My Plague Year: Ouroboros
I sat on the sofa with my husband last Saturday morning, and I called my mother and sister through WhatsApp. My tablet was streaming a live feed through Facebook of St. Joseph’s church in Gibraltar, which we cast onto our television. On my phone screen, I could see my mother and sister had done the same, except for them the church is up the road. The church was empty except for the priest and a helper. This is not how I expected to celebrate the first anniversary of my father’s death.
The plan had been to go to our local church in the morning. I’m not particularly religious at this stage in my life, but I’ve mellowly accepted that Catholicism is in my culture. I also like the quiet inside the church in Wapping, and the fact that there’s a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. My dad loved Lourdes, and we drove there with our caravan almost every year when I was growing up. Our local church is of course closed, and the priest hasn’t quite got the hang of technology. We asked for a mass to be said in my dad’s name, and last Wednesday a priest alone in a church offered a mass to him.
My mother had done the same, but the church in Gibraltar was able to accommodate the actual date, so we decided to get together in the morning and watch it, with the help of a combined six screens. Before the mass, the priest had a song on a loop for half an hour. The sound cut out. Then the video. The priest got my father’s name wrong and made up for it by trying again halfway through the service and getting it right. I think all this would have amused my dad, who was constantly tinkering with new phones and laptops and cables. I remember when we got our first widescreen TV with a huge back, and to my mother’s horror, he cut a piece of the Mexican pine dresser to make the TV fit.
After mass, we turned all the screens off and ordered Chinese food. My dad loved Chinese food. He used to take us to a Chinese restaurant in Puerto Duquesa on Sundays and flirt with the waitress. Then he would take us off-roading in his beloved 4x4 up the mountains of Manilva to buy bread from a woman who made it in a stone kiln in her front room. Or to buy grapes, or oranges from El Tesorillo, and sometimes a bottle of mosto inside a plastic bottle with the water label still on it, and drunk, drowned midges floating on the top.
Except there were no Chinese restaurants open for takeaway lunch, and we settled for feeble Thai food, with a pad Thai that tasted of ketchup. I felt at that moment like I just wanted to have a nice day, and it wasn’t because I had arrived at some milestone. Maybe because I’m stubborn, I don’t feel warmly towards the idea that you should mark an occasion in a certain way just because of a date. I’ve had moments at 3am on a Tuesday night in November where I’ve cried for an hour in the bathroom over him. I am sure those moments will come again, but it won’t have to be on a birthday, or an anniversary, or at Christmas. So a nice day felt good enough, livestreamed masses and poor Thai food aside. One day the church will open and the Chinese restaurant will open and things will just happen one day and they’ll be accidentally perfect, and my father taught me those were the best days.
In the afternoon we watched Solo: A Star Wars Story. My dad loved Star Wars. Which was great, because whenever I was stuck for a gift I could fall back on Star Wars. Through the years he received Star Wars mugs and t-shirts and once even a concert program when we went to see A New Hope live with an orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. I felt bad at that time because what I most wanted was for him to be there, but I hope it showed I thought of him. I used to say I never had any regrets in life, but now I do. regret not having told him more…how much I loved him and what he meant to me and how much of what he was inspired me. Although he probably would have blushed and told me to shut up. I get that from him, too.
I think about the last time I saw him when I took gifts for him. He was easily pleased. If it wasn’t Star Wars he was happy with Earl Grey tea, or a perfume. It had been my birthday the week before and my mum made a white chocolate cheesecake. I made him a cup of Earl Grey tea with plum, and we ate more cake than we should have. I helped him write a letter, and suggested the word ‘disingenuous’ and he loved it. He kept me up late at night watching TV shows, and I tried my best to feel like I hadn’t lost any sleep from the glare of the television but it probably showed in my face, and it made me feel sad when he told me he couldn’t sleep because of his pain. I think of all the tea he never finished, the perfume he won’t wear and the season finales he won’t watch and I turn to ice.
This is where it hurts, and it’s also a selfish emotion. Maybe we not only hurt when someone dies because we miss them, but because it shows us a reality of life we prefer not to see. My Catholic upbringing tells me there is life after death, and the depiction we get to see if Jesus or any of the saints ascending to Heaven. There’s none of that in life. All my life I’ve been reading and writing and watching films and shows, where everything gets wrapped up neatly and everyone has a turn at a story. You don’t read a book where the main character walks out onto the street halfway through Chapter Two and gets run over and dies and then the book ends there.
A lot of this year I’ve felt a sense of ‘what’s the point?’ but kept on going through the motions. It’s not a desire to do, but it’s a feeling against living, against making meaning, because if there’s no meaning at the end then honestly, what is the point? Except what I start to realise now is that the point isn’t mine to make. I am not here for myself. All my life I’ve thought of myself as the main character, but I’m also a side character in so many people’s lives. My plague year but I carry my grief with me, maybe better-maintained than before but never forgotten. This next year isn’t about giving up meaning, but the search for it. I owe at least that much to the man who raised me.
