The Grudge is Dead

As the rain saturates everything, I sit and reflect. Contemplate. I’ve been doing that a lot recently. I guess I do it a lot in general.

Though I wrote this part after everything else, it feels like a eulogy. Not the usual sugar-coated kind that talks shit about how someone was great from start to finish.

We know you weren't, but neither am I.

You always find your way to the forefront of my mind—especially over the last 23 years or so since I left home.

I am formally announcing my resignation from my position of hating, despising, and holding all manner of negative feelings towards you.

Though this resignation is meant for you, it isn’t directed at you. Your brain’s not what it was. Your level of lucidity had been served its death warrant the moment you were handed the heartbreaking diagnosis of vascular dementia.

For many years, I harboured a pit-and-pendulum, millstone-heavy grudge against you. For what I saw as your pitiful attempt at fatherhood.

For so long, I felt mashed into the dirt and concrete, like my heart, emotions, feelings, and need for attention, recognition, some sense of pride from you in me—had been fed through a ricer.

I resent your drinking. Especially how much more regular it got during my late teens. I’ve always tried to be sympathetic towards addicts, but your example stoked a deep, righteous fury in me. You made it easy to loathe weakness—yours, and anyone else's who couldn’t get clean.

I hated how much stress and anxiety you caused the family. Even when it wasn’t visible or vocalised. I became a de facto extra-parent to my sister, while you were out getting pished and Mum was working. Finding you on the kitchen floor, or leaning against the kitchen counter, urine-soaked jeans and glasses, and face smooshed into curry.

I also remember in Majorca, you falling asleep outside the apartment room door. I felt deep sense of shame about what the chambermaid or other patrons of the hotel must have thought.

You also never thought very hard for your marriage. Something I at least tried to do differently. So it felt like you didn't give a shit. Fortunately, I was out of the forefront of the picture by that point. So, you and Mum separating and eventually getting divorced didn't cause me concern. By that point the relationship looked and felt like it was cremated and ready to be scattered to sea.

It sounds melodramatic, I know. But remember: these were the distilled emotions and thoughts of a teenage boy who overthought everything and found refuge in music that let him tap into the darkest, deepest corners of his butchered psyche.

So yes—melodramatic. But not untrue. And I’m a writer, a poet. So I’ll dress it up in all the linguistic histrionics I want to.

You’re dying now, by the way. And I don’t say that lightly. Really, I don’t. But the more I say it, the more it becomes real. The more it breaks that fourth or fifth wall between my mind and the world, the more it becomes reality. The one where your heart gives out, and your lungs stop breathing.

I’m sad about that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m incredibly sad. Angry, too—but not even angry at you anymore.

That’s why I’m writing this.

Because while I still harbour resentment for your lack of engagement, your addiction, your absence from my later life… I also now feel a greater understanding of you.

Now, as an adult. As a father of adult children. (Yes—both boys are over 18 now. It’s a weird experience, let me tell you. But one I’m pleased to be going through.)

I understand the pressures. The weight of fatherhood being thrust on you before you were ready—or maybe ever wanted it. I get it now.

Maybe your only model of a father was Grandpa Hugh—and that’s one I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Least of all you. Not even my worst enemy.

He always struck me as cruel and mean-spirited. While Nonna’s bright light and Italian warmth made her home feel like a sanctuary, the grey, grim, overcast lounge of Grandpa Hugh and Granny Mary’s house felt like a prison. I can’t even remember if we were allowed to wander freely in that place. I doubt it.

It felt like visiting someone in jail. I’ve never had to do that—but that’s what it felt like.

Melodramatic again, yes. But those are the thoughts that have stayed with me. That have percolated in my maturing mind since my teens.

And I believe that had a big impact on the kind of man—and most crucially for me, the kind of father—you became.

We are mirrors of the influences and examples around us.

And here’s the most soul-crushing, empathy-forging part of all of this: I now understand your addiction far better than I ever did, before dementia took root.

Not least of all because you lived in Scotland, being brought up through the harshness of the 60s and 70s in Glasgow. You were not the only one to come out of that with an unhealthy relationship to drinking and the idea that getting drunk regularly is okay.

But that's not all.

I have my own sins. My own addictions.

My addiction to porn and sex—mostly through chatrooms and the internet—has been a ruiner. A ruiner of my life and of the lives of those who sail through this choppy sea of existence with me. I could come up with excuses and try to recuse myself of fault with flimsy arguments—maybe the way you did.

But the truth is, I was weak. And so were you.

But we’re human. And weakness is part of the gig.

The cruel irony is that it took me getting my own disease—addiction—and you getting yours, for me to see how narrow, how tunnel-visioned, my disdain for you really was.

I’ve been a terrible father at times. Awful. Shameful. Not quite criminal—but maybe some of my acts should be categorised, tried, and punished.

Addiction is a bastard. Harder to battle than Hans Gruber, the T-1000, any Xenomorph—chestburster, facehugger, or Queen—or the Predator (Yautja, if we’re being precise—Ya-OOT-ja).

So no, I don’t blame you now, not for failing—and eventually conquering your addiction. I remember when you got clean. Or mostly clean. And I marvelled at it. Still do.

I also understand now how challenging fatherhood is. Especially with bad parents behind you and bad parents to live up to.

My regret? This came too late. That I wasn’t in the right headspace to face you until now. The cruel irony of timing. Of “waiting for the right moment.”

Because once your diagnosis was set in stone, my chance for closure died with it.

Dad—I love you for trying. I love you for mowing the lawn. For being hands-on with DIY—even if you were at best a “trier.”

I respect your work ethic. I’m grateful that you gave me a deep, lifelong love for music across genres. Spotify still doesn’t know what kind of music fan I am.

I love that we had holidays together. I love that everyone loved you at Nonna’s, where you were part of the furniture—always with a joke and a laugh.

So I’m done with the grudge. Not in that shiny, pop-psychology, self-help-book kind of way—but because I want it said. Plainly. Publicly.

You were flawed. Maybe not the best example of anything.

But fuck it.

You were my Da.

And I still love you. And I forgive you.

I like to think you’d be proud of what I’ve achieved as a writer—as proud as you were of Louisa when she danced, or of Michael and his endlessly evolving band.

But I’ll never know. And that’s okay.

We don’t always get the smooth, closed-off answers to the questions we hold closest to our hearts.

I can’t hate someone who suffered from a beast I now recognise as my own.

I don’t expect sympathy or understanding. But, I get it, in large volumes. So I owe you the same.

Forgiveness. Understanding. Empathy. Sympathy.

I’m sorry we never got to know each other in my young adult years. Or my middle-aged years.

You won’t read this, and that’s fine. You always found reading hard anyway.

But if there’s even the slightest chance you could hear, understand, comprehend, and respond—I’d be at that nursing home you now call your final home, reading this to you.

And if I ever win anything from this—I’ll donate part of it to a dementia charity. In your honour.

Thank you for doing the best you could with what you had.

I made it to adulthood. I had a safe home and security, love for most of that time, even if it felt like it drifted off later in my time at home. I wasn’t hard-up. I wasn’t beaten to a bloody pulp—and neither were Mum, Michael, or Louisa.

The grudge is dead

The love is still alive.

Thank you, Father. Da.