Two weeks without Dad. 'Borings' from the Heavens
Death is a seismic shift in the solar system of family. What happens when its sun dies?
Liz gave me a detailed description of the physical and emotional experience of giving birth after she had her first child. It was after midnight, we leant against the kitchen cupboards in her Cape Town apartment and stood opposite each other in darkness, with just the light from the street outside on our faces. We were probably cosily hugging mugs of rooibos tea, even though I am 99 per cent certain I’d have wanted a drink. I was far too polite, no, embarrassed, to ask for wine from a breastfeeding mother, nor her gigantic and comfortably patriarchal husband, whose company I struggled so hard to enjoy.
I listened with a mix of grossed-out fascination, a twinge of envy, and boredom, which might be why I can’t remember the details 25-plus years on. She shared the detail, which probably took close to an hour to relay, with a Q&A session at the end. I listened on the understanding that this was momentous, interesting, and because she needed to get it out, as they say. And that’s what BFFs are for. The telling, and the listening, and the empathy.
From 18 to about 30, Liz and I were the girlish iteration of best friends: entwined, permanently communicating, borrowing, bed-sharing, getting ready to go out together, turning up to parties in the same clothes inadvertently, crying, wetting ourselves with laughter, swapping outfits in taxis. Our friendship bloomed when we were technically adults but yet to experience ourselves with fully formed prefrontal cortices in their mature and sensible form. The bond is very strong.
The drift apart started in our mid-twenties when it became clear she really wanted a family and I just couldn’t focus on something as decadent as domesticity, given survival and working out how to make money from writing taxed me daily, and other stuff distracted me nightly.
She escaped a doomed engagement and fled to South Africa, where she met and married an Afrikaner. We drifted further apart in terms of lifestyle, but the bond remained. Formed when our plastic minds were at their plastickyiest.
We hadn’t seen each other for a while. A year, maybe more.
We hung out in London for a brief overnight and stayed up late drinking rosé and playing records, just like in olden times. I found an old Smiths album and some of it sounded so good. Not long after we’d said, “Now we really must go to bed,” again, but with a convincing level of finality, I observed myself sitting opposite her on the sofa, talking about my Dad’s death with the same intensity as she had told me about her son’s birth 28 years before.
I thought to myself, a passive observer of my emotional self, Oh look, I’m doing that same thing, only at the other end. Ah well, she owes me one.
Birth and death are the big ones.
I was telling Liz because she would listen and I trust her. The death of a parent is significant and I needed to vocalise it, I needed to get it out.
