing the dying person is acting sanitizes the experience. Those films never prepared me to see the person I loved most in the world take his last breath. I slept that night in my sister’s room. I couldn’t sleep in my room with Dad’s body there. The next morning, I went to the bed he was in, and I looked at him with a strange detachment.
