Down to a sunless sea: memories of my dad

I’m going to be releasing a new piece every Thursday for at least 8 weeks. General content note: death, dementia, old age, mental health issues, euthanasia, suicide

12 min readOct 27, 2017

Andre Gorz Tweet

A while ago, my dad said, “I don’t look in the mirror now unless I have to do my hair. I don’t recognise the man looking back at me.” This has been repeated to me a number of times since then: it’s become one of the looped conversations that we have. Sometimes I reply with, “I know. You’ve told me.” Other times I don’t bother. I also sometimes feel like that when I look at him. Who is this man sitting across from me?

Recently, a new phrase was coined to describe my generation: people who were born in the transition between Generation X and the Millenials, between 1977 and 1983, who had analogue childhoods and digital adulthoods, are being called Xenniels. I’m reluctant to embrace this term, partly because Millennials are getting so much shit and I don’t want to betray them. There’s nothing wrong with being a Millennial, so why try to be in a different box? But there is truth in the distinction. The experience of people from my generation is specific. As Hasan Minhaj puts it in his show Homecoming King:

“They say that every generation is defined by a great struggle or tragedy, and it’s wild that our kids will never know that there was a period of time in this country where you had to make a choice between being on the internet or being on the phone.”

He’s joking about the struggle and tragedy, but he’s not joking that there is a specific set of cultural experiences that come from being born on the edges of significant cultural changes that people born on the more recent side will never understand. My dad is also part of a very specific generation. He was a child between the world wars, and he was an adult after they had ended. In the same way that I identify with Millenials but understand where Generation X is coming from, so my dad would come to identify with the counter-cultural forces of the 60s, whilst understanding where the pre-war generation was coming from. He had been a conscript to the army during what is often called a just war, and he has lived to see unjust war after unjust war be fought; he has lived to see a time when liberals write think pieces to argue against punching Nazis. Despite being from a different generation, he has always had a lot of sympathy for the circumstances of younger generations. He has never been someone who talks about how easy kids have it these days. He’s been horrified by how kids have it worse these days. The spirit of 1945 had suggested the future would be better — so much better — than this.

I lived through the birth of the internet and the positive visions of the cyber future, the immense possibility of this tool to connect people; break down barriers; circumnavigate power and the media; democratise the arts; change the world for good. The internet, to me, offered hope, a general pathway towards improvement. But that is not the future it has so far ushered in.

My dad was the person who brought the internet into my life. He had computers early, for better typewriting initially, but he got interested in computer programming systems like Basic. When the internet came in, he got on board that too, becoming an early convert to the Church of Apple (a religion he still follows, although he has a lot more criticism of their doctrines now). His early iMac was located in his front room in Cardiff in the early 90's. He learnt how to code in HTML and made himself a website. At this point, I didn’t know many other people who had computers, let alone websites. My secondary school was only just starting to have computers. We stole our essay info from CDRoms of Encylopedia Britannia back then. Wikipedia was just a twinkle in James Whale’s eye.

I didn’t use the internet much initially. But when I did, I used it in my dad’s room.

When I went away to university, my dad created a part of his website that I could use to put up essays and writing. I would email him my text, from the computer room at university, and he would sort out the code and put it up online. This was my first experience of publishing independently and directly to the world. Now I do that every day without even thinking about it — via facebook and social media — but back then it was magic, magic that I didn’t understand but my dad did.

At some point between university and when I came to live near my dad in London, my knowledge of the internet overtook his, but that slight lead was expanded into an impossible chasm when I got a smart phone. Smart phones fundamentally changed the DNA of the internet, but my dad didn’t get one initially. Years later, when he does want one, it is too late: his mobility issues make it hard for him to use them, and his brain can’t overwrite old operating systems. He is bamboozled by the internet frequently now. Even emails can confuse him.

“Did you know that you can hear Apples for Everyone on the internet? I just found it there.”

“Yes, dad, I do know. I uploaded those tracks myself.”

“And anyone can play them?”

“Yes. I wanted there to be a record of the songs we sang, even though we don’t sing them anymore.”

“Well, I’m glad they’re there because I wanted to hear the songs again.”

This is another conversation we have regularly now. My dad periodically discovers our old band’s back-catalogue online. Every time, he’s shocked that it’s there. It’s not just that the internet has moved faster than he could; it’s also that he is forgetting what he used to know. His mind is reaching back through time to before these developments happened and then being surprised by them again.

In the aftermath of both the UK Election and the Brexit Vote I wrote this tweet:

The tweet became a thread. It got a lot more attention than most of the things I tweet. I wouldn’t say it went viral, but it currently has 29,297 impressions, 3,765 engagements, 153 retweets and 166 likes.

My dad made websites and blogs for years, and he self-publishes his fiction on the website Lulu, but social media is something he just missed. I think that’s a shame because he would have been good at it. It would have allowed him to communicate the ideas he so desperately wants to communicate. Not that I’m suggesting his tweets would change the world, but they would have been heard by someone.

He regularly says to me, “I should really get myself one of those… y’know… what do you call them… the thing you are holding in your hand…”

“An iPhone.”

“Yes. I see people on them. They can do lots of things.”

And then I remind him that we’ve tried that before. That he’s been given an iPhone to try out, and despite my lessons and the instructions I’d written for him, he just couldn’t get his head around it. We’ve also tried him with tablets, which he also can’t quite get. He can still use his Kindle, but that’s as far as he got with that kind of tech.

I used to work as a library assistant, and one of my jobs was to provide training to pensioners in how to use the internet. These sessions were called Silver Surfer sessions (rather patronisingly) by the council, but they were a good resource, helping people to enter the internet age. I ran those sessions at a time before tablets had really become a thing. Many older people who had not been able to get into the internet before found tablets and touch screens much more intuitive. Because of this, they could join and enjoy social media. But my dad had kept up, which means the change is harder for him to make. I remember initially finding touch screens and the slightly different way the mobile web works confusing. But it didn’t take me long to retrain myself.

I helped my dad join twitter. It was before his dementia had set in, and he was still very active online. But it didn’t work for him. He was frustrated by the character limit (being concise with words is not a natural talent in my gene pool) and overloaded by the amount of information.

I find it both amazing and confusing that my dad has managed to retain his belief that change is possible for the amount of years he has lived, particularly because he has lived through many periods of time that would have made me give up. I feel like any belief I had in change, no doubt partially installed in me by him during my childhood, has left me now. I cling on to the possibility that change can happen; I can’t discount it all together. But I really can’t see a pathway to it, and it doesn’t seem likely. My dad gets so swept up in the potential of people that he still believes they can change the world. Not on paper — he’s always called himself a pessimist, and he certainly doesn’t see things as having progressed positively. But emotionally he can throw all the analysis out of the window because he believes on some level, that love and political arguments can transform our scarred and violently unequal world.

If anything, getting older has increased his belief in hope and people, even as he finds himself despairing more and more about his personal circumstances. In these final years, he’s even moved from an agnostic position to some sort of religious belief. He talks of the ‘unknown other’ rather than God, but he seems to believe that consciousness is something outside of neurons and evolution, something infinite and mystical. He would still say you can’t know, and that it’s arrogant to think that you can, but the phrase he used to use was “nobody knows, but everyone believes.” I would say that he has embraced belief now.

He went through a phase of saying “Bless you!” to people, both as a greeting and as a goodbye. There is something within his aging that does seem holy. One thing I’m grateful for is that as he has aged, he has clung to love, kindness and the possibility of people. There are different ways people can age; for many, it makes them more closed-minded; more suspicious; more bigoted. That has not been the way it has been for my dad.

After I’d finished the first draft of this piece, I went round to visit my dad. I found him in a stress because he couldn’t open a thing he’s writing on his computer because the software wouldn’t load. I took a look and found a solution to the issue without updating his operating system. He doesn’t want to do that because he knows this system and isn’t really up to learning a new one. He kept telling me not to worry and apologising for taking up my time. I told him to stop doing that and that I was happy to help. Within his apologies, was the frustration I always catch in him around using subtitles: he wants to not need them because the old version of him could hear fine, but when he turns them off he just can’t understand what is happening. He has a similar issue with his computer: the old version of him could do this stuff fine, so he feels he is somehow letting himself down by not being able to do this now. He wants me to go away and let him try to do it himself, but he also knows that if that happens, he may not be able to solve the problem.

I said it was understandable to be frustrated by computers and change and that I found it pretty hard to navigate his mac system because I’m used to Word, so I can only imagine how frustrating and confusing such small but big changes would be for someone in his situation.

He told me that he’d be okay at sorting it out as he had an instruction manual for his software. I looked at it and realised it was ten years old: not only was the information contained within in it anachronistic; the way that we source information about our technology has changed. Do they even make instruction manuals anymore?

A little while after I’d sorted out his computer, while we were having a cup of tea, I put my theory to him, that whilst he is intellectually pessimistic, he is emotionally optimistic: he somehow manages to keep hope alive. He was sceptical of it, saying that yes, there is a chance of change happening, that people reading Andre Gorz could change the world, but that there were also great forces making that unlikely. “The world as humans know it could end shortly after my life does.”

I realised that maybe our positions aren’t that different after all. And I wondered if, in the moments that I manage to believe in hope, I seem as inspiring and naïve as he does. It made me wonder if maybe the spark I see in him, that belief in people and ideas, if that isn’t also in me, despite my frequent feeling that it isn’t. If I might communicate that to other people regardless. If the world as humans know it lasts for long enough for me to reach a similar age as my dad, I wonder if I will be someone who frustrates and delights young people with my faith in them, whether I will still accept the possibility of hope and change? I hope so.

Our tweeting about Andre Gorz led people to read the Wikipedia page.

Andre Gorz committed suicide/euthanasia with his wife in 2007. My dad had been a fan of Gorz’s work for decades before that. He wants people on the left to view Gorz as the new Marx. I have some sympathy with that position. Over the last few years, it’s been a delight to my dad to see people suddenly starting to mention Gorz by name, and to come up with ideas like Universal Basic Income and Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which he sees as being very much in Gorz’s wheelhouse.

The last addition to my dad’s sense of politics came from my reading of the work of Kimberley Crenshaw and bell hooks and other black feminists and womanists. When I explained these ideas about structural oppressions and how they intersect with each other to my dad, he got the idea very quickly. I’m glad we had those conversations before his memory had started to fail us. In his late-80s, he began to call himself an intersectionalist, and went around telling everyone to find out about this theory. It reminded me of when he saw The Wire a few years before that and kept going up to people of colour and asking them if they’d seen it, only without the unintended racism of specifically profiling people. When he gets inspired by things, he thinks they will be the solution. He believes in the power of words, of art and of ideas. Soon he will not be able to make words, or art, or have ideas. He will leave them in the documents he has written, in the paper and digital remains of his brain, and in the people who he has touched and influenced.

When having our circular euthanasia conversation recently, I pointed out to my dad that if he did want to make the same decision as Gorz, he could look up ways to kill himself on Google.

“Surely they don’t allow people to put up stuff like that,” he said.

“They do,” I said. “Probably the first result will be a helpline for people thinking of doing it. Google will make sure that comes up first, but everything is on the internet — there aren’t any rules as such. But there will be lots of advice for you on how to do that, if you want to.”

This was a strange moment for me because my dad five years ago knew that, but the dad I know now will probably forget. And I’ll have to decide whether to tell him again.

This is part of a collection of essays that I will be releasing here on medium weekly over the next few months. Click here to read the introduction.

To read part 9 click here: