Before & After by Nicola Brown

Commissioned by the Ōtepoti Writers Lab. CW: Contains conversation of sudden death. Please proceed with care.

I am sitting in the back of a car, with my dad. The exterior is black, sleek, shiny; it has been polished with great care. I have a hazy memory of wooden veneer panels inside. This car will have slowly hummed up the driveway, and when it arrived a police officer had told my mother, sister and I, in the kitchen of my parents’ house, that Dad’s here now, Lindsay’s here. 

Part of my jumbled mind thought, momentarily, that this meant Dad had simply gone out for a walk and became disoriented, but someone found him and he’s back. But it’s not that. So now I am perched on the car’s chrome bumper. Fortunately it is sturdy, as my legs feel like they've disappeared. My body is a scribble on a toddler’s magnetic drawing screen, partially wiped away. 

I am here and not here, because this is impossible.

I ask to hold Dad's hand. This necessitates difficult rearrangements; he is swaddled. Perhaps other people don't ask this. Something in the back of my mind notices the circularity of being swaddled at both ends of life. The person who is now in charge of my dad's body does some awkward shuffling and I realise the fabric is wrapped tightly.

As he does this, I wonder: how can a total stranger - a quiet, respectful one, but still a person well outside our family - be about to take my precious dad away?

Once released, I hold Dad’s hand, slightly warm, the bones prominent. I stroke his forehead, shiny and grey. It's easier - less disturbing - to smooth his hair. When did it become so feathery? I don't know if I am moaning, or sobbing, or something else. I whisper oh Dad, oh Dad, oh Dad. I love you. I'd rather speak louder - maybe if I shout, he'll return, wake up from this intense sleep? - but the man from the funeral home is less than a metre away. He is quietly shuffling his feet and alternating between looking at me and the rhododendrons lining my parents’ driveway. Watching, not watching, watching. As I say goodbye to my dad. 

_____

Before

An hour earlier, or maybe two hours - what IS time on days like this? - I’d left my workplace at lunchtime, moving my car to avoid a parking ticket. I found a space next to Queen’s Garden. The day was cold, dismal, dull. In contrast, I was wearing a red and blue floral top, which would turn out to be too lighthearted for this day.

About to walk back to work, I picked up my phone and saw a missed call from Mum. She wouldn’t typically call during the day, especially on work days. There was no message. This seemed an ominous sign, most likely about my 99-year-old Gran, who’d been unwell. I braced myself for bad news. I remembered one of the rest home residents I’d cared for in my teenage years scoffing at a newspaper death notice I read to her which said someone elderly had died ‘suddenly’. If you’re in your 90s, she’d said, there’s no such thing as sudden death. You should be expecting it.

I sat in the car and called Mum. She answered but didn't speak; I heard her breathing, sobbing. What's wrong? I asked, desperate to know but equally desperate not to hear what was coming next. Dad's been found dead in the street, she said. Oh Mum!, I said, I'll be right there. I have to get someone to cancel my clients, I’ll get there as fast as I can. 

As soon as I ended the call I realised I didn’t ask what happened. In the absence of information I was imagining worst case scenarios. Technically this was already a worst case scenario but my mind flew to the bleakest of pictures, which is hardly surprising; over decades of being a clinical psychologist, I’d been entrusted with other people’s harshest, most unbearable moments in life. And I’d not been immune, with tragedy digging its claws into my life numerous times. But please not like this. Please not my dad. 

I stepped out of the car and it’s the only time in my life I’ve felt entirely outside my body. I am watching this woman from the side, and a little above. Me but not me. She is walking along the street, unsteady - like she’s had a few wines but doesn’t want to show it. A group of people emerge from the donut shop and walk past her, carrying perky white boxes, laughing, oblivious. After the briefest scan for traffic, she crosses the road by the mini pōhutukawa trees. She’s really slow now, dragging herself up the polished wooden stairs of the building, grasping the black metal handrail. She’s become very pale and her body is shaking, faintly. 

She pushes through the huge glass door and announces to the receptionist - toneless, matter-of-fact - that her dad has just been found dead in the street. The receptionist jumps off her seat - like a cartoon character - a few centimetres of clear space between her and the office chair, and lands seated again. The woman whose dad has just died looks surprised, as if she didn’t know this could happen in real life. Another woman emerges from a nearby room, overhearing. She says - familiarly, it seems they are friends - let me drive you, takes the car keys, says not to worry about the things being mentioned - clients, the leftover lunch in the staffroom fridge, the commitment later that really should be cancelled. 

The friend says I’ll sort things out, don’t worry about those. As they drive up the hill, the friend makes soft murmuring noises, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the woman’s knee. You are a strong person, she says.

I’m so cold, says the woman whose dad has just died. I must be in shock. I want to stay in shock. I don’t want to feel what’s coming. I don’t want to go in. How am I going to get over this? She is rambling now. It’s a seven minute drive and she doesn’t know it then, but they pass the exact spot where just a few minutes before there was an ambulance and there were paramedics and bystanders, one who called the ambulance and the other who did CPR, and there had also been a man having a heart attack and that man was her beloved dad. 

_____

If you've lost someone suddenly, you'll know there’s a deft axe which can slice life in two: there was Before and now there is After. Before, life seemed normal, predictable. This is all a fallacy of course, but within that delusion this was a seemingly benign Thursday. Then the faintest of lines was drawn - a tiny moment in time, a trace on an ECG screen, or not - and we crossed the threshold into After.

It still seems unfathomable to me, two years later, that a person can wake up and eat breakfast and go aqua-jogging and rinse their swimming togs and start walking to a Rotary meeting at lunchtime, with a lunch they’ve already ordered and a speaker they’re looking forward to hearing, and then, suddenly, there would have been strangers running from building sites and phone calls and a siren. Before everything stopped.

We say things all the time like you nearly gave me a heart attack or it’s not life and death but what if it does, and what if it is? What then?

We leave Before and fall into After.

The days and weeks of the After are impossibly hard. I would cry myself to sleep each night in my wife’s arms; I’m sure neither of us knew it was possible to cry so much, or for so long. For a brief bright second I would wake each morning thinking everything was fine, and then I would remember. He’s no longer here, I’m never going to see him again, he’s not going to see his grandchildren grow up.

A friend who lost her dad during childhood called and said you and your dad were so close, you’ll be a ship without an anchor. Exactly.

The good news, though, is that the After also brings many kindnesses, which make things a little easier. Flowers - blues, lavenders and whites for sorrow; nothing too chirpy like my shirt on the Before/After day. A doorbell and phone that didn’t stop ringing. Containers of soup, cards, full tins of baking, messages, chocolates, plants, gift vouchers, letters, entire baskets of thoughtfulness.

In a particularly intrepid move - given that it came from a friend in Ireland who has never seen our house or garden - we arrived home one day to find a magnolia tree at the front door. Taller than me, fat white buds of promise at the end of gangly branches. After much deliberation - where to locate an impromptu tree? - I found a space for it.

A few weeks later it was Dad’s birthday - his deathday and birthday are not far apart. The grief was still so sharp and raw, the messages of support had dwindled as they do; the relentlessness of mourning burns people out. After the initial rush of official bereavement-related things to do, I felt his loss very deeply. I wrote him a birthday card - taking great care, saying things I would have said in person - and buried it beside the tree. I do this every year now, a tender ritual which gives me something I can do for him on his day. I am especially grateful for the magnolia.

The only way through grief is through it. It has taken two years to begin feeling slightly ok.

_____

After someone dies, you become the recipient of heartfelt words - so many words. Welcome to the club no one wants to join. Your father/husband/grandad was a wonderful man. I knew him because of X/Y/Z and this is the impact he had on me. It gets easier. It doesn’t really get easier. You will miss him terribly. I’m sorry, we’re sorry. Please let us know if you need anything. You are in our thoughts and hearts. I have only just heard. This is a terrible shock. Here is a soft hanky for the funeral.

The one message that perplexed me was this: there were multiple versions of well, isn’t that a good way to go? It was always well-intended, I’m sure. But - yes and no. I mean yes, granted - I don’t want to suffer dreadfully or linger if my body is in deep, torturous decline. In that case, dying quickly would be preferable. And also no, in the sense that I’d rather be able to tidy up a thousand loose ends, find someone to adopt my plants, ensure that for the love of hygiene somebody in my family takes over wiping the dining table every night, and more importantly, I hope I’m able to say goodbye - especially to my beloveds. If I get to choose, I want to feel their love and care around me when I die.

_____

People also say you’ll feel him around you, he’s still there for you, you can talk with him anytime. But I didn’t, he wasn’t, I couldn’t. It seemed some kind of flaw in me that I couldn’t connect with him like others did with their loved ones. I would search for signs and get nothing back. 

Over time, though, small resonances hovered on the edges of my consciousness, bringing him back in subtle ways. I would tend to my plants and remember Dad introducing me to gardening by having me plant asparagus in the garden of our first house (possibly the least forgiving plant a child could begin with, but ok). I would swim and remember him teaching me breaststroke, as I watched the sunlight dance across the bottom of the pool. I walked - a lot. In the bush above Ross Creek there is a grove of enormous pine trees. Once, not long after Dad died, I found my way there and started crying. I leaned into the strength of one of these ancient trees and realised it felt - unexpectedly - just like a hug from my dad. 

He isn’t here, but in tiny ways he is everywhere.

_____

The last conversation I had with my dad was in that same driveway, the one with the hearse and the rhododendrons. Driving him for an errand, I was inching slowly in reverse, checking that the car wasn’t nudging against the unforgiving roughcast walls. As the driveway descended I swerved, halted, corrected, tried again. Dad and I chatted about how, in the decades he and Mum had lived in that house, I’d still not mastered this skill. 

If I'd known this would be our last conversation, I would have chosen a more meaningful topic. 

I would have said I love you. I’m so proud of you. You inspire me. Thank you. I’m grateful for all of these things..…and the list would be so long. I would have listened to his words of wisdom one more time. I would have recorded his voice, written things down, and I would have hugged and hugged and hugged him.

It’s a gift, I suppose, to know this now. The time for these things - if at all possible - is right now. Whenever we can. With the people we love. Tell them. Capture them. Hold them.

Because there is Before, and then there is After.