On February 6th 2022, my dad died. If you’ve read this Substack for a while, you’ll know this already - I wrote about it in three posts titled Sex and Grief Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3. The first instalment was published the day before my dad’s death. In it, I talked about being in a waiting room for death and trying to connect the now, which was filled with caring for my dad at the hospice, and the after, which would be an unfathomable world where my dad has died and I must, somehow, go on. I’ve now spent just over a year in the after and I have, somehow, gone on.
Much has changed in the year since he died. I moved back to London from Brighton to be closer to friends, I officially quit my PhD, and I got a stable job that I enjoy. I have also been on holidays and dates and to parties and all the other things that make up the pleasurable mundanity of life. Underneath all of the material changes in my life, however, there has been a seismic shift, like a tectonic plate under the surface of my Self has moved.
This shift is hard to articulate to anyone who hasn’t lost a parent. I’ve tried to describe my dad’s death by saying it’s like the sky or the sea has disappeared and the fundamental elements that make up the world have gone, and this is partially true. The key flaw in this simile is that it is only my sky or my sea that has gone, while nearly everyone else in my life still has theirs. It’s more accurate to say I have stepped across an invisible boundary into a world occupied only by others who have lost a parent. I can still interact with the world untouched by grief, but I’m living somewhere else now.
It’s tempting to write that, despite the tragedy I’ve been through, I am stronger, braver, and a fundamentally better person for losing my dad. His death could be a narrative point in my story - the darkness before the redemption and reconciliation of the third act. At times, I’ve felt pressure to reassure people that I’m doing better than ever actually, and I’m coping really well with the grief, and that my dad dying was sad but made me appreciate life all the more so don’t worry about me, it’s all part of the much-coveted main character energy. At times I’ve also told myself this story and felt it to be true.
The tricky thing about traumatic grief, however, is that it explodes narrative and sequential time, rendering this kind of romanticisation impossible to keep up for long. In my first Sex and Grief post, I formulated my personal timeline as before and after my dad’s death, where the after was largely unknown but filled with sex and other pleasures - I wrote that after my dad’s death, “I will want nothing more than to throw myself into joy”. The suddenness of his death would, surely, spur me into enjoying my life more in the awareness that my own body would also someday fail and die.
The problem with this was that time no longer played by the rules and I did not go into the bacchanalian after I had imagined. Once my dad died, I was wracked with deep and horrendous health anxiety that I wrote about in Sex and Grief Pt. 2. I was briefly convinced I had the same disease that he had died of and asked my doctor for chemotherapy. I’ve variously been convinced that I have a brain tumour, bowel cancer, and multiple sclerosis over the past year - an obsessive anxiety that I am only now recovering from after an enormous amount of work.
Similarly, I have not thrown myself into sex with the wild abandon I imagined when I was waiting in the hospice. I’ve had a strong preference for sex with people I know well and trust absolutely and have scarcely glanced at hookup apps. I’ve found that I can sometimes be distracted or moody in sex, or dissociative (as I wrote about here), or the vulnerability and intimacy of sex brings up sudden bouts of fear and grief. It is only very recently that I’ve begun to consider having sex with people I don’t know.
Unfortunately the impact of my dad’s death did not stop when he died, meaning that I have not been able to return to my life as I had previously envisaged. His death has instead continued to happen over and over in my mind and body as I’ve struggled to understand and accept it. It’s a common theme that trauma, by definition, can’t be integrated into an individual’s understanding of their own lives or the world around them. It instead becomes a point their mind struggles to move past that can result in flashbacks, attempts to numb painful emotions through alcohol or drugs, and anxiety and depression.1
For me, his death feels like a pulse vibrating below everything I do, with the words my dad died echoing around in my head while I’m having a conversation with friends, while I’m at the supermarket, while commuting to work, while I’m on a date or having sex. Sometimes it’s accompanied by memories like administering his morphine or the way his voice sounded when he told me he was going to die and the way my voice sounded in response saying okay, okay, okay.
I am now realising that I’m not in the after of my dad’s death and there is no such thing - as I begin the earliest stages of acceptance, it has become apparent that I will never finish grieving my dad. I will always have these memories and I can only choose how to carry them. Annoyingly, all the advice I received about grief being something that never leaves you, that you just grow around, was true.
In the months immediately after my dad’s death, my grief was an all-consuming tsunami. Now, as the waters begin to calm, I can see it is a not an external wave of destruction but rather a deeply painful part of myself that needs to be nurtured, acknowledged, and cared for. It cannot be put down while I throw myself into hedonism, instead it must be carried and loved in order for me to feel like part of the world again. First and foremost, I need to learn how to take care of myself now the person who took care of me the most has gone.
Looking at Porn is written around my full time job working on health inequalities. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, you can tip me on Ko-Fi here. I’m not on social media at the moment, but you can email me at robinccraig@gmail.com if you like. Please be mindful of emailing me your own trauma stories - I do not have capacity to reply with due care.
Not to be a shill for Bessel van der Kolk (I wrote about his work in my previous post on dissociation), but his book The Body Keeps the Score is a fantastic read on trauma I’d highly recommend.
You’re such an incredibly talented writer, Robin. Far above so many, in use of words, precision, emotional depth and to both; reveal a singular perspective that reaches out to the masses.