Into the Void

I’ve been thinking a lot about the silence that comes after intense grief. The void that forms once the storm has quieted. How normal it is for me to have silence instead of parents. The difference between the silence of parents who you’re estranged from, to the silence of parents who are dead. I was estranged from my parents before it was a popular topic on social media.

It’s not normal. None of this is normal. As a parent in my forties, I should be organising phone calls with grandparents, discussing how similar I am to my child with the person who watched me grow, feeling annoyed that they’re wanting to give unsolicited advice when all I want is an understanding ear. But I have none of that. Because they’re dead. Instead, I have this silence.

Estrangement is a strange thing in itself. It’s a forced silence. A relationship that’s dead without anyone dying. But there’s also the silver of hope that something might shift, that someone might adjust, that something might change. No one is coming back from being dead for 10 years. And if they are, I don’t want to see it.

The truth is, if my parents didn’t die, if my father was alive, it’s unlikely we’d be talking. We may have reconnected at some point but it would have only fallen apart. I could not and cannot pretend to be someone I’m not and my father could not bend his rigid beliefs to have a relationship with me. So there would have been silence, and even with an awareness of this truth, there still existed hope that one day somehow, we could have reached a truce.

But there’s no truce. Only death and a life that echoes with silence. Most days I don’t even notice it. But sometimes it can be heard despite all the noise of life.