Remember me
I am halfway through a year of firsts: the first times we have passed birthdays, holidays, anniversaries without Dad. Though each of these occasions carries its own heaviness, a friend who has been part of the Dead Dads Club longer than me warns that the second and the third and the fourths are worse, because with them comes distance. There is at least an immediacy to the firsts: we are separated only by six shorts months; my life as it is now would still feel familiar to him.
Still, doing as I have always done at Christmas only without him seems unnecessarily to emphasise his absence. So I have decided to embrace the strangeness of this next first – to double down on it, even. This Christmas Day will be the first I have spent with a partner’s family instead of my own. It marks, I feel, a growing up, a gentle changing of seasons.
Christmas at M—’s dad’s will – based on previous experience – be considerably boozier than I am used to. It won’t, I suppose, feature the Baileys’ unorthodox Christmas dinner dessert: summer fruit pudding. I am coming to terms with the rumoured absence of Yorkshires and cauliflower cheese. Most importantly, it will be utterly incomparable to the Christmases that have gone before: Dad’s usual chair will not sit conspicuously empty, because it will not be there.
To this year of firsts, I add a last: after six years of documenting my life in this column, this will be the final Deleted Scenes. When we first “met” I was 27; in a few short weeks I will turn 34. The intervening years have been by turns brilliant and terrible. You have seen me through one pandemic, five moves and innumerable first dates, the heart-rending end of one relationship and the tentative, hopeful start of another, and the death of my beloved dad. You have followed me into the disorientating, curious world of online dating, and into the disorientating, curious world of hospital wards.
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The list of things I have done for the sake of copy includes but is not limited to: flying to Copenhagen for a first date; learning to flatfoot dance in Appalachian America; attempting for the first time in my thirties to learn to ski and to play football. I have been held hostage by a persistently miaowing cat and besieged by small yet threatening children wielding stones. I have spent a glorious year living with and learning from two children who are not my own; flown to Bali for a solo Christmas only to learn of my dad’s cancer diagnosis, turn around and come home again. I have had a hell of a lot of therapy. Through it all, you have been extraordinarily patient with me, as I have bemoaned the particular precarity and frustrations of my generation, and written in agonising circles around the same questions, about friendship, faith and family. But now it is time for me to take on a new challenge, and for you to get to know some other writers.
Whenever I have considered retiring Deleted Scenes, I imagined that I would do so at a juncture that offered some completeness, some sense of a happy ending: a wedding, a birth, at the very least a home of my own. That you would know, even though we don’t talk as much as we once did, that I was buffered, safe, happy. Of course, this was a fantasy. If there has been any unifying logic to this column, it is that there is nothing given that cannot be taken away; that what one day seems the foundations of a life may be gone the next; that reality has nothing so neat to offer as closure or completeness. I do not mean this to be as hopeless as it perhaps sounds; it is, rather, an acknowledgement that life always pushes us on, to move, to change, to grow. It will be strange to continue doing so without relating it all to you, week by week, but I hope it will be freeing for me to write about other things.
I have no great words of wisdom with which to leave you. Only that, if nothing else, the events I have documented in these pages have taught me that, come what may, I will be OK in the end, and you will be, too. And so now, all there is left for me to do is to thank you, once again, for reading and to wish you a very merry Christmas, one last time.
[Further reading: The Online Safety Act came for my short story]
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