What I learned about stories across my father’s death

Ask Alice is an online column written by our former Secretary, Dr Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction mini, under ‘A B Endacott’.

Please note the following column contains references to death of a loved one and grief. 

My father died at the beginning of August. He had endured stage 4 pancreatic cancer for several months, in remarkably good shape given the stats surrounding this type of cancer. However, his diagnosis was terminal. You can only stave that off for so long.

During the months of his illness, I often thought of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. It’s one of the few books aimed at younger readers which centres on the perspective of a child losing a parent. Importantly, it portrays the inevitability of letting go as something we must do for ourselves and the person who is sick. In many ways, it helped prepare me to know there would be a moment when I had to let him go, and to tell him it was ok for him to leave me.

I think, by the end, he was held together by love for me and my sister. He worried about leaving us, he worried we weren’t ready. He perhaps was worried that he wasn’t ready. It’s an awful thing to tell someone you love that they have your permission to die. But a story had readied me to know just how important that moment was.

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As a child, the most monumentally world-ending thing you can imagine is losing a parent. They define such huge swathes of your world. I’m not inclined to posthumously canonise my father. He was a whole human being, which meant he had a great many flaws. He could be insensitive, selfish, and downright thoughtless. He made decisions that hurt me deeply. He could frustrate me with things he thought were funny but were, in fact, borderline offensive (broad generalisations about women are the key offenders, here; astonishing given his two daughters both evade those generalisations with a wide margin). But he was also deeply non-judgmental, a brilliant person with whom to work through any technical or logistical problem, and one of the most intelligent and interesting people I knew.

This mélange of qualities are my father to me. Like any person, this complexity enveloped him, and it is the absence of this complex, loving person with which I am now faced. Yet in the way a story helped prepare me for the end of his life, I could not think of a story which prepared me to navigate my life beyond his.

I wonder if the trope of the absent or long-dead parent in teen literature (especially fantasy) exists because to capture the complexity and size of what it means to have recently lost a parent is a near-impossible task for the confines of a narrative. Stories are stylised; you remove chunks of what would constitute a ‘normal’ day because they are irrelevant to the plot. Yet I have found that it is in those most mundane moments when my grief has emerged, goblin-like from the shadows, to sink its bitter teeth into me. To rearrange this into the aesthetic requirements of a story would undercut the reality, and the truth.

I imagine there are stories which do portray this. However, I have yet to read something which fulsomely captures grief in a way I find recognisable, especially this stage of immediate aftermath where my grief and gratitude are tangled and enmeshed, when I’m fine until I’m not, where I’m unpicking Dad from my daily life; calling him on my way home from work, seeing something and noting it to tell him later, or looking in my dairy for when I will carve out the time to go and see him.

This mess is not a good story. It’s circular, the climax is at its chronological beginning, and it’s just about my everyday. If I were to craft it into a book, I’d have to include some other ‘problem’ or thread. But that would take away from the fact that I’m grieving my Dad. Not discovering some secret aspect of his life. Not leaving the physical space of my normal world as part of a healing journey. Not overcoming my grief so I can embrace love. The only story here is that I’m slowly and painfully piecing together the glimpses I get of how huge this loss actually is.

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One day a couple of months ago I was visiting him and I started to cry. I slipped my hand into his. Like my maternal grandfather, who has also passed away, he had huge hands which engulfed mine. Nobody else in the world besides the two of them held my hand like they did. I whispered to him, “what am I going to do without you.”

He looked back at me and said, “you’ll be ok. You’ll live your life. I just won’t be there to see it.” I cried when he said that. I cry whenever I remember this moment. I cried writing it down, just now.

Of course I will live my life. It will be big and beautiful, filled with wonderful things and heartbreaking moments, and laughter and tears, and everything in between. It is because I know how much he loved to hear about my life that my heart broke then, and breaks over and over again when I remember I can’t tell him those stories, from the mundane to the extraordinary, about my day.

I became pregnant with my first child in March. It has been difficult beyond words to navigate a pregnancy while watching someone I love move toward the end of their life. The news of this child was bittersweet. On the one hand, I was able to tell Dad about it. He was beyond thrilled; it was something beyond his pain and illness that he could think about. On the other hand, my unborn child is not a consolation prize (although many people have essentially suggested this). Knowing that Dad’s delight would not, and did not, culminate in him meeting his first grandchild was, and is, a physical pain rooted in my chest.

Only a few weeks before he died, he asked me with a quiet sorrow whether I would tell my child about him. I promised that my child will hear so many stories about Dad, we’ll all be sick of hearing about him. He laughed at that, one of the deep belly laughs which I so loved I was able to elicit from him.

He is now an interwoven collection of stories. It’s what we all become, I suppose. I know all too well that the stories I tell of him don’t capture who he was. How can they? Even if everyone who knew him pieced together their stories of him, there are still the truths and quiet thoughts that he held about himself and his life which we will never know.

I miss him terribly. I know that missing him will not go away, only change with time.

I know how the story that I have crafted across this column is meant to end; with the promise of an eventual lessening to the grief, or a perspective that reduces the intensity of its sting. I won’t adhere to that expectation. I can speak to those things, and they are true. But that’s not what this story is about.

This story is about what it means to sit with your sadness and your grief, to acknowledge them, and to give them the dignity of space to be present without trying to shove them to the side.

Author’s note: 

I have had the incredible privilege of being supported through this period of my life by a collection of truly spectacular people:

My superhero of a mother, Helen, my much-adored husband, Mitch, my in-laws, and my friends, have all been there in any way I needed them. I cannot imagine how I can ever repay this love and generosity.

In a work context, my team at the University of Melbourne, have been profoundly patient and supportive, led by the world’s most compassionate director of program, Anna. 

On a professional side, my therapist, Vera, deserves a special shoutout, but also the people who have managed the physical manifestations of my stress. 

Even as my grief and distress as been my own, I have had so many people who have been there to hold me and give me what I need so I can work through these emotions. I am grateful for them in ways I simply cannot express. 

I would also like to extend my thanks to the various medical professionals who oversaw Dad’s care, including the team at Cancer Melbourne, his local GP, and the care facility where he spent the last two weeks of his life. They consistently treated him with dignity and respect, and were compassionate and helpful to us. 

If reading this has caused any distress or discomfort, please visit Beyond Blue or call Lifeline on 13 11 14. 

To learn more about pancreatic cancer, which is often not detected until it is quite advanced due to symptoms being vague or unnoticed, please visit the Cancer Council’s website.