The loss of a loved one: Death, literature and how to achieve closure

When your father dies, say the Irish, you lose your umbrella against bad weather. When your father dies, say the Russians, he takes your childhood with him. Mary Schmich quotes these sayings in her poignant article, ‘When your father Dies’.

She adds: “When your father dies, it doesn’t matter that other people’s fathers have died, that fathers have been dying since human time was born. What matters in the moment of his death is that he was your father. Your one and only.

Your loss is unique, profound, yours alone”. Oh, and the tiny things we remember. The smell of his cologne. How sad he looked when we disappointed him. The way he supported his chin when sad or in deep thought. How he patted us on the back. The warmth of his hugs. 

MY FATHER DIED

My father died. And I remember my own unique and intimate loss. In my memory, this is exactly what happened in one of the events I can never shake off: I was 6 or 7. I was walking ahead of my father and became really tired. Suddenly, he lifted me up in one sweep in his strong arms and placed me on his shoulders.

I could feel the stubs of short hair on his beard. I was bopping up and down his neck as he walked. But it happened over three decades ago and I could have glamourised the scene. Literature is awash with cases of people who glamorise the past, especially in the face of loss.

The real paradise, a writer once wrote, is the paradise lost. As I get older, I visualise more often about this particular incident with my father — like a childhood incident the English critic James Wood once wrote about, “the scene has a convenient, dream-like composition.

Perhaps I have really dreamed it… happy dreams, never troubled. I like returning to that place in my sleep, even look forward to it”. I have also had these dreams with my father and wished I could return even in my sleep, albeit for temporary reprieve.

But real life is a different matter. My father has been dead for ten years. And I have not recovered. Maybe some things are not meant to “be recovered from” but to be survived. I had these thoughts recently when I shared some of my experiences with the family of the late former Nairobi mayor, Samuel Mbugua, the tenacious founder of Marion Group of Schools, which my wife heads. I am friends with the family that had lost a father, an affable man.

I am a parent in Marion Preparatory that had lost a father figure. There is something solid about fathers and father figures to those of us who were lucky enough to grow under them. When my father died, I felt lost. I was so dazed that I did not weep a tear. My two sisters wailed and wept and probably got over it. I was just dumbfounded.

But I probably grieved the most — for ten years, till early this year when I felt something lift. I saw my father often in my dreams — vivid dreams. Sometimes he was frail and helpless and at other times he was strong, the veritable force I knew him to be.

When I was young, I knew nothing would beat my father. I was sort of disappointed when I saw him lying helpless, totally and irrevocably vanquished by death.

And then there is guilt. My father lived in poverty all his life. And he died before he witnessed me doing well in life. He died when I was four years out of college, just married and with my first born daughter and struggling to make ends meet.

I sent him the little money I could afford. When your father dies, even the achievements we get later in life cannot sufficiently compensate for the loss. I wonder how proud my father would be if he was alive to see his giggly “boy” head a company.

For those of us who are literarily inclined, we turn to books for everything — even how to cope with grief and to get closure from the experiences of others. Literature, a house of mirrors that reflect real life, is awash with death and loss.

One of the great non-fiction books is When Your Father Dies: How a Man Deals with the Loss of His Father by Dave Veerman and Bruce B. Barton. The authors grapple with how to deal with the loss of a father, “an emotional rite of passage that affects who you are, how you relate to others, how you deal with your past, and how you face your future”.

Non-fiction has confronted mortality in many works. My loveliest novel on this is The Old Man and the Sea, a novel by Ernest Hemingway in which he writes about a Cuban fisherman (the Old Man), getting on in years and running out of luck and days. We all have our date with our own mortality. This was a date with his. The Old Man is talking to a boy he taught how to fish.

The Old Man observes: “The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish,” probably alluding to the fact that mortality is difficult for all.

The setting sun is a perfect metaphor when the strength of youth wanes in our parents and they turn into frail beings we can hardly recognise.

The reader imagines what happens in old age. Maybe an ageing father or mother is inconsolable after their spouse dies, and the house is an empty nest as the children have grown up and left. The Old Man still hopes to repair and rebuild his life, to restore what he has lost. He says:

“My big fish must be somewhere,” as he climbs back into his boat to go fishing. And that should be the attitude in our lives, to start again from the ashes of pain and loss after losing someone close to us.

The writer is the general manager, Oxford University Press East [email protected]