On Father’s Day Sian Rees was thinking of her late dad Gareth and reflecting on her process of grief.
I just read a piece of your writing. You were reflecting on home and what that means. I remembered that I had written on that theme when you were passing and I was moving between different states of being and different physical spaces, as you were.
16/01/2018
The room I am in is painted blue and there are no curtains, so when I wake up I can see the trees and the sky. The bed covers are white and black, etched with a paisley pattern, and there are National Geographic magazines sprawled neatly on the desk. I am drinking hot fresh ginger and lime tea from a glass, poured from my teapot painted and there is a freshly bought bouquet of flowers beside me that I bought. The candles on the bedside table next to me are lit.
I have stayed in four out of six of the bedrooms in this house, none of them mine. This is not my home. Of all the rooms, this is perhaps my favourite room to sleep in; it feels humble, unpretentious and stylish. It’s clean and cosy. For half the working week I stay in this house,
someone else’s home, in whatever room is free, in one of my friends’ bedrooms, in South East London. The other half of the week I go back to Portsmouth, back to my home town, where, each time I’m back, I wail as I come through the door to my mother’s house. I am here because I flew home from my trip, travelling across South East Asia, because I found out my dad has stage four colon cancer, and last week my grandmother died.
My favourite moments are on the train from London Waterloo Station to Fratton Station, Portsmouth. Between the stops – Chichester, Guildford and Rowlands Castle – there is thick and lush countryside that shields the city and paints the pages of my journey with spring flowers, and an erratic and impulsive English sky, that seems larger, of course, as I am looking more closely at it. I can get swept up in the trees as they speed past me in clusters of forests, broken by stretches of green, sometimes drowning a little in patches of rainwater. But of course this is something that English nature is used to. There are always sheep or horses, and country houses dotted amongst the farms and land. I take a look to see if I can see if the houses are hiding under a moss of ivy or other wall shrubs or climbing plants. I love that about country houses.
I remember being at my grandmother’s house in Wales and realising that when I had my own home, I would like to have ivy cloaked all over it, as if the house had been designed by nature, and moulded right into the roots of it, or swallowed by it, much like a tree hole for a
family of owls. My grandmother told me ivy was an awful thing. This train journey offers moments of respite; It is not Portsmouth, where my moments drift in bulky waves of feeling like a lost a child craving her father, or London where there is not much space to feel at all – a weight
that can be ignored, where I am not a daughter to a dying father, only a friend or colleague, an identity that liberates me from grief, momenterily. Whilst I move between places and spaces, the way that dad always did, these things, the teapot, the candles, the flowers and moments create a sense of home in myself and my space amongst the chaos.
It is spring, finally. The days became longer, and I say that as if it happened in a moment. If there is something I am grateful for, it is the brightness to the days now. It brings a lightness to my sense of being in a small way, as well as a lightness to the day. And I am grateful. For the things I can take with me. When I stay in four different rooms a week and everything feels impossibly impermenant, I always have a book or my headphones and my music subscriptions. If I can always stare at the flickers and glimmers of the candle light, soothed by the sounds from the speaker, gnawing at chunks of my book, distracted by the taste of the words.
Life has shown it has the ability to shake the foundations of my entire being. Life’s frightening ability to strike the hardest blows from within; corruption and destruction without any external, tangible factors is a scary thing. I distract myself, or perhaps come back to myself in response to the pain of this situation, by the comfort of my things, little escapes and journeys, moments of movement, to help when I must sit in one place.
‘Perhaps when we travel, we are trying to escape the self,’ you wrote. As I look back at that passage, I agree, but we must always return. ‘Wherever you go, there you are’. That period feels distant now. It was so close to the bone then, so close and painful that I think I was a little
numb to the idea of death, although I tried to grasp it. I thought about it as you did in the piece I’ve just read of yours, you said: ‘But what does “dead” mean? Is it a corpse? I wonder where the owner went. Dead as well? I’m not sure I can have a view about death when I’ve not experienced it. Perhaps I have experienced it’. I also wrote words to the same effect, a few months after you passed.
06/06/2018
How do I know you were alive in the first place? A seamless collection of the characteristics of life, held together by what? How did you not fall out? Who remembers the first moments of life? In that case, how do we know the first moments of life, are not the last moments of death? No one is alive to experience it, so how can we understand it? How can I mourn a life lost, when I’ve never lost it? The only thing I know, I will never know. Where did you go?
I wrote a poem, along similar lines four months later, called ‘The Impossibility of Death’. This section is the sentiment I am thinking about today:
Just as food transforms to fuel,
Just as electricity turns to heat,
Just as air creates growth,
Are you gas or light,
Cotton or silk,
Sand or sea?
Death is a metaphor for
You not being you, anymore,
You were you,
And now you are me.
I look back at those final lines, unpicking what I meant, and what it means today. We share the same being somehow. I carry pieces of you in my body, in my face, in my gestures. In this moment, here, reading your writing, I become aware that we share the same mind. Through the
medium of self, as well as the self-awareness of grief, the boundary between us collapses. Identity, just like home, isn’t always separate and whole. You continue to travel, unfixed and untethered to one place or one being echoed in the same way as home is echoed in the flickering of my candle light; in the music played through my headphones, the freshness created in the periphery from picked flowers in a room. You are there in my words, my eyes, my thoughts, iin my coding and the cells that have passed from you, to my mother to me. You are inherited and remembered, embodied and practised in me, still. We are intertwined in emotional and physical architecture. We are dislocated identities carried in one person. You are shaped like the idea of home, made not of fixed boundaries or separation, but of that which we bring
with us.
Photograph by Moshe Tasky.
