Your Notes On Living #1 - When Grief Meets Guilt by Michelle Gately

Notes on grief and how everyone's story is different

Hi everyone,

Today I'm sharing the first guest post for Notes On Living by my incredible friend Michelle Gately. Michelle also writes the Substack publication The Unfinished Bookshelf, which I can’t recommend enough, especially if you’re a book lover!

This week's post by Michelle has been written with so much care and heart, and I'm truly grateful to Michelle for sharing these words with us. TW: A quick note before you read on, this post discusses the death of a parent, so please go gently and take care of yourself however you need to.

If you’d like to write a guest post for Notes On Living, then you can find out more about how to do so here.

With Love,

Alicia x

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I’m driving back to work when I see him. I inch the car to a stop. He has white hair, combed over. Or maybe I’m imagining that because the image of this man shuffling across the painted white lines, leaning heavily on a walker, is so similar. 

In the few seconds this takes my face flushes and hot tears well in my eyes. My stomach clenches. I’m used to this split-second pang of grief now – it usually happens when I see an elderly man or woman who would have been around his age. 

But this time, as I wipe away the tears there’s a flash of something else. Relief. 

Relief because this reaction means I’m not a monster. 

I’m not a monster because sometimes I do actually cry when I think about my dead dad. 

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I grew up knowing – dreading – that my dad would die while I was young. The only child of a late second marriage, I got used to batting back questions about “a day out with your grandpa” before I started school. 

I always thought when it happened I would break down, experience the kind of gut-churning panic and retching sobs that make you feel out of control. 

That’s what happened the first time he was in hospital. I’d come home from work one night to find him passed out on the floor. He told the paramedics he wouldn’t go to the hospital. Two days later, he collapsed while we were out somewhere and I drove him to the ED. 

I remember the panic, sobbing on the floor in my bedroom during the days he spent recovering from sepsis. 

This pattern continued with hospital admissions every few years – the slow decline we’re all told to expect with the elderly. 

I had a feeling before my husband and I moved overseas that I wouldn’t see my dad again. I almost didn’t; he was admitted to the hospital a few days after we flew out of Australia. 

This time, he wouldn’t live independently again. In some ways that was a relief because I didn’t have to worry about him dying alone at home anymore. 

He was in the nursing home while we lived overseas, but he stopped eating almost as soon as we moved back to Australia. In his own way, he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to live much longer. 

My dad’s death wasn’t a shock, it was planned and managed by a team of palliative care nurses. We stopped his medication and then waited. I said goodbye while he was conscious, but it felt like the person I was speaking to was nothing like the dad I grew up idolising. 

Each day I woke up and checked my phone, waiting to see the missed call that told me he’d passed. 

But when the nursing home carers called, I was in the library. It was poetic, really, because I used to beg him to drive me there after school once or twice a week. Even though he only read a handful of books in his life, he’d drive me and sit in the non-fiction section where the newspapers were stacked while I borrowed more books than I could read. 

I didn’t cry when they told me. I hadn’t really the whole week.

I felt guilty in so many ways: that I couldn’t stomach being there any more now he was unconscious, that so many friends were checking in on me daily, that I wasn’t distraught. 

I felt angry that I had to think about any of this when other people my age still had parents who hadn’t even hit their mid-fifties. Who wouldn’t see the slow decline of ageing so intimately for decades. 

I was relieved because he was so ready to die. Relieved I didn’t have to see him like that anymore. 

Which is where we circle back to guilt. 

The truth is our relationship had shifted years before my dad’s death. Everyone has moments where they start to see their parents not just as parents but as flawed and fallible people. 

But there’s another shift too, where you start being more parent than child. Are they taking their medication? Are they eating properly? Can they cope with driving? Can they live alone? 

The thing is, usually, you don’t have to deal with that in your twenties, when everything still feels messy and you often find yourself looking for the actual adult in the room. 

I know the guilt won’t easily be assuaged. Being too hard on myself is my toxic trait – one I am slowly untangling, but at a snail’s pace. 

But perhaps I also need to remind myself that time softens grief and, if I’m honest, I lost my dad years before he died – the one who danced under the water pouring from the guttering of our courtyard, who took me for hot doughnuts after school, who told me crazy stories from his days as a copper and watched every episode of Heartbeat with me. 

I know the splinters of grief will dig in when I see someone who looks like him, or hear a voice that’s almost the same. Yet I can also enjoy the freedom of not worrying about his health anymore and instead use those moments to keep the memory of him – as the loving dad of my childhood – alive. 

I guess the point in sharing all this is to say that grief is not always like the movies. It doesn’t mean you loved them any less, just that your story is a little different.