After years of tears, actor and writer Michelle Langstone has found a new way to talk about the loss of her dad.
I once met a guy who said he saw Jesus in a piece of beef schnitzel. This was a staggering pronouncement to receive at age 22, but I absorbed it, nodding, writing nothing off. Miracles can happen, I thought. People see statues weeping. Others see messages in clouds. If Jesus made himself known in a second-grade cut of meat, I don’t think it’s my place to challenge it.
I don’t walk around looking for miracles. When my dad was dying I gave magical thinking an arbitrary go. I tried and failed to make a pact with the universe: “I will be kind to every single human being I meet if you’ll find a way to fix my dad,” I would say to the mangroves in the estuary down the back of our house. He died anyway of course.
Beyond trying to out-kind dad’s terminal cancer diagnosis, I’ve been guilty of wearing a lucky necklace to auditions (a gold four leaf clover naturally), and superstitious about following the same routine to the minute before a theatre show (touch every seat in the auditorium, drink a can of energy drink at 26 minutes past the final hour before curtain), in the hope it would make things run smoothly, but that’s about it.
But lately, for some reason I can’t quite pin down, I’m starting to wonder if the miraculous is, in fact, something that’s really kind of pedestrian. Like lint in your pockets, or dog hair in the eyelets of your sneakers. I am starting to think that miracles, if they exist, are just little happenstances of humour that make life more bearable.
I’d gone to borrow my neighbour’s lawn mower, that’s how it started. He was going through some stuff, and we sat in his driveway for a bit and talked about tough things while his dog pranced and wiggled between us. At some point he asked me about my parents. I told him my mum lives by the sea, and that my dad lives in her wardrobe. Off his expression I added — “He’s dead at the moment.”
“Well, probably not just at the moment,” he said, laughing.
“You never know!” I said with what I hoped was an air of mystery, getting to my feet and brushing off the seat of my jeans. “You just never know.”
I mowed the lawn and the blackbirds came down to scoff the bugs I uncovered. I dragged my broken mower to the back of the garden with half a mind to drain the petrol and take it to the dump. It was my dad’s mower — red, worn through like his body was when he left us. I wedged it between a garden waste bin and the wooden painting horses he’d made when I was a kid. And then I realised it was the anniversary of his leaving.
“Thanks for the reminder, Dad” I said, laughing.
It’s been six years since my dad left. I’ve always used that term ‘left’ rather than ‘died’ because it did feel as if he just wandered off one day. And I have wrestled in these thousands of days since with the idea he could just come wandering back when he felt like it. The evidence of his ashes, in my mother’s wardrobe, lately has not provided me with any further evidence to the contrary.
On the anniversary of dad’s passing his mower gave up the ghost at last, and I made a flippant comment about how he’s just dead at the moment, and I realised I have made some kind of link between a series of concepts that allows me to amuse myself with the idea that dad is just currently dead. Perhaps, like the cat in the box who is both alive and dead for so long as the box remains unopened, I have a Shrodinger’s dad, who theoretically exists in both states, so long as we don’t tamper with the box of ashes.
It’s a cheap pine box with a fake silver plaque on top which bears his name. The plaque came unstuck early on in the proceedings when I slept with my arms around the box one night. I stuck it back in place with a gob of Blu Tack. The box is made of cheap pine that’s almost as thin as balsa wood. The first time I picked it up I almost dropped it, because the dead weight of its contents was at odds with the unbearable lightness of its material. When I moved the box it sounded like a snake was inside it, spitting grit.
I lived and languished extensively in a boat made from the grief of dad’s leaving. I bobbed about in my tears for years. The gift of that extended period of mourning has been the complete acceptance of his absence. He is very dead.
But that doesn’t have to mean he will always be dead.
It turns out that referring to your parent as “dead at the moment” really opens up a whole line of humorous conversation. It never fails to take the receiver of it aback. It elicits surprised laughs without fail. Somehow, it has made the absence of dad much less painful, funny, even.
From the moment I said those words to my neighbour, the last calcified bits of sadness shifted in my bones. The ridiculous unlikelihood of dad being alive again one day stormed my body, and ran out of me in a silly, galavanting joke.
It’s a joke my dad would have loved. I’m kicking myself I never thought of it when he was alive, when we had to look at the casket-deep bodies of our relatives. He and I, the worst gigglers at funerals, would have stretched that joke beyond decency. As if we took Billy Crystal’s Mostly Dead bit from The Princess Bride, and ran off with it.
A short conversation at a crematorium might go like this:
The body of a family member slides into the crematorium and the door closes. Dawson and Michelle watch the flames engulf the body. The cremation specialist removes his gigantic gloves.
Dawson: Well, she’s snuffed it then, hasn’t she.
Michelle: Yeah, looks that way.
Dawson: Dead then.
A beat, then Dawson and Michelle glance at each other and speak in unison, eyebrows cocked.
Dawson/Michelle: At the moment, anyway.
Now when I tell people dad is dead at the moment, I will occasionally come across someone who gets the joke immediately, and proceeds to list for me all the relatives they have who are currently dead, future status pending. Now the departed seem to me like a Greek chorus, hovering in the wings, and it comforts me immensely.
Because dad is just dead at the moment it has become somewhat amusing to me that he is dead at all. I now add to these statements with ridiculous musings that tail off suggestively “You know…atoms, constant motion, the impermanence of life, the time/space continuum…” I say breezily.
The fire in the crematorium burns between 800-1000 degrees celsius. It turns bodies to ash in just a few hours. I don’t think there is salvageable DNA in that sack of grit in the box in the wardrobe. It’s not as if I think someone could clone my dad. That thought horrifies me. But that ash still contains atoms. Atoms are part of everything. They go on adventures, atoms, whether we like it or not. They mingle with the fog, or the dew on the lawn. They assimilate themselves in schools of fish. Matter moves, it changes form and then it changes again.
I should clarify at this point that I only got 49% in my fifth form science exam. They scaled my entire year up about 10% because the exam was judged too hard for 15 year olds, so I scraped through by dumb luck. Science is not my area. But my ignorance makes my considerations more enjoyable to me, even as it infuriates others. I would also like to state for the record that I am in sound mind and body.
I explained to mum recently that if dad is dead, (which he is) then when I am also dead, we will both be something that is, to us, not dead but something else. Provided we have a consciousness. But even still, two dead people together are not just dad, dead. The state of his being will have changed by my company. A technicality, sure, but I’ll take it.
It’s fortunate that dad is only dead at the moment. The word ‘moment’ is itself such a harmless word, a word that feels as if it is composed of finger sandwiches, the distant chime of a grandfather clock, or the breathless interval before the next song begins.
Somewhere in another moment, in another time and space entirely, my dad could be waiting for that song to begin, too. If it’s a song he likes he will make a show of clicking his fingers in a stylised flourish, and he will move out across the floor, calling to my mother, who will laugh and flush, calling to us kids, who may or may not join him.
I’m kidding, of course I’ll join him.
There was a time when I had to be rigid in my thinking about dad. Back in the heavy grief, if I allowed myself to see him in my mind in the lull before I fell asleep, my sleep would gallop away from me, and instead I’d cycle through the last week of his life all night long; image after image of his body wasting away, and of the last things we said, would play in the movie nobody would ever pay to see.
Now that dad is only dead at the moment I can think of him when I fall asleep, and the images are of the time before he was sick, when he was jubilant with laughter and silliness. His comedy routines and annoying habits have come back to me. I think of him laughing as he reads this, calling me a dingbat.
I love it that something daft and offhand — some half formed joke — can turn the ship of grief around. I love that grief can move not just with solemnity, but with silliness — it seems the final fitting tribute to my hilarious father.
I once described my grief as an Olympic flame. Never extinguished, carried across continents, on and on. Now I experience grief like a weather event; occasional storms strike the lightning rod of good humour I have built around dad’s leaving, and they shake, but do not alter my structure as they race to the ground.
I don’t know that you ever get over a loss as monumental as my dad’s was for me. But at the same time, you’re not not over it.
Shrodinger’s dad again. Over it, and not over it. Dead and alive.
The problem will be when the time comes to scatter dad’s ashes. It seems a more permanent arrangement if his physical body is hiffed to the four winds. I have considered keeping a small amount of them, just to have him close. But knowing my brain, that will set in motion an eternity of wondering exactly which part of my dad I have. I’d take an ear, but a nostril? Absolutely not.
For as long as his body is in the box he is together in one accountable place, and it seems possible he could make a comeback in some way or another. Set him free into the wild and he’s off and racing, coming down in the rain, fertilising the passionfruit vines, making my cat sneeze.
For now we keep the box closed and my dad lives and dies in every moment in a wardrobe by the seaside. He is alive for all of us, and dead for us too. It reminds me of what the artist Robert Montgomery says, in his lit up neon installation:
The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive
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