Lessons From a Dead Dad

A few things I've had to learn the hard way

When I was 25, I walked into my dad’s bedroom to find that he’d died in his sleep. Having your dad clock out abruptly while you’re still young sucks, but it does have some benefits. I didn’t have to work for a while, I got his PS5, but most importantly, I got to listen to everyone flounder as they desperately tried to come up with something to say to me. For about two months, everyone I spoke to sounded like they’d learned English from reading inspirational fridge magnets. I don’t blame them. It’s impossible to know what to say to someone who just lost someone they love. Should I change the subject? Is it too traumatic to ask about details? What should I do with my hands? Eventually, it seems, we have nothing left to do but trot out something vaguely wise we heard someone old say once. Being a human can be so embarrassing.

In everyone’s defense, I say “we” because I’ve been in that position before, and there’s really nothing anyone could’ve said to make me feel better. I just had to accept that I was going to feel like shit for a while, and hope that eventually I’ll wake up one day and forget to feel like shit (Surprise: that’s exactly what happened). There was, however, one thing I heard a lot around that time that had some lasting impact. While it didn’t make me feel better, it was absolutely true. This was “You’ll come out stronger on the other side”, or one of it’s variations.

Being told that you’ll make some sort of gain out of grief is not really what you want to hear when you’re in it, but it’s true. Some lessons in life you learn from going to school, others you learn from finding a dead guy in your mums house.

Parent Yourself

There’s a weird shift that happens in your family when a parent dies. Suddenly, the generation that’s always been seen as “the kids” become adults. It was like my siblings and I all got a promotion, but instead of our old boss retiring to the South of France, we set him on fire and put him on our mantelpiece.

Your parents aren’t going to live forever, and that leaves you with a terrifying conclusion. At some point, you’re going to be the person running the show. You should probably start practicing show running. In my early twenties, I would say I was soft. I shunned responsibility, and when things didn’t go my way I would solve them with a tried a tested method: watch a movie and drink wine until I pass out. Sadly, it turns out this is not a healthy way to deal with your problems (or so my therapist has told me), and it’s at least part of the reason why I made very little progress in the first half of my twenties. When my dad died, it became very real that no one was going to save me. My mum loves and supports me, but she can’t live for me. I couldn’t wait, do nothing of value, and expect a good life to just materialize. It turns out, if you want a good life, you actually have to start making good choices – and that means learning how to handle adversity, showing up on time, and tidying your room once in a while. 

I think we don’t like to know that we cause a lot of our own problems, because self-pity is so damn fun. It’s nice to see ourselves as a victim, because they’re the ones we root for. When I was 23, I was briefly a bartender. At the start, I could do all the easy stuff - pour beers, make a rum and coke, laugh politely when a drunk says something you can’t hear over the music, etc. To learn the real cocktails though, I had to revise, and revise I did not. I showed up hungover, got 50% on the exam, and was yelled at by my boss. Yet somehow, I was quite indignant. How dare he be mad at me? Just because I wasted his time and energy. Who does he think he is?! The universe gave me an opportunity to learn from a mistake, and I replied by drinking again and quitting my job soon after.

This is not the attitude of someone who knows how to live well. The problem was, my whole adolescence I had the motivation of wanting to avoid negative consequences from my parents. As an adult, It was safe to flunk this bartender exam, because it’s not like I was going to get grounded. At some point though, you realize that your parents told you off when you flunked tests for a good reason – it was usually because you didn’t work hard enough, and not because God deployed a vast conspiracy against you. Growing up, distilled, is learning to discipline yourself the way your parents used to. It’s learning to say “no” to habits that make your life bad, and “yes” to habits that make it good. I’ve found that when you lose a dad, you have to become one for yourself.

If you get the opportunity, mentor someone

A few months after my Dad died, there was a kind of tribute night held by people he worked with. He was a Network Engineer, and worked as a contractor for decades. As a result of his job hopping, the pub where the event was held was populated by an enormous group of people. Almost of all them I had never met before - yet they were all people that valued my Dad a great deal. It was like discovering that he had a secret family, if he had been cheating on my mum with a hundred Quake II fans. I got a couple of fun anecdotes here and there, but by far the most common thing spoken about was how great a mentor he was. People 20 years my senior would say that had he not shown them the ropes in the 90s, they wouldn’t be where they were today.

Being remembered as a good teacher is a pretty excellent and enduring legacy. For not an enormous amount of effort, you can make lasting positive change. If we ever find ourselves with a chance to teach others, it’s worthwhile doing, and it’s worthwhile doing it right.

You’ll be dead soon too

One of the more surprising things about death, is how quickly the world moves on. Of course, for my family, the storm would rage for a long time, but the external world brushed it off quite swiftly. I remember a week or so after he died I walked past our local pub, and saw people relaxing in the beer garden. Drinking, laughing, enjoying their lives – it was all so offensive. Didn’t these complete strangers know that my dad had just died? He was only 57. If we lived in a small village, it’d have been in the paper!

Wait as I did though, there was no government mandated national day of mourning. The Queen didn’t even write us. It turns out, my dad just died on a Saturday, and that’s all that day was ever going to be for everyone else. Most didn’t hear of his passing, and those that did probably just said “Oh, that poor family” before going back to their own problems. Of course, this is all anyone should reasonably expect, but it juxtaposed my dad’s life in many ways.

He could be a highly strung man at times. Our impressions of him (are you really even family if you don’t impersonate each other?) often take the form of manufacturing a disaster out of nothing. In the car, whenever my dad took a wrong turn, he’d despair as if our destination had just been nuked from orbit, and we were never going to make it to Duxford Imperial War Museum. He also had a bad habit of stressing about work, and staying at his desk until late. It’s astounding how little these concerns matter when faced with a crowd of people, laughing in a beer garden, ignorant that he ever existed. We should give ourselves permission to relax more often.

Add “I love you” to your vocabulary

My dad loved us dearly, but like many men in his generation, he could be awkward about showing it. He was less about the deep heart to hearts, and more about the acts of service. He drove me to football practice every Saturday morning. He’d fix the computer every time I infected it by playing flash games for a free iPad. In 2002, he once spent a whole day filming us as we tried to recreate the Matrix (I played Neo). He, however, was not always great at saying the words “I love you” out loud.

I don’t blame him. He was born in 1964. I was born in 1996, and even I find it hard to say it sometimes. To this day men feel like if they emote, they’ll burst into flames, and I imagine the parenting styles of the 60s made the flames feel particularly hot.

In his absence, though, it’s something I’m working on. My family say it to each other more often now than ever. I even say it to my friends. In the awareness of death, people sometimes prescribe that we have deep face to face chats with our inner circle, and get everything off our chest. I’m sure those chats are valuable, but it’s also handy to get so used to expressing ourselves, that we have nothing to unburden in the first place – and if you ever feel like you have a lot of thoughts to dump at once, you can always just start a blog.