ALWAYS ON MY MIND
My thoughts on losing my dad in 2025 and exploring why it is hard to move on when his death has left me with an unbearable numbness.
The writing was created with these photographs in mind, which I took with my Dad on our many trips to the East Sussex beaches from 2009 onwards.
There was nothing left emotionally
Within the context of grief, not many talk about feeling nothing…..
I have so much love still for my dad, and in many ways, he saved me so many times, whether that be through inappropriate jokes (that I was far too young for!) or just being completely earnest with me.
But the truth is my dad suffered from the inability to extend those virtues to himself, in that towards the end of his life he was so ill and refused to discuss or even address not only how sick he was physically but mentally, unfortunately, to the detrament to those closest to him. After years of trying to help him and seeing his health decline to the point where he could barely get up from the sofa, let alone get up the stairs. The truth is my brain hit the metaphorical emotional killswitch many, many years for he left us.
When he did actually die, there was nothing left emotionally. To have all my fondest and saddest memories of my dad keep playing in my head over and over, even dreaming about him and our time together, and not feeling anything has got to be somekind of weird subconscious torture. I know from experience how to feel about these memories, both the emotion of the experience and of looking back, before things got far too hard.
To my bones, this feels wrong on every level
Being autistic, there are certain things that I have had to train myself to feel or rather try not to freak out about, mostly using pragmatism and learning from experiences to try and get right. It has been a while since I’ve been in a situation where, emotionally, I do not know what to do or feel. I logically know that grief is a highly individual thing (which is infuriating for those of us who need emotional guidance!), those who I have talked to about this are mostly very much of the standpoint of “ride it out” and “you are not doing anything wrong”, but really to my bones this feels wrong on every level. How can I possibly not want to cry and sob inconsolably that my wonderful, hilarious and stubborn to the point of idiocy dad who is now gone? Everything is a fucking question, which is kinda my existence day to day, which as fun as it sounds, is pretty fucking tiring.
I feel the dam trying to burst emotionally, physically and mentally, and I honestly worry about what is fighting to get out and, more disturbingly, if there is anything in there at all.
Past the initial shock of dad’s quite sudden death, there was nothing. I may have to observe emotional reactions to understand them rather than feel them, but there is one constant related to grief and its tears. No matter the relationship, people cry when they lose someone, especially someone close like I dunno a fucking parent!!
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They cry because of memories lost, experiences that will never happen again, and issues that can now never be resolved. For me, thinking about the experiences I spent with my dad some days was too painful because through his inability to come to terms with his health problems or address pretty serious symptoms that screamed “you’ve got bloody cancer” he essentially decided he was the guy sitting in a burning room insisting everything is fine.
I did not have a particularly healthy relationship with him towards the end, being in the same room as him was too hard to bear. When you find yourself only asking questions, offering help and trying like hell to get through to someone you love with all your heart, and all you receive is nothing or lies, something snaps and fuck me did my brain snap in half.
What if people think I didn’t love my dad?
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of his attitude was the lying, especially lying to a daughter who may not have made it out of a mental breakdown she had in her mid 20’s if it wasn’t for his help and humour. He told me at the time that he suffered from depression after his first marriage ended, and he helped me come to terms with what I was feeling and drove me to therapy just so we could chat afterwards. Where did the kind, optimistic person go who was so worried for his kid?
I cried more when the dog died (to be fair, he was the best dog), on the way home from Heathrow airport, I sobbed through the whole journey with Leo holding my hand fuck knows what the taxi driver thought of the sobbing mess at the back of his cab.
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When it became evident to me that crying was not happening, all I could think and to this day I still do, is what if people think I didn’t love my dad?
I am too therapized, I suppose to ever use the phrase “what the fuck is wrong with you?” out load but as it turns out when you enter one of the most challenging moments of your life, those careful, constructed walls of therapy logic that get me through the day come crashing down. My brain tends to “tap out” when things get too much, which I seem not have conscious control over or awareness sometimes. Too much would be the perfect descriptor for the shit show happening in my brain right now. Between dad’s death, mum’s second bout with cancer, my father-in-law’s early alzimers diagnoses, the dog and my godfather (dad no.2) passing away, all happening in over an 18month period, my subconscious has had a Mike Drop moment. Thats it, I’m gone, done, bye and good luck feeling healthy emotions again.
I’ve been told that from about the age of about 7 my brain has been detaching me/my emotions from trauma, most likely thanks to the ven diagram of Neurodiverness that apparently exists in my brain (Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, ADHD and Autism), which I do in part get from my father, who was severely dyslexic.
Whilst realising this is liberating and can explain a few things, one fact remains, I still can’t cry.
Sometimes I just think fuck me, can someone give me a break from my brain? What would it feel like to be ‘normal’? Again with the questions questions questions….When you spend your life being ridiculed for acting out of the realms of normality, my brain apparently just developed its own couping system for small Hannah, which I’m still trying to decode as an adult in her thirties.
But through all that, who was the main person who was happy to listen to my constant questions about life, the universe and everything? Who was there to tell me I was good at things despite what my grades at school said? Who put me in front of sci-fi and engaged with me about science and art? Who didn’t ridicule my emotional reactions and encouraged me to be myself? You guessed it, the guy who died, whom I can't stop thinking about, dreaming about, the person I can’t cry about.
I find it super ironic that the part of my brain that I inherited in part from my dad is the same part that is seemingly not letting me grieve for him. I love a dark joke, and so did Phil Pratt, but this is A LOT. I feel as if the part of my brain that usually is something I rely on for guidance, problem-solving, and protection is holding me hostage. I cannot move on.
Whilst realising this is liberating and can explain a few things, one fact remains, I still can’t cry.
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With that said, none of the above explains the images that accompany my frustrating musings, which is important because these photographs are not only a tribute to my dad but also help me remember him fondly, which can be hard given the scope of his sickness over the last 10 years and especially towards the end.
My dad was the one to get me into photography; the shelves at my childhood home are full of photo albums, and all are full of (mostly) my dad’s photography and negatives. My dad loved photography, and he was very good at it as well, not just from a creative standpoint but also technically as well. Using film cameras, even SLRs is technically challenging; you need to know the film you are using, learn to follow the light as well as use the light to get the image you want (sometimes ignoring the light meter entirely!).
I was taking pictures at an early age with my dad, and I really fell in love with it when I was studying my undergrad, particularly with using film cameras from the 1970’s and 80’s, very similar to the models my dad used. The images produced had this wonderful, grainy, nostalgic quality to them and along with the act of taking a picture itself (the CLUNK from the shutter is so satisfying) the whole process was so enjoyable.
As my interest in how images are crafted became more prevalent in my art practice, my dad and I started going on seaside trips to photograph the beaches around East Sussex. We did many of these trips, mostly in winter and would leave first thing in the morning, around 6 am to get the dawn light. We would often take the dog and wander around the beautiful beaches of Winchelsea, Rye and Hastings. The wind swept history, and the beautiful landscape always captivated me, as well as my dad talking about how he would spend summer holidays in the now-abandoned holiday resorts.
Quickly, these trips became more about me hanging out and talking with my dad than the photography; it was a shared bonding experience, and one of my biggest regrets in my life is that I never told him how much they meant to me. I just assumed he knew. So even though these images make me so happy, there is this underlying regret attached to them. I wish I had spent more time telling him how I felt about spending time with him because, honestly, these trips were another way in which my dad shaped and saved my life.
He just didn’t let me do the same for him.