The Game of Grief
Dear readers, As you can guess from the title, this post is an alternative type of a jolly festive read. I’m sprinkling it all with a bit of jest and dark humour, which is the language I love best. That’s my first disclaimer. The second is that I’m not a qualified counsellor or psychologist, but God help my poor patients if I would ever decide to become one: their spiral might forever descend if their lives were put into my hands. The third disclaimer is that this post has no objective to obtain sympathy or empathy of any sort. I don’t need it. I write through personal experience, logging the journey and memories of mourning in order to support others who have also suffered a loss of some sort, whether it be a death or separation from a loved it, or anything that gives a sense of mourning or disappointment. It is also in dedication to my father, Stephen Arthur Rogers, who passed away on 9th October 2022. As romantic as it sounds, and I know he’s rolling his cynical eyes at me right now while I write these very words, but I feel he’s pushed me to write this. Or in any case, he’s certainly inspired it. Over a year has passed. I haven’t written much publicly about my father other than expressions of grief on social media. I guess it might be that I’ve had too much to say or on my mind, and I didn’t have a blog or the correct medium to express it. I’m not in the business of drama dumping the world with my thoughts. Fuck no, I save that for my nearest and dearest. If we talk about the different stages of grief; by Jaysus, there are anywhere between 5 to 7 to a zillion steps to pass through depending on what and where you read it. On some level, I guess this post is my own way of coming to terms with it: the Acceptance stage. But what I write in the below paragraphs may contradict the last sentence. Because the process of grief is more complex than a step-by-step process. I knew a little something about the grieving process. Just before my father’s death, I was going through separation from my former partner. From that experience alone, I was going through tremendous loss, and as a way to find relief and emotionally and mentally prepare for the pending divorce, I read up on the grieving process to gain insight on what to expect and when. It’s not as though I was walking into it blindly; I’d heard of the 5 or 7 or however many stages there are of grief beforehand, but it all seemed simplistic and unrealistic. We all know, emotions are wretched to grasp, comprehend and control at the best of times. When a big life event comes along, it’s an emotional boxing match: blows all over the body, especially the head. The majority of the websites and self-help guides on grief have their disclaimers before launching into the “5 steps of horrendous mental suffering”, by stating that grieving is never linear, which is very good of them, but also wholly accurate. Grief isn’t linear whatsoever. But still, I felt it was lacking that je ne sais pas quoi. As mentioned above, my father passed away on 9th October. He battled a short but intense fight against lung cancer. I remember in the weeks after the initial diagnosis in early August, I was learning all these terms and what they meant, like CT scans and the use of different dyes and colouring. I learned this-or-that scan may impact if Dad could receive chemotherapy, or that the effects of this-or-that treatment may make dad more poorly for a day or two. There were different types of diagnosis which I never knew existed, and then there was the dreaded term nobody wants to hear about themselves or a loved one: palliative care – end of life. There were different types of nurses and hospital units and treatments flowing through the conversations, and consequences and ifs-and-buts if this-or-that happens: it confused me more, as well as being the worst dictionary exercise ever. My brother and sister were grand, talking me through everything in layman’s terms. They are professional doctors and have witnessed some of this in their day-to-day jobs. It couldn’t have been easy for them having to regurgitate the spiralling bad news and information from the doctors’ technical jargon into words that the rest of the family could comprehend. That comes with its own traumas. Something I will always be grateful to them for. This was all happening during a British autumn. I was not used to the wind and drizzle and greyness, being that these days I am very much a tropical animal, thriving on vitamin D and rays del sol. Still today, in Honduras, on the rare day when temperatures drop and there’s a little drizzle, it evokes something of a melancholic trauma of those final weeks. The dampness and rain and clouds and sitting in cafes at the Royal Worcestershire Hospital drinking shitty coffee waiting for shitty news; I fucking hate those memories with a passion. It still sits in my system rather uncomfortably. I remember the first pangs of grief hit me some weeks before my dad even passed. I sat down for a pint with my best mate Stuart Harbourne in a bar in Birmingham, and he kind of confirmed what I already knew, “Lung cancer: it’s one of the bad ones”. It causes a little sense of guilt in my low moments, that I somehow premeditated or manifested the worst-case scenario. What might have happened if I’d used the power of positive thinking? Would things have turned out differently? Silly, really, I know. Very irrational and absurd. The devil’s work, procrastinating such things. I’m able to rationalise it; don’t worry. After all, I’m not sure how positive-thinking medically prevents the spread of aggressive cancerous