How My Father Died
And how family can get in the way
Heart attack. That was the coroner’s conclusion but decomposition made it difficult to be certain. He’d been lying in his flat for five days before the neighbours called the police because of the smell.
He lived alone. He died alone. He was 54.
I walked past that block of flats recently for the first time in years.
I wasn’t close to my father. I don’t think “close” is a word anyone would use in relation to him. He lived a solitary life spending his days at the local bookies. He didn’t work and had no social life. He’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia a few years before. In retrospect, like many at the time he may have been on the autism spectrum instead (navigating my own journey). It was quite common for people on the spectrum to be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic (more recently too). He certainly had some strange ideas but they seemed to have an internal logic and consistency, whereas schizophrenic delusions tend to be more irrational and disordered. In any case, he didn’t get the help and support he needed early on.
He’d grown up in Uganda when it was still a British colony. Indians had been in East Africa for generations, moved by the British to “serve as a buffer between Europeans and Africans in the middle rungs of commerce and administration.” The eldest of five, he came to the UK by himself in 1968 at 17. Partly trying to get away from an overbearing family who didn’t understand him. Unfortunately for him they all followed in 1972 when Idi Amin expelled the Indians from Uganda. Britain took them in. Almost 40,000 in 1972.
He’d worked as an engineer for a while. He’d also been arrested for driving without a licence and then bailed out by his family. I have no idea what else he got up to. I’m sure he faced racial discrimination, this was the seventies — the era of “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” signs. Must have been difficult, being well educated, speaking better English than many of the natives and supposedly having all the rights and privileges of a British citizen, to come to the metropole to be treated like a second class citizen.
When he was 29 his mother decided he needed to settle down — that would fix everything. So they had him married off. Arranged marriages being a common thing in Indian communities at the time. Marriages were within the same ethnic, religious and caste group. In the caste system they were tailors, and that’s exactly what my grandparents did in Uganda and then in the UK. Working 16 hour days. Not fancy suits and dresses. Simple shirts and trousers.
They found him a young woman from Gujarat. My mother. She had her own issues and a difficult and traumatic upbringing. So this may not have been a good match, but had it not happened you wouldn’t be reading these words right now.
They were married in 1979. Moved to the UK and I was born in 1980, my sister in 1983. That wasn’t family planning, children just happened. Due to my father’s illness (still undiagnosed) we had little to no contact with grandparents or other relatives despite them all living close by. Aged one I was abandoned on the doorstep of a social services building by my father who couldn’t handle the pressures of being a parent. I was returned to them a few hours later. It didn’t get better. Cold and dark flat, no gas or electricity. The money went on the horses.
I wasn’t being sent to school and so started going on my solo adventures when I was seven. That eventually resulted in my sister and I being taken into foster care. My mother left my father and won custody of us. After that we had no contact with my father although he would try to reach out periodically. The rift between my mother and father never healed. Both damaged human beings — before, during and after their time together.
Fast forward to my early twenties and I took a renewed interest in my father. I wanted to understand him. Get to know him. And I needed a father, I’d never had one. Or really parents even for that matter. So I started visiting him. He’d been living in a tiny council flat in Chadwell Heath for a few years by that point, within walking distance. I’d go find him there or at the bookies on the high street.
He was aloof. Distant. Detached. He lived in a world of his own. I’d gone looking for guidance, approval, acceptance — all the usual things. He couldn’t do any of that. I’d try to tell him about all the things I was doing. My life, work, friends I’d made. He wasn’t interested, or rather it didn’t mean anything to him. When I’d tell him about friends his distrust and paranoia would trigger, “friends? You should read about Julius Caesar.” He was bitter about his past. I wondered what had happened, real or imagined. Was there some specific trauma or was this more a product of a lifetime of not being understood and feeling alienated?
He was very intelligent and knowledgeable across a wide array of subjects. Much of what I learned early on, especially science and history, was thanks to him. Even if he did drive me hard in his half baked attempts at homeschooling, often expressing frustration at my “slowness.” Perhaps it was more frustration with himself? It left me with a lifelong sense of never being good enough, always needing to “catch up”, try harder. I could never please him! But it also left me with a lifelong respect for his knowledge and intellect, and for knowledge and intelligence in general.
When I was 22 I started bringing him over to my mother’s house, where I lived. First just chatting outside and then spending a few hours at a time in the house. My parents would talk, occasionally bicker but it was generally amicable. There was a softening of tensions. Time had passed. They were older. I wasn’t hoping for much, a little reconciliation leading to companionship maybe. Not for me, for them. My sister would go to her room whenever he was there, she wasn’t ready. These visits were intermittent and brief. Sometimes a careless word and he would leave. But it was enough. A start.
This continued for a year or two.
And then he died suddenly. I’d seen him about a week or so before. Probably the last person to see him. Aside from the people at the bookies and local shops. They knew him as “Jack.”
One Saturday morning in May of 2005 I got a call from my uncle. His brother, the second eldest. He lived nearby. I didn’t know him well. I didn’t have a relationship with any of them so getting a call was unusual. He asked if I was in, I said yes. He said he was coming over. I knew something was up, one of the grandparents likely. I didn’t have a relationship with them either.
He arrived and I got in the back of the car. He had someone with him, a distant cousin maybe. I didn’t know him. My uncle told me, matter of factly, that my father had died. The distant cousin took hold of me, in anticipation of a sudden grief reaction. Aside from surprise, my response wasn’t emotional. This was unexpected and confusing news but I wasn’t in shock. I was calm. I didn’t know what to do with the information, this wasn’t a scenario I’d prepared for. What happens next? I asked “now what?”
We drove to my father’s flat. The body had been removed and there was a dark stain on the carpet. I’d been in this flat before a few times during my visits. It smelled strongly of old cigarette smoke. Yellowed walls. The astray was full of limp rollie ends, he’d rolled his own and smoked without filters. We spoke to his neighbours, they hadn’t really known him. They offered their condolences. Then we were back in the car.
It was time to tell people, starting with his parents. We drove to their place and I was given the task of breaking the news to them. I’m not sure why. I told them and they reacted with disbelief then shock and grief. I felt like a stranger telling two very old people their son had suddenly died. Next we drove back to my mother’s house and it was time to tell my mother and sister. Shock, grief and tears. I felt like I was observing all this from outside my own body. Numb. Dissociated. Only a few hours before it had been a sunny Saturday morning and I’d been listening to metal.
Then a whirlwind of activity kicked off. People started turning up to my house. My mother’s house. The council’s house. My grandparents were there. Something to do with eleven days of mourning culminating in a funeral ceremony. I knew nothing about any of that. I hadn’t been raised with Indian/Hindu culture and tradition. They had me decide whose house would be used for those eleven days. My mother wanted it to be hers so that’s what we did. For some reason these decisions were all placed on me. I was 24.
Upwards of 50 people started turning up daily. They were all strangers. Indian people. I wasn’t used to being around so many Indian people. Every room was occupied. Folding chairs had been brought from somewhere. Food was provided by a restaurant someone owned. Indian food. I didn’t eat Indian food. I had no privacy. I couldn’t even get to my computer. The people were there to pay their respects and to sit with the grieving family. I had to be front and centre to all that, the face of it. But I just wanted to get away. He was dead, so what more needed to be done? I told jokes and kept people entertained, it gave me something to do.
Aside from annoyance, frustration and feeling overwhelmed by all the people, I had no idea what my emotions were in relation to the death of my father. I didn’t have a chance to think about that. Everyone grieves differently and this was definitely not my way.
I overheard someone remark “he hasn’t even cried yet”, referring to me.
It all felt intrusive. Invasive. Maybe I could’ve told them to leave. I felt powerless, swept along, railroaded. Going through the motions.
This is about as good a summary as I can find on the meaning behind those eleven days:
“Hindu beliefs about death are centred on rebirth and reincarnation — a person’s physical body leaves, but their soul reincarnates into another life after eleven days. We believe the soul needs this food for the journey to another world.”
He hadn’t believed in any of that. Although we never had the chance to talk about it, I knew he was non-religious and an atheist. So was I. I don’t think he would have wanted any of this. But then it wasn’t for him. And it wasn’t for me either.
Then there was the family politics which I didn’t know anything about and didn’t want to. You can’t be political about something you are not a part of.
On the eleventh day the coffin was brought into the house, to the living room. The day of the funeral. A lot of people were at the house, too many to fit inside. The body was wrapped due to decomposition, his face couldn’t be seen. It all felt abstracted. It could be anyone in there. Even a dummy. The body seemed small. Shrunken. We walked in circles around the coffin. Rituals, chants and offerings. I mumbled along. Then we carried the coffin out and into the hearse. Drove to the crematorium. I’d written some words and read them out. Someone commented later that I’d spoken well and “could be a politician.” Sure.
And then suddenly it was all over. All the people disappeared. A few came by in the days following but everything went back to “normal.” Didn’t keep in touch or see them again. Aside from at my grandfather’s funeral a year later which luckily didn’t happen where I was living and didn’t require as much from me. I wouldn’t do all that again.
A few weeks later my mother and I went to my father’s flat and cleared it out. It felt surreal.
A few months after that I was on a boat on the Thames with my uncle and his son scattering the ashes. It was perfunctory. A task to be done.
My father hadn’t been understood in life and wasn’t in death either. Everything that had happened had been about everyone else. I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me about him. His childhood. His dreams. I’d been trying to piece together a better picture of him. Trying to get to know him.
Over the years the hardest part in all this was the way he’d died. Alone. Lying there for days. Had he lived with someone, could they have called the emergency services when this happened? But it’s more than that. Being so isolated and alienated from society that someone can die mere metres away from other people who are completely unaware, only separated by walls. It happens. Not that uncommon.
In the following years my mother would occasionally have troubled thoughts that someone had him killed. Even if something like that were possible, to what end? He had no friends, and I’m sure no enemies either. He had no money. My sister and I got the £3,000 or so that was in his bank account.
What also stayed with me was the loss of control and autonomy once the mourning period started. All that activity and confusion, those eleven days, robbed me of the freedom to understand what had happened. Having to perform in front of all those people. I wasn’t one of them, nor a part of all that.
My uncle having me break the news to his parents and then to my own mother and sister… was unfair. I don’t know whether it was abdication of responsibility or if a custom was being followed. Regardless, I was too young.
I felt anger about all this. Most of all I was angry at my father for dying without giving me his approval. Without seeing me. In my own way, like him, I’d always felt different and didn’t think anyone could understand me. But I thought he might. I felt he could see me. But maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he didn’t like what he saw because it reminded him too much of himself. Both mirrors, reflecting to the other what neither wants to see.
19 years later it all feels like some sort of fugue state. The individual days blur, many moments I can’t recollect clearly or put into the right sequence. I’m sure I did experience shock. I’ve covered all this with therapists many times since, and made peace with it. It happened. It’s a part of my life.
I went to Uganda in 2022. An uncle, a younger brother of my father who moved to Denmark over 40 years ago, was going back for the first time in 50 years. 50 years since the expulsion. He asked me if I’d like to see where my father had grown up. I said yes, I was curious and I’d built a good relationship with this uncle. We went to Jinja, a small city on the Nile where they’d grown up. I saw the old house (someone else lived there now) and my father’s room. He was the only one of the children who’d had his own room. He used to build radios in there. Sounded like something I would’ve done.
The rest of the time we spent walking the streets and speaking to local people. They were surprised by us, my uncle, like me, is atypical for what they expect an “Indian” to be. Sadly the colonial stratification is still in place and the new Indians who moved there in the eighties exploit that to their advantage, emulating the British middle/upper classes. My uncle would mutter “these fucking Indians…” No real opportunities for the many bright young minds we encountered.
High levels of child poverty too. I met a woman from Manchester who was running a charity for street children. I volunteered with a group looking for children and also went to a rehabilitation centre to hear their stories. Stories of abuse and neglect. I got to share mine too. Have stayed involved with the charity and made a lifelong friend in the CEO (now moving on to climate work).
That Uganda trip opened new possibilities for me. It was also there that I decided to go on my open ended travels around the world. Uganda brought some finality and closure to my father’s death. I’ll never fully understand him but that’s fine. I only need to understand myself.
He was let down by the systems where he grew up and where he moved to. He was let down by his family. They didn’t know any better. These things weren’t talked about. There was no real awareness or understanding of mental health.
He left me with a sense of striving, pushing myself hard, and so the measure of success and independence I’ve enjoyed are in part thanks to him. Regardless of how harsh and unpleasant his homeschooling attempts were. He couldn’t regulate his emotions or ask for help. I’m different. I can. Whatever his grievances with family, friends and society, justified or not, died with him. Maybe my successes are also his and in a sense I’m giving his life meaning with everything I do. Maybe it had to skip over him to get to me, that drive to make some positive change or impact in the world. A relay rather than a race.
Some who have heard parts of this story, without fully knowing me or my history, have remarked “your father would be proud of you.”
That is incorrect. Not because there isn’t anything to be proud of, but it misses the point. He didn’t live in the same world as the rest of us: he wasn’t withholding. He just couldn’t. And the other point it misses is: I don’t need him to be anymore.
As for how I die: hopefully as an old man. On my feet, in the middle of a long run. A simple non-religious ceremony please. I don’t really care, I’ve had enough of funerals so won’t be coming.
Before that I’ve got lots of stuff to do.
