Grelief

A reflection on loss, family and an unexpected hard reset.

Fair Warning: This piece contains very little in the way of politics. It is a personal reflection on the past two weeks and the slightly strange emotional territory that comes with grief and change. Politics will be fully back on the menu from next week. Thank you for Bearing with me.

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Photo by Arthur Hickinbotham on Unsplash

Morning, All.

As many of you will have noticed, my output lately on Bearly Politics has been far lower than usual with only two pieces published over the past two weeks or so. That has been, as you can imagine, quite a deliberate decision.

In between my dad’s passing now over two weeks ago, travelling back to South Africa for the funeral, the various logistical arrangements that come with death and distance and then allowing myself a little bit of time afterwards to just exist without really doing anything, I made the conscious decision not to write - even when I was feeling spurred on to do so by the general chaos and insanity of the world we currently find ourselves in.

Self-Checkout at 11:35

Since June, Bearly Politics has been running at a fairly relentless pace, something I am incredibly grateful that I was able to sustain for so long, but when the shit finally hit the proverbial fan two weeks ago, I realised fairly quickly that trying to force words out of myself in the middle of all the personal chaos would only produce something angry, exhausted and probably incoherent - which, to be fair, does feel like it would resemble roughly half of modern political commentary anyway.

So, I pared back massively - and for once, I didn’t feel guilty about it.

I will also now admit that the timing of everything that’s happened recently has been oddly… fortuitous.

I know this sounds like an incredibly horrible thing to say about a situation that includes a death of a family member, but life rarely arranges itself according to the emotional etiquette and signals we imagine exist when it comes to grief and loss.

My dad’s passing came during my final week with the NHS, and the funeral, travel and the ensuing activity branching out from all of this, ended up neatly straddling what would have been the end of one job and the start of a new one.

This meant, of course, that I missed my own farewell from the NHS - something I am genuinely sad about. I would have honestly loved to say goodbye to people who have played a massive role in my life over the past few years a bit more properly. After nearly half a decade, a pandemic and more meetings than any human being should reasonably endure without the assistance of industrial quantities of alcohol or sedatives, it felt like a final chapter that deserved just slightly more ceremony.

At the same time though, the disruption inadvertently created something that I hadn’t had in a very, very long time - space.

Instead of going straight from one intense role into another, life forced me to pause - and pause very properly at that. It felt like someone reached deep inside me, and pushed the hard reset button. Like a power down that people so rarely get to experience because the world is always telling you to keep running, producing, answering emails, attending meetings and in general just keep doing.

Death, in the current circumstances, did not give the tiniest fuck about my calendar.

The emotional side of the past two weeks has also been incredibly strange to navigate, and I suspect that what I’m about to write will resonate with some people with complicated family relationships, while leaving other people a bit perturbed. I apologise to the latter group.

The first thing I will say is I am very sad that my dad died.

The thing I will add, which will potentially conflict with this, is that I’m incredibly relieved as well.

Since my father got sick three years ago, things have been very hard. The past six months in particular became extremely difficult to manage.

My father was, at the best of times, not a particularly kind man. He was an unapologetic alcoholic his whole life, and he was both verbally and emotionally abusive to my mum, my sister and me pretty much our whole lives. As his illness progressed, these traits sadly did not soften in the way that I had hoped they would and, if anything, became even more acute. Even sharper.

Most mornings over the past year, I would wake up with dread at looking at my phone. I would invariably find messages waiting for me from my father. Sometimes they were just a demand for different or more medications, usually sedatives or painkillers.

Other times it would be complaints about carers or nursing staff looking after him, leading me to pre-work calls with the carehome management to find out what was going on.

Quite often there were accusations of abandonment. Accusations that I clearly didn’t care. That I was not doing enough. That my mother was awful. That my sister was ignoring him.

My father was a man who was extremely adept at coercion, manipulation and the weaponisation of guilt.

I tried to manage these messages as best I could. Sometimes I did well. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I ignored them until the guilt became too much.

Anyone who has dealt with long-term illness in a family - especially when the relationships are… unhealthy - will know that it becomes a strange mixture of duty, resentment, care, anxiety and exhaustion.

That cycle, as of two weeks ago has… stopped. Suddenly.

I wake up in the morning, and don’t fear looking at my phone anymore. I simply don’t have the words to accurately describe just what that relief feels like. It’s in no way or form happiness or joy - it’s a bit more subtle than that. It’s more like a stillness sitting in place of what was previously unstoppable background pressure.

Throughout all of this, I also feel incredible empathy for my mum - a woman who lived deep inside an environment that I was at least physically able to escape from.

Watching her over the past few weeks has been one of the more unexpectedly hopeful parts of this whole episode. She is, very slowly, beginning to chart what looks like her own course. The family home is being sold, and she’s buying a small place in a retirement village where she’ll live within a community around her. She’s talking about getting a dog again, something she hasn’t been able to do for years. For the first time in her life, she’s making plans to travel, completely unrestricted by someone else’s needs, behaviour or demands. I am incredibly proud of her.

Tomorrow is also my first day in my new job.

That sentence still feels strange to write. The past few years in the NHS have been some of the most intense and meaningful of my professional life. I joined during the vaccination programme in the middle of the pandemic, and what followed was five years of work that I will always be proud of. The scale of the systems we were trying to improve, the people I had the privilege of working with, and the impact we were trying to deliver - it was enormous.

The role I’m moving into now is very different.

In terms of scale and influence, I won’t wield anything like the same level of institutional power that comes with working inside a massive national system like the NHS. But that’s also part of the appeal. I’m looking forward to doing smaller, more focused work. Projects that can move quickly. Ideas that can be tested without having to navigate seven layers of governance, three committees, and a PowerPoint presentation that somehow still ends up being forty-seven slides long.

After the past few years, that kind of focus feels appealing.

As I’m sitting here on my sofa with my MacBook balanced precariously on a scatter cushion looking back at the past two weeks, everything feels incredibly surreal. The mix of grief and relief (grelief?) is something that I’m still reconciling. It will take me a while to do so I suspect.

And throughout all of this, I have realised yet again, just how lucky I am to have the people I do in my life.

My husband has been extraordinary. My friends have been consistent - checking in, sometimes with long messages, sometimes with a simple “are you okay”. The community here around Bearly Politics, continues to be an incredible pillar of support with hundreds of emails, messages and comments of support.

And slightly improbably, my Dungeons and Dragons crew I’ve been playing with has become another pocket of human connection in a year where I’ve discovered that story telling - even when it involves levitating celestial bears - can be incredibly therapeutic.

The strangest realisation out of all of this though is that I am, where I sit, the least stressed I have been in probably six or seven years - certainly since before Covid. And me, being me, is slightly worried about that.

I have to question myself a bit that in the immediate aftermath of a death, funeral, international travel and a major career transition, I feel more centred and focused than I have been in years. Part of me wonders slightly anxiously what that says about me as a human being.

But perhaps - and I’m trying this on for size - it just says that I’m human in a slightly messier way than the grief manuals suggest. That relief and sadness can sit together without one invalidating the other. That sometimes the hard reset button gets pushed not when we choose it, but when life decides we’ve been running on fumes for long enough. I suspect the conflict will settle eventually, not into neat resolution, but into something I can carry more lightly.

So tomorrow, I’ll start the new job. I’ll probably make myself an unnecessarily elaborate breakfast to mark the occasion, answer some emails, and try not to overthink the fact that I’m walking into this next chapter feeling oddly... ready.

Ready in a way I haven’t felt in years.

And if that makes me a slightly strange human being, well - I’ve been called worse. Usually by my father, actually. But that’s rather the point, isn’t it? That cycle has stopped. And whatever comes next, I get to meet it without that particular weight.

That feels like enough of a place to start.

Thank you for sticking through this extended ramble - I wish everyone a great week ahead, and I’ll be back this week as acerbic and probably annoyed as ever.

Best,

Bear