Dead Dads Club
By: R. P. O'Donnell
Tags: Fatherhood, Trauma, Death And Dying, Death, Grief

Two weeks after my twentieth birthday, my father passed away. Two weeks ago, I turned thirty, which means that today marks ten years since my father left us — an official decade since I joined the Dead Dads Club.

Dad’s death was not unexpected, nor was it unwanted. He had been exceedingly sick for exceedingly long, so by the time it happened, it was nothing short of sweet relief. About three weeks before it happened, I received a text from Mum, saying that the doctors had said that he was on the way out, and that he could be gone any day now. We spent the next two weeks by his bedside at a palliative care hospice, as we said our goodbyes and waited for him to die.

Dad lamented the news that he was heading to palliative care. He had been denying his inescapable truth that his remaining time on Earth was limited. The first few days were punctuated by friends and family who put on cheery faces, and pretended like nothing was wrong. Then, there were the distant relatives who lured my mother out of the room and cornered him, alone, and tried to put the fear of God into him in a callous attempt at a deathbed conversion (which I still cannot bring myself to forgive them for). Then eventually, there was just Mum and I.

We lived at the hospice for the next couple of weeks, where we celebrated my twentieth birthday, and Father’s Day shortly after. The few photos of my twentieth birthday feature Mum and myself, gracing either side of Dad’s hospice bed, as he lay between us with his bald and weary head, stripped of his once-long locks after repeated bouts of chemotherapy. Dad never smiled in photos, and these photos were no exception. Dad was not one for words, and our relationship was strained. We said our goodbyes through our respective birthday and Father’s Day cards to one another. The last part of his card to me simply read “I’m sorry I’m sick, but I’m sure you understand.” We sat and waited for the few moments of lucidity that Dad had in amidst the methadone fog that kept the pain of his rapidly failing body at bay. Eventually, these moments ceased, and Dad slipped into permanent unconsciousness. The last conversation I had with him was when he was rousing from a daze, and I asked him “Are you tired?” His last words to me were “Yes, very.” He slipped back to sleep, and we never spoke again.

The ensuing nights were long and arduous, as we lay exhausted while Dad’s breathing became increasingly more laboured and heavy. Periodically I would step out for a bit of respite, sneaking around the corner to observe the tropical fish tank that seemed perfectly placed to inspire tranquillity in those who were pre-emptively — or emptively — grieving. A colourful cube-shaped reminder that life is beautiful, transient, expensive, and difficult to manage. I was careful not to step away for too long, lest I miss Dad’s departure.

It was a morning when it finally happened. I had just woken up after the nurses had finished cleaning him. I stood by his bedside to say good morning, and Mum had popped to the bathroom ever so briefly. It was just him and I, father and son. His eyes were open, which they had not been for days now. His mouth hung slack, and his tongue made three almost imperceptible pulses before drawing to a complete stop. He was motionless, cold, and his stare was eternal. It began to dawn on me what may have just happened. Mum stepped out of the bathroom, and I said with uncertainty “I think he’s gone”. She looked at him, and one of us called a nurse. One arrived shortly after, checked his pulse, and confirmed my suspicions. He was gone. We stood there, quietly weeping, before we said “Bye, Dad” for the last time, and went home.

It has been ten years since that day, and I still think about it often. As Dad’s death came expectedly after a long period of illness, we were mercifully allowed to pre-emptively grieve. The act of pre-emptive grieving allows individuals to brace themselves for the impact of the impending shock wave that will reverberate through their entire existence. In many ways, the opportunity to pre-emptively grieve and say goodbye is a gift that those about to die bestow to those of us who have much life left to live. At the time, I had read that those afforded the opportunity to pre-emptively grieve sometimes tend to have better mental health outcomes and grief trajectories than those who lose someone suddenly and unexpectedly. That being said, even though you know death is right around the corner, and you are waiting and ready, no amount of preparation can spare you when it finally arrives.

Grief is many things. It is painful, it is unexpected, it is alienating, it is unifying, it is essential, and it is unyielding. Grief hits you at unexpected moments, through unexpected triggers. The first of these moments for me was when we arrived home from the hospice that morning. Dad’s studio was the first room of the house when you opened the door, and my brief interactions with him consisted of me coming home and saying a brief hello to him, before retreating to my own room. When we arrived home that morning, I passed by his room to say hello, and the reality of the situation well and truly hit me then and there. There would be no more strained hellos, and perfunctory conversations. His room was empty, and he was gone. The grief wave took me, and I broke down and sobbed. Another one of these moments that I distinctly remember happened a few weeks later. It was the morning after a university musical wrap-party. I had awoken on the floor of a sharehouse after a night of drunken showtunes and Mighty Boosh quotes, and I was admittedly a little worse for wear. My girlfriend at the time (/now wife) and I stumbled down the road to the nearby McDonalds for a recovery breakfast. I ordered a cappuccino and being a pretentious 20-year-old self-professed coffee aficionado (read: dumb), I apparently needed several sugars to mask the taste of what I perceived to be sub-par coffee. I removed the coffee cap and poured the sugar sachets onto the frothy milk foam and chocolate dusting. As I watched the sugar sink into the foam, in a Proustian Madeleine Moment, I was thrust back to a memory of my infant self; sitting at a desk at Dad’s office, transfixed as I watched sugar sink into the foam of my babyccino. The grief wave hit again, and I was ripped back to the present, where I found myself sitting in a McDonalds, hungover, and sobbing uncontrollably into a cappuccino.

As time passes, these trigger moments of profound loss become less and less frequent, until a point where they almost cease to happen. The pain subsides, and life continues. While the pain recedes over time, it never truly disappears, and you are left instead with a dull ache, not unlike the slight alteration of sensation where a wound has closed over and healed to form scar tissue. While people may leave this world, they never truly leave your life. Your body learns and adapts to their absence, and their memories are repurposed within your own narrative.

I struggled to reconcile how deeply Dad’s death affected me, considering how strained our relationship was. Why did I hurt and care so much for someone who had so consistently let me down? While Dad was physically present, he was absent and disappointing in so many other ways. He was non-verbal, temperamental, aggressive, and emotionally unstable. I grew up witnessing his appalling behaviour, and as I grew older, the more revolting I realised his actions were. In a way, I owe Dad a degree of thanks, in that he taught me the very kind of person that I did not want to be. Since I was a teenager, I have taken pause, examined my actions, and strived with every ounce of my being to not become my father.

It was only in the final year or two of Dad’s life that he started trying to build a relationship with me. Dad was quoted as saying that he struggled to have conversations with children, or that you couldn’t have real conversations with a child. I feel perhaps he may have been waiting for me to ‘grow up’ before he could connect with me. A terminal cancer diagnosis likely spurred him into action, forcing him to realise perhaps he should try to have a relationship with his son before his imminent death. Dad was an exceptionally talented artist who was wonderfully creative and intelligent, albeit limited in his lifetime by his debilitating shyness, his abrasive personality, and his crushing sense of perfectionism. I developed an intense interest in art and art history in an attempt to connect with him, and through this, we had our discussions and disagreements. Many of his opinions would no doubt be cancellable if expressed today. I would drive him to and from his chemotherapy treatments, and we would either sit in silence, or if I was lucky, we might have stumbled upon an artistic idea that we could muse upon to pass the time and awkwardness. Dad would famously throw tantrums any time his schedule was in some way disturbed in the unlikely event that he (God forbid) had to drive me anywhere. As I sat in the driver’s seat, I would think to myself that in my act of doing for Dad what he so often refused to do for me, I had become the bigger man.

While I have gone through great pains to avoid turning into my father, there are still undoubtedly similarities that I share with him. Occasionally I will wake up, put on my glasses, look in the mirror and see my father staring back at me (albeit with the notable absence of facial hair). Sometimes I will laugh, grumble, or cough, and hear Dad’s manner in my ear. Relatives have picked up the phone and expressed dismay that my characteristic greeting sounds so much like him (thereby triggering their own grief). We shared a propensity towards unrelenting monomania, where a powerful tunnel vision can either produce exceptional results or fracture the relationships around us. There was also Dad’s propensity to addiction, with an attraction to vices which he used to numb his overactive neurons and quell his noisy mind. I know that I, too, harbour this trait, and I am subsequently quite cautious with the way I consume most things.

I am privileged enough to have been diagnosed as an adult with multiple neurodivergencies, and I have no doubt that neurodivergence was another thing that Dad and I shared. He just didn’t know it. I am privileged enough that I have been able to access medications that alleviate many of my struggles, and that make me feel that life is worth living. I often wonder whether Dad would have led a much happier and more manageable life had he understood the way that he was wired, and how to manage his symptoms. Would he have been less volatile or more emotionally available had he learned how to process and express his emotions, or how to manage his sensory issues? I have learned to frame Dad’s most negative behaviour through the lens of his own trauma and likely undiagnosed neurodivergence, and this has largely allowed me to forgive him for his actions. Nevertheless, these are explanations, not excuses. I have a degree of empathy for him, but that does not discount the fact that he did terrible things within his lifetime, and I have spent much of my own lifetime unlearning the results of his failings as a father.

Dad’s behaviour in life left me with trauma, and Dad’s dying when he did left me with more still. Losing a parent when you are young — particularly a complicated parent — leaves you with many questions that will forever remain unresolved. There will never be another opportunity for explanations, reparations, or restoration. I am not in any way religious or spiritual, so I do not believe that there is any form of judgement waiting for us beyond this life. In my worldview, life is ultimately meaningless — nothing more than an incredible self-replicating by-product of a chance chemical reaction billions of years ago. For me, this is enough. The very fact that life exists in the myriad ways that it does is wonderous enough, that I feel trying to explain its existence through supernatural means almost cheapens the majesty of it. For the longest time I thought that Dad similarly did not believe in anything beyond this life, however something he said in the weeks before he died made me think otherwise. Dad made a throw-away comment that he was a Buddhist, and I didn’t think anything of it until he later said to me “I better be reincarnated as something good after all the shit I’ve been through”.

Dad undoubtedly suffered immensely in his last few years, and perhaps the way that he had come to accept his pain was by conceiving of it as some sort of cosmic retribution or karmic realignment. Perhaps the fact that he had entertained these thoughts means that he was seeking atonement? I’ll never know. I don’t believe that the sum total of Dad’s cumulative choices meant that he deserved to suffer in the way that he did. No one does. Dad was ultimately only human, and we as humans are all spectacularly flawed in many different ways. I have been angry for a long time now, but the fact of the matter is that Dad is dead, and no amount of anger will bring me the answers I want or need. I have come to realise that acceptance and forgiveness is perhaps the only way that I will ever receive peace. There are many things that I will never know about Dad, but what I do know is that Dad is now free from whatever pain he endured during his lifetime.

Losing a parent in your formative years is a unique burden to bear, and it is a burden that is only really shared by those who have also experienced the same loss. In the beginning, I found it very difficult to relate to people who had not experienced this particular pain. When you tell people that one of your parents is dead, they will often become very coy, bashful, and saccharine; struck with the unfortunate position of not really knowing what to say in reply, never having considered the possibility that their parents may, too, be dead someday. I used jokes and humour to mask and avoid what was, in hindsight, a pain that I was ill-equipped to handle. My favourites included “baldness doesn’t run in my family, but cancer does, so I’ll go bald either way”, or “men in my family don’t live very long, so while everyone else out there is having a quarter-life crisis, for me it’s more of a mid-life crisis”. I used these as a quick means of filtering who I could potentially form relationships with, and who I would probably be too much for. Through this, I quickly discovered the existence of a very exclusive club, which I like to call the Dead Dads Club. In Dead Dads Club, I was joined by many who had their own complicated relationships with their fathers that they, too, were trying to unpack. Many of us, still young, similarly used jokes and humour to cope, or, as a cry for help. We would share our choicest routines, each one perfectly engineered to alienate as many people as possible, so that we might most efficiently find our tribe. We swapped war stories to remind ourselves that we were not alone, and to try and forget the fact that we would likely never receive the answers that we so sorely needed from those who had left us too soon.

I say Dead Dads Club because, in my experience, it was far more frequent that I would encounter people whose fathers had passed away, rather than their mothers. Indeed, Dad was an anomaly at his chemotherapy centre, in that he was the only man there. He once asked, “where are all the other blokes?”, to which the nurses replied “most men don’t make it this far.” While it seemed that Dad had made it further than most other men in this respect, his own internalised toxic masculinity had placed him in this position in the first place. Dad avoided doctors at every possible opportunity, believing that he was impervious to illness, and that any pain or discomfort was something to grin and bear. It was only when things became absolutely unbearable that Dad sought out medical attention. By that point, there was already a tumour larger than a tennis ball lurking in his colon. Having been surrounded by illness and death growing up, I now verge on being a hypochondriac, attending the doctor at the slightest signs of discomfort. Doctors will often see ‘anxiety’ written under my list of pre-existing conditions and do their very best to convince me that whatever my symptoms may be, that they are likely just symptoms of anxiety. In my mind, I would rather be safe than sorry, lest my hypothetical future children also find themselves as young members of the Dead Dads Club.

Dad himself was a member of the Dead Dads Club, his own father having died suddenly when he was only four, at the age of thirty-nine. Some have suggested that Dad’s failings as a father were the result of the absence of his own father, but I believe that this line of thinking is reductive, sexist, and predicated on outdated and problematic notions of gender. I sometimes wonder whether Dad was aware of his shortcomings, and perhaps this is why he kept his distance — in order to spare me. His emotional absence may in fact have been his greatest act as a father. Conversely, it could simply be the case that childrearing was just another domestic chore that Dad shirked his responsibility of, expecting the women in his life to clean up after him. Dad’s refusal to engage with fatherhood meant that I was raised by women whose lives were defined by selfless sacrifice and struggle — my mother, her sister, their mother, and Dad’s mother. These women so selflessly shouldered the burden of raising me once they realised that Dad was incapable of honouring his commitments, and to them I owe an eternal debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.

Like most men of his generation, Dad was a chronic workaholic, consumed by his work, projects, and hobbies to the detriment of his health and personal relationships. His enduring deathbed regret was that he had wasted much of his life working. He had missed many milestones and abandoned the people around him when they most needed his support, all in pursuit of something that was effectively meaningless. This chronic workaholism is another trait that I see in myself that I am still trying to navigate and negotiate. In the absence of emotional support growing up, I learned to define my self-worth through external validation through things like work and academic achievement. I am haunted by my family tree and the young ages at which the men in my family have died, and I feel this has contributed to my tendency to overwork. Dad was sixty-one, his dad was thirty-nine, and Mum’s dad was fifty-seven. In a way, I feel that I am similarly doomed to die young, and subsequently feel an intense pressure to cram as much into my short life as possible. I have achieved more in my life so far than I ever thought would be possible, but it has been an exhausting three decades. I have gradually learned to slow down, take a breath, and listen to what my body is telling me. Perhaps the simplest way to avoid my imagined destiny is to rest.

The existence of the Dead Dads Club speaks to the fact that grief is one of the great unifiers. All of us will experience grief at some point in our lives. Death is the only certainty in life, and we will all inevitably lose someone close to us. Grief is something deeply profound and it is a defining feature of what it is to be human. The very fact that we as humans experience grief as something so enduringly painful suggests that, like physical pain, grief serves a purpose. Pain acts as a teacher — through pain, we learn to avoid things that will harm or damage us. There are competing hypotheses as to what the evolutionary benefit of grief is, but each seems to suggest that the pain of losing loved ones is what led to the formation of communities and long-lasting bonds — traits which likely conferred a higher probability of long-term survival and evolutionary ‘success’. This could be considered a somewhat cold means of rationalising grief and suffering, but I choose to think that conceptualising of grief in this way, instead, unites us in our humanity. Like pain, grief is a teacher. Grief reminds us that we are not immortal — it humbles us. Grief forces us to reflect on the lives of those we mourn, and also on the life that we still have yet to live. Grief teaches us to make use of what limited time we have left. Grief forces us to consider, am I happy with the person that I am? What memories do I want to leave behind? Is there still time to change? Ultimately, grief reveals to us that life is precious, complex, fragile, and fleeting, and to hold our loved ones tight.

Grief has been one of my greatest teachers. By reflecting on Dad, his life, his regrets, and his actions, I have learned what kind of person I want to be, and what kind of life I want to live moving forward. Grief has taught me how to accept the past and forgive what I can. Grief has taught me that, like pain, it must be felt, and it cannot be ignored. In order to begin to heal, one cannot pretend that the pain does not exist. Like Dad with his doctors, avoiding grief will only lead to more hurt. Grief takes no prisoners. The process is painful, but it is necessary.

As the years have passed, I feel that Dead Dads Club has become somewhat less exclusive. I anticipate that our membership will expand as we grow older, and our respective fathers inevitably fall victim to the march of time. Everyone joins the club eventually, and all of our patrons enjoy free lifetime membership. Needless to say, if you find yourself as a new or pending member, we’ll be right there to swap stories, share some dark jokes, and remind you that you are not alone. We’ll see you when we see you.