Book extract: Long Going by Sophie Calon

There was a dad with me once.

He drifted slowly, unsteady on his feet. I yearned for closure eventually. Truth is, I grieved his going before learning he had gone. Not a surprise, that news, but still a shock when it lit my phone screen. Those pixels stung like citrus on a cut.

People often speak of hiraeth. Untranslatable, they say. Is it? Split it in two, hir|aeth, and you get long|gone. And that’s the crux of it, if you ask me. A longing for someone, something, sometime, someplace long gone. A heave in the gut for the no longer reachable.

Where we truly lack the words is a more searing sensation: the longing for what’s fading just beyond reach. Within sight, between here and gone, like ink greying in cold sunlight. Hir|mynd, long|going.

My dad’s long going was dark and frightening. Tiring, too. All that not knowing if, when he did come back, he might stick around this time. In Welsh, there’s no word for ‘have’. Someone or something is either with us or not with us. No possession, only presence.

Yes, there was a dad with me once.

I last heard from him two years, seven months, and twenty-five days before his death. An email to tell me of his own dad’s death. I sent a curt, kind reply, then let my dad have the last word:

Grandad
Thursday 2 May 2019 1:34 PM

I’m in Barry at the moment. It’s all very sad. The conversations are about Death Certificates, the funeral, undertakers etc. I’m finding it all really tough.
Anyway, I’m determined to bounce back and I am doing everything I can to achieve that. Keep up the reading. I have been doing more of that than for some time (and getting beyond page 6). It’s been a great help recently. Love you.

Why didn’t I write back after that? Fatigue, I guess. There was too much pretence in things we said to each other. For instance, his line about doing everything he can. It felt like a lie. To himself, I suspect, as well as to me. He might have kidded himself into thinking he meant it. Bottom line, it was false, but it wasn’t his fault. I kind of get that now. Gwin, wine. Red, mainly. Could you tell? Stains like hell. Splattered across us all, his collateral.

As for how to get him bouncing back, well, I was at a loss. Might I have done more? At first I didn’t know if I should, then I didn’t know if I could. My efforts felt belated. By then his drinking had asserted itself centre-stage, spotlit and erratic. The show went on, and on, and grotesquely on. The more I grew up, the more he crumpled. I’m told I shouldn’t, but even so I worry it was cause and effect. My growing up, his tumbling down. He raised me to live with joy, curiosity, confidence, while he tipped slowly into oblivion. Obliterating all that possible living.

As a child, I believed every word my dad said. He was the wisest of men, I thought. I trusted him more than anyone. Now I’m a year older than he was when my birth made him a dad aged twenty-seven. I like to think, if it had panned out differently, if he hadn’t died twenty-eight years later outside a Volkswagen dealership one night, that we’d still be good mates. I don’t know if I wish he were still here. It haunted me, that shadowy figure he was towards the end. I do wish, though, that I’d had more time to gather some wisdom of my own, anything that might have done something.

It’s confusing to love someone who’s dying from what might look like an opt-in terminal illness. And how do you square the fact that its key symptom, heavy drinking, is so socially acceptable? Let’s face it, mandated at times. Then, at some point, somehow, fatal. I assumed the end was fixed, maybe before it was so. I couldn’t bear his long going, so I went myself. I fear my absence had a role in making it certain.

I’m still figuring it out. There’s no easy cure for this, no medicine over the counter. By the time I had seen what other people’s lives looked like, that is, by the time I was better equipped, it felt like he was already beyond reach.

Oblivion for him, vivid for us. We were told to forgive it all along the way, to forget until the next time the next time the next time. Let bygones be bygones. Long gone, now. But what about this long going, is that worth remembering? I think so.

Long Going by Sophie Calon is published by Honno Welsh Women's Press and is available from all good bookshops.