The first cut is the deepest

Yesterday, I listened to the old messages on my answering machine because I wanted to hear my dad again.

“Jennie, it’s your dad…” As if I wouldn’t recognise that voice anytime, anywhere in the world.

This week, a year has passed since my dad died. It’s more than a year since I last heard his voice in real time and, God knows, I miss him.

His calls drove me nuts sometimes, phoning at 6am on a Sunday because it was 8 o’clock in South Africa, going: “Are you not awake yet?”

But him not being out there in the world, him not calling ever again… Well, if I think about it too hard I really do think I’m going crazy. A year.

It seems like yesterday; it seems like a lifetime ago. A year of firsts: my first birthday without my dad, first Christmas, first New Year, first Easter (his last happy moment was a fresh-out-of-the-oven hot cross bun) and his own birthday all pass by, all without him.

So now the year of firsts is all but done, year one of experiencing everything without my dad in the world.

It was a grim year, underscored by a pandemic but punctuated by bittersweet moments of commemoration.

Lighting a candle at his place at the table; reading the loving letters he wrote to my mum when they were apart; listening to his favourite songs on repeat till my eyes were raw; seeing him echoed in my sons; awaking with a dream of my dad, smiling, healthy, still fresh in my mind; scattering his ashes; and, yes, discovering his messages saved on my answering machine.

I’m coming to accept that, however long I live, I’ll never see my dad again. And yet I feel him in the leaves and the sky, and I talk to him on the wind.

If I last as long as he did, I’ll spend 31 years without him.

Sometimes I can’t bear the thought, but bear it I must, as must everyone who has lost a loved one.

My mum put it succinctly: some losses we never get over – all we can do is learn to live with them.

It’s been a year of firsts. I guess we’re learning to live with it.