Remembering Dad

I'm having a day off work tomorrow. It feels like a very indulgent thing to do but last year I ended up rehearsing the entire day and then fell apart in the evening. One thing I've learned in the last couple of years is that any deferment of my grief tends to mean that I react far more violently later.

Missing my Dad is a daily occurrence. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it's a painless fleeting thought. But most of the time it does hurt. I have a distinct memory of being a child, fairly young, when the realisation of mortality hit me. And the thing that hit first, as it does when they are literally your entire world, was the terror that my parents would die. I remember my Mum comforting me that it hadn't yet happened, that everything was fine and the thing that strikes me is how much worse it actually is than I ever considered. All you can contemplate when you theorise about losing someone is that first howl of grief. The controlled sorrow of the funeral and the grim moment-to-moment slog of the first week of bereavement also factor in but it's impossible to predict what it will be like afterwards. I might have imagined myself in an artfully sad pose somewhere, looking distraught but brave, but what I hadn't ever thought of in the days before it was even a possibility was the mind-numbing stress of continued absence.

I don't think it is really possible to know how much of an impact someone has on your life until they've left it. Dad's death has leeched a great deal of colour from the world for me. I have really struggled to retain enthusiasm and joy in things because his enthusiasm and joy is missing. When I see a fantastically choreographed action sequence in an action film, I hear that "woo-woof" sound he used to make in complete childlike glee. Beautiful music makes me think of that face when he'd close his eyes, completely transported by the sound, before opening them, shining and keen to share the moment. When I act, there's no-one else to whom I can talk so exhaustively about my process or pick up tips without feeling that I was being boring or repetitive because I knew that he was as obsessive and pedantic as me. He was so expressive and passionate and full of life that those qualities bolstered my own feelings and without him, I feel like I've lost something far more than could be imagined from losing one single person. I feel like I've lost an awful lot of myself.

Of course I remember his more irritating qualities but, as with anyone, when you love someone that much, you love all of those aspects of them as well. I miss his temper and laziness as much as anything else. Because if they were here, he'd be here with them.

Two years on from his death, the size of the hole that Dad's going has left in my life is still somewhat immeasurable. I can locate it in specific things that I miss - his bulk, his humour, his exactness, his sayings, his stories, his voice - but a person is never just those things. It's the impact that they had on those around them, small or large, and I think anyone who knew Dad would agree that his impact was always large. He had a talent for making people feel special who had only just met him so imagine how it felt to be his daughter.

My father was an exceptional, infuriating, exciting, honest, incorrigible, sublime, ridiculous, awe-inspiring man. And I miss him every day.