The Landscape of Loss

Capturing Grief

TW: Grief & Parental loss. Please feel free to avoid if either of those concepts are too hard to hold right now. All my love, V 💙

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Four years ago, on March 15th 2020, suddenly and unexpectedly, my father died.

Unless you have experienced the way your world flips in the wake of losing a parent, I doubt I would be able to describe what it feels like, especially when it was so unexpected. The only person who seems to have got close to explaining it is Saul Bellow in his 1996 letter to Martin Amis;

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

I had just crossed the border on a drive back from Torridon, Scotland when I received the phone call. I wasn’t there, I was hours and miles away. I wasn’t the one who found him. That fell to my older brother. He had to perform cpr on a man who has been dead 12 hours. I wasn’t the one who sat with my father’s body for 5 hours until the funeral directors arrived. That fell to my brother, my mother and my uncle, all of whom kept vigil.

Dad’s house was left exactly how it was when he had gone to bed on March 14th before the life slipped out of him in the small hours of March 15th.

It took a lot to convince my brother to hand over the keys to dad’s house on the morning of March 17th. Pacing the living room with a bowl of cereal, more hitting the floor than finding his mouth, it took every single ounce of persuasion and perseverance I could muster to convince him he did not need to return to that traumatic space, that I needed to go in to the house without him.

Photography wasn’t really on my mind. Mum and I just wanted to go in and sort the bed that dad died in, remove the duvet cover and try to make sense of everything.

Things struck me, though. Things I’ll never forget. My dad’s phone was plugged in. On the night of the 14th he’d charged it, intending to wake up. The phone ran out of battery in the week after his death. I have it still. I haven’t been able to power it up and switch it back on. The same with his laptop. I feel like it’s sacred ground. I feel incapable of placing a full stop at the end of his existence.

Somehow, for some reason I cannot recall, I took a few ill composed, but raw images on the afternoon I first went into the house and the time I returned to clear out Dad’s things. Those visits were punctuated by COVID and the first lockdown, as well as a truncated funeral where I held my mother’s hand through disposable gloves, terrified Covid would take her from me.

The images are little vignettes of a life, small pieces of a narrative that I can never fully understand. There were things I didn’t capture, like the small bag of weed on the side (subsequently made into brownies), or the evidence of death on the duvet. I guess the things that caught my eye were the things I associated with Dad, that spoke of his personality.

His trademark trilby hats, settled on the stairs next to the denim jacket that I helped him choose years before. Both now hang in my living room. I’ll occasionally sneak a sniff of its collar, a reminder of the musty atmosphere of his living room.

Dad was problematic. He had meals on wheels but refused to eat them. He hid them all over the house from me and my brother, in drawers and cupboards. Plates of rotting food covered in tin foil. A weak attempt to pretend he was looking after himself. That smell stayed with me for months. It seemed to stick to anything that existed in that house. I can smell it now. Indelibly burned into my senses.

In the living room, his boots, haphazardly positioned where he left them. He loved those boots. He was buried in those boots.

A copy of (the now defunct) Practical Photography that contained the monthly column I used to write under the same title as this Substack (Adventures of the Landscape Photographer). Dad wasn’t always the best at expressing himself but gosh he was proud of me and especially loved my writing. I don’t think he ever fully acknowledged that I inherited that from him.

The recycling bin full of cheap wine bottles. We found them everywhere. Hidden in every conceivable nook and cranny. By the time we cleared the house the bin was overflowing with empties, mostly the same brand of cheap rose wine that I could not tolerate then and struggle to even look at these days. We took home what was left in the fridge including an opened pack of ham and pint of milk. I couldn’t bring myself to touch either, birthing the frankly macabre band name, ‘Dead Man’s Ham”. Humour I feel dad would have appreciated.

The piles and piles of pills. Anti-depressants and supplements in an attempt to keep him healthy, all completed ignored. Two black bags full that I returned to the pharmacy, struggling to explain why all this medication and resource had been wasted.

His ‘Old Labour and Proud’ mug (photographed in my kitchen later). Gosh we loved to discuss politics. Dad was a steelworker and when the steelworks were threatened with closure in the late 70s he went on strike for 3 months. He was proud of his trade unionist roots. He hated Thatcher, but was close with a number of Conservative voters and would love to debate with them, especially over a glass of wine.

His proud collection of Observer books, all of which I will never part with. Dad was like an observer book of knowledge. He knew all the bird calls, all the flowers. My happiest memories of him revolve around our trips into the countryside or the coast. His love of nature became mine. His knowledge, my knowledge. A legacy of sorts.

There were so many scraps of paper with notes and poems scribbled on them. It became hard to read after a while. Evidence of a man consumed with regret at times, who struggled to find a way to reconcile all the contradictions of this life. Words tinged with loss and loneliness, a feeling that he was out of place and his real life was happening somewhere else. It burns. It makes my heart ache. The birthday message to me that he never sent:

Out of all of the notes, this scribbling is the one that sticks with me.

Addiction and the human condition. And I’m trying my best to fill the void with love and I’m trying my best to make those dreams possible.

Miss you Dad, always