Ten Years Dead
My dad died on August 13th, 2010, but it wasn’t until August 15th that we found out, so to me today is the real anniversary of his death. He’d died at a conference in Sweden, alone in his hotel room. The 13th was a Friday. Friday the 13th - unlucky for some. He hadn’t turned up for breakfast on the Saturday, but it wasn’t until he missed an important meeting that people worried enough to break down the hotel room door. Getting the message from Sweden, to the UK embassy, to, of all people, the local police department, who then broke into dad’s house to find contact details for his next of kin - me - took another few hours. So it wasn’t until around about now - the time I am writing this post, late in the morning - that they finally made contact.
It was a Sunday. I was upstairs in the old house we used to rent in Stirchley. I was tinkering about with a novel I had written. One which had been sent off to agents and fallen mainly on deaf ears. I’d had a small bit of interest, a few requests to read the full thing, but those who read it said they didn’t think they could sell it. Too dark. Too non-specific in genre. Too fucked up.
When the phone rang and took me away from my editing, the stranger’s voice asking me if I was my father’s son combined with the headspace I was in, thinking about my novel, and I suddenly got excited. A few months before my dad had suggested sending the manuscript to an old friend of his who ran a small publishing company locally in Birmingham. The number I’d idly noticed as I picked up the phone was familiar. Something local. I had mentioned in my letter that I got the publisher’s details from my dad, who used to know him. It would stand to reason that, upon phoning me on a random Sunday morning in August to offer me that storybook publishing deal, the old friend would begin by checking he’d got the right person: Bob McKee’s son. Thinking it was a bit strange he was being so formal - the man on the phone didn't call him Bob, but Robert, and used his full middle name too - I eagerly confirmed I was the right person.
As the police officer told me that my father was dead, I still believed for the first few seconds I was speaking to a publisher. Then, when his words sunk in, I knew it had to be some sort of sick prank. Someone had got my number and was playing a cruel joke. Though they did seem to know a lot about my dad. Where he was, the hotel he had been staying in, his date of birth, my name, my sister’s name, dad’s partner’s name… and as he continued to speak - my ears no longer really hearing a lot of what I was being told - I suddenly realised why I recognised the number on the phone. It was dad’s number. Our old family home. He really was calling me from dad’s house like he had said. And as he started giving me contact details for the UK embassy in Sweden, and a reference number, I began to shake all over as I realised with horror that this was all very, very real.
The realness got even realer as the officer began to list things which needed to be done. Securing the house now that the window had been broken for him to gain entry; retrieving dad’s car from the airport carpark where he would no longer be picking it up that night before his ticket expired; making arrangements to get his body back from Sweden; organise a funeral; and, worst of all, inform the rest of the family. Tell my mom her ex-husband had died, my sister our dad was gone, my gran that she had lost her son.
If you want to know how crazy grief can be, know this: that same Sunday was the date of WWE SummerSlam that year and as the police officer was speaking to me, a friend of ours was on his way to our house from Brighton to stay over for the event. Finished with the phone call, as I told my wife what had happened, babbling incoherently as she held my hand and cried the tears I was too shocked yet to cry, I still believed we would be watching SummerSlam. I guess our friend can just chill in the lounge for a few hours while we deal with all the dad stuff and then we’ll be done in time to watch the show? My wife had to look me in the eyes and tell me calmly that we needed to cancel the visit for it to hit me fully that she was right. Fuck. Tonight - and everything else - would never be the same again.
The three worst phone calls I ever made in my life followed. Telling mom and my sister was awful, but telling my gran was even worse. Worse because somehow in her heart she already knew. Dad used to call her every day you see. Six o’clock on the dot each night, even when he was away for work. He hadn’t called her for a few days and she knew something wasn’t right.
“I have some really bad news,” I told her.
“Oh DaN,” she said, “not your father…”
The next day, August 16th, was his birthday. It was meant to be his 60th. For the first time ever, I had offered to take him out. Usually, even though it was his birthday, he would still end up paying for any celebratory meal we had, but we had made a point of this that we would be paying this year. My wife had knitted him a scarf - a proper old man scarf - and we had gathered together an “old man pack” of bus routes and a book about seeing the UK by bus because he would be getting his free bus pass. The whole joke was that we were giving him all this old man stuff because he wasn’t that old. He was retiring in October and 60 was meant to be the start of a whole new chapter of his life. We would laugh about the gifts, eat Thai food, and then go for some drinks at a pub he liked that served “real ale”. That had been the plan. Instead, after a day of booking locksmiths and glaziers to secure his house, making terrible phone call after terrible phone call, liberating his car from the airport, and crying more than I knew I could cry, we spent his birthday driving up to Bury to be with gran on what was now a difficult day. Weirdly, it was really nice. We all just shared stories about him and laughed a lot. Even having to pop outside for a bit to speak to the coroner in Sweden, and the doctor who had pronounced dad dead, didn’t dampen the mood. It was the first time I learned the other side of grief - that life somehow still goes on, and that no one is ever truly dead so long as we remember them.
It’s hard to believe it has been ten years of remembering already.
Ten years without being able to share with him what I am up to.
Two weeks after he died, it was the first week of my teacher training. That first year is marked with mourning, but the most consistent sadness was all the times something happened at work that I wanted to talk to dad about. Something only he would understand or get a kick out of. When he had been alive we had spoken at least once a week, usually on a Sunday, until the battery on his phone died. I don’t know when that routine had first started - sometime when I was at university. It was a conscious decision of his to be a better father after a childhood marked largely by his absence. His and mom’s marriage was an unhappy one, scarred with his many infidelities. Those heartbreaks led to mom, quite understandably, painting dad as the bad guy and the dominant narrative in our home was that dad wasn’t around a lot because he was off fucking other women. At some point, when they finally divorced and both his children now lived away from him, I think dad realised he needed to make more of an effort to be part of our lives, so he did. Part of what made his death so sad was knowing that had he died a decade before, I would have felt very differently about it and far fewer tears would be shed. We had finally got to a point where we had the father/son thing down, and now he was gone. The lack of those Sunday phone calls each week hurt for a long time. As did not being able to speak to him when we discovered he had fathered another daughter outside of his and mom’s marriage; a secret half-sister we only found out about after he was dead.
But it didn’t need to be big things. A certain piece of music - a new Springsteen song; Bob Dylan trying to sing Sinatra; the Rolling Stones performing via Zoom - these are all things I know he would have got a kick out of and it is hard to believe we haven’t been able to share. Films and TV shows, theatre - it’s crazy dad lived in a pre-Hamilton universe and I never got to hear him trying to clumsily quote a few historical bars. Football. England in the last World Cup, the demise of his beloved Bury FC. And what about the world he didn’t see? Brexit, Trump, Covid-19? Only three months into the coalition government of 2010 and he already saw the writing on the wall about austerity. Our last conversations had been about the stress he was under dealing with the ever-decreasing budget for libraries. Sleepless nights trying to minimise job losses which couldn’t be minimised. Strain on the heart and body which would eventually fail him.
I remember wishing I could tell him when I became Head of Department at my school, and when I finally got Authentic Democracy published in May, it was dad I most wanted to send a copy to. I know he would have been proud, as he would have been of my getting a paper accepted last week into an academic journal. Last summer we went to the Lake District for a week - dad’s favourite place in the world and where we scattered his ashes. Falling in love with the place by myself for the very first time - not being dragged there on a family holiday - it was dad I wanted to talk to about it and ask for advice on where we should walk next. Likewise, when we finally braved a visit to Gothenburg, the city where he died, I could see how much he would have enjoyed the place under other circumstances and felt sad that he had not been able to.
Big things and little things - an absence, but an eternal presence also. Present by his lack of presence. A hole in reality, all too noticeable.
But life, impossibly, has gone on. And now it is ten years later. Death, also impossibly, no longer shocking. There have been too many other terrible phone calls - my mom telling me about her terminal diagnosis, her husband telling me she was dead, the hospital telling me gran had fallen, the care home telling me gran was dead, the vet telling us it was a tumour, the vet telling us it was time to put our cat of nine years down… Mentally, I am in a far worse place than I was ten years and one week ago, before any of this horror touched me, but at the same time I am in a better place now than I was five years ago when all I could see was the way in which everything dies. Even living through a global pandemic, I am prepared: it has merely confirmed the lesson I began to learn a decade ago that no one is safe. The world can change with a single phone call. You can buy a return plane ticket and have no need for the second flight.
The human mind can be wonderful though, as well as self-destructive. Sometimes I still dream of him (and of mom, of gran, even of Rupert, our old cat) and in those dreams it’s like a little visit to the past. I wake up feeling like we’ve caught up in some odd way. I don’t believe in ghosts or the spirit, but when perception can become reality there is very little difference between the perception of contact in a dream and actual contact. I have had many dreams of going back to #86, our old family home, and sitting at the kitchen table (which now sits in our shed as a work-surface my wife uses for potting plants) to share a cup of tea and a chat with dad. And it’s better than nothing, even if a sense of loss is also reawakened in the morning and takes a few days to get over.
Ten years is a long time but it is also no time at all. I have lived so long now without a father that it feels normal. But at the same time it feels like only yesterday that phone rang and everything fell apart. I suspect the same will be true on the twentieth anniversary too. Life goes on, but like a cartoon character running in front of a scrolling backdrop sometimes we keep hitting on repetition of that same distinctly drawn landmark as it does - a tree we’ve seen before, a familiar plant pot, a ringing phone and the nightmare that followed…
My sister suggested taking the occasion of this anniversary to write a letter to dad, letting him know what we’re up to and what we’ve done these last ten years. I don’t believe in spirits or ghosts, but I do know I speak to dad often enough in my head that if there was anything he needed to know, he would. And for everything else, he can read this blog. He did, after all, die a blogger, excited about the internet’s ability to share information democratically to all.
I miss his blogs, and I miss him. Every day.
One of the last photos taken of dad before he died