Nine days after the sudden death of my father, I went to collect his mail from the post office box he kept in the city. It was the least of my worries and, like everything at the time, it was happening in a hurry, on the way from something and late for something else. My mother, my sister and I were in crisis mode then, responding only to the most urgent things – and there were so many. Media requests, memorial service arrangements, visits from friends and family. Months later I would realise that, during this period, I had completely failed to pay for parking, anywhere, ever. In a city known for its zealous parking officers, I had pulled up wherever I chose and leaped towards my next task, like a hero in an action movie commando-rolling into a fire.
Inside the post office, when I told the person at the desk that I was there to collect the overflowing mail from the mailbox belonging to my parents, his hand went to his mouth.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s all we can talk about.”
As we spoke, this kind man telling me how shocked they all were to hear that John was gone, a drifting tide of Australia Post staff moved towards us. They had known Dad for years. They couldn’t believe it, they told me. They were so sorry. He was here a couple of weeks back, they said. Dad knew the names of the woman at the next counter’s kids, she told me, asked about them every time.
I stayed for a while with these nice people, telling them a bit about what had happened, attempting to make sense of it with them in some way, as my family and I found ourselves doing with so many people during this time. The same thing happened to Mum when she went to their local post office to send a parcel – one woman reaching out, tears in her eyes, clutching Mum’s hand as they all spoke.
People say that in grief you learn who your friends really are. We were reminded that we had many wonderful friends. And that Dad had friends everywhere. Some people were so passionate about their connection to Dad I didn’t know quite how to react. Not long after he died, I was at a child’s birthday party. I barely knew the family – our kids went to kindergarten together – so I was standing by myself when a woman approached to pass on her condolences. There was a stranger standing next to us, hovering on the edge of the conversation.
“Wait. Who was your dad?” she asked. “John Clarke?” she squealed. “Are you serious? I love him!” Several people at the party looked over. “Ha! That’s nice,” I said, trying to go along with her vibe. “I love him too.” It was meant to be a joke. She looked at me sharply. I thought she might admonish me for the dark humour. Instead, she leaned in, all severe intensity. “No,” she said. “I don’t think you understand. I grew up with him.”
It is impossible, before you have been through it, to imagine yourself into the experience of all-encompassing grief. My own perception of it was cobbled together from the deaths of my grandparents, all of whom I loved and was sad to lose, but not in a way that whipped the bottom out of the world like a magician with a tablecloth.
But Big Grief, the type that wakes before you do every morning and lights up your entire nervous system, hits differently. It’s confounding and surprising and huge and blinding. It shapeshifts through your life, leaping from photographs, haunting celebrations, drifting past as a scent on a Sunday walk. It fills the dark, sad moments and infects the good ones, too. Celebrations – birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries – are dreaded in inverse proportion to the joy they used to bring. Sometimes, grief comes disguised as a powerful rage (shout-out to the woman on Sydney Road who snapped at me outside a fruit shop in the days before Christmas in 2017 and may not have yet recovered from the effects of my disproportionate snap back). For me, those early days were also characterised by a manic urge to get through the to-do list that exploded into being on 9 April, 2017.
That was the day John Clarke, aka Fred Dagg, aka our dad, political satirist, writer, performer, thrower of frisbees, world champion drinker of tea, died suddenly while walking through the Grampians with his wife, our mother, the love of his life, Helen McDonald, by his side. Her words over the phone to us seemed impossible. He had suffered a massive heart attack, apparently out of nowhere. Retrospect and medical opinion have helped us make sense of how he was as “fit as a fiddle” one day and gone the next. Any form of recovery would have been unlikely, short-lived and probably completely miserable. But we didn’t know any of this yet. Something strange accompanied me and my younger sister Lucia during this time, something close to a quiet sense of self-assurance: a weirdly fundamental feeling that, despite the horror and complete shock of losing our beloved, hilarious, brilliant dad so unexpectedly, and the public element of it all, we could get through this next bit. This feeling was so incongruous that we discussed it in the snatched moments we had alone together. We could only attribute it to one thing: our childhood.
Extract from Would That Be Funny?: Growing Up with John Clarke, by Lorin Clarke (Text Publishing)
