‘Why did I hurt?’ A writer on grieving the father she never really knew

Grief is a thing with wings. It swoops in when and how it wants, often uninvited. When I think of my father, I think of sound. His laughter: a deep rumble from his slightly distended gut, ending with a sigh, as if he were reluctant to let it go. The gentle push of his windscreen-shaped glasses up the bridge of his nose. I think of 5am wake-up calls – me at five or six, my brother five years older, both of us trudging drowsily to the dining table for maths lessons. I think of his short afro, often patted into a near perfect square.
An ex-military man, his life was ruled by discipline. He both scared and fascinated me. I was in awe of his mind: brilliant with numbers yet complex, shielded by an impenetrable layer. I admired his style: beige and unremarkable, distinctly his. His personality was uninhibited, exuberant, vivacious. He loved entertaining, clinking champagne glasses at our home on Victoria Island in Lagos, discussing Nigeria’s woes.
Yet, for a long time, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t seem to love me.
I was 10 or 11, on the cusp of teenage upheaval, when my parents separated. I needed him. He had left Lagos and we wouldn’t see each other again until I was in boarding school, two years later. By then, I had changed my name. He spent a gruelling hour demanding to see the girl who no longer bore the name he had given her.
Even now, I can’t fully explain why I did it. Perhaps, I wanted to shed a part of my past, like snakeskin, to emerge as someone new. I remember standing up in class, 20 pairs of eyes on me, introducing myself by my middle name instead of my first. I thought, since my name had changed, maybe my life would, too.
Dad and I stood awkwardly outside the gate of my boarding house, a converted bungalow in Lagos. I wore a red checked dress two sizes too big for me; he was in his usual beige French suit, but the afro had receded, replaced by the early stages of balding.
He asked how I was, and my response was a worded lie: “Fine.”
I had questions – where had he been? Would he ever come home? We had only a few minutes and I told myself I’d ask him those questions next time.
We wouldn’t see each other again for nearly three decades and those questions had lost their flavour and meaning. I wanted him in my life. When my friends spoke of their dads, I imagined mine was abroad, pining for me, eager for a hopeful reunion. I cried when my great-uncle and brother walked me down the aisle. Then, I grew tough. Stopped thinking about my father, longing for him.
By 2011, I was a mother, a wife – so why did it hurt when he finally reached out to offer a heartfelt apology for abandoning me? It was noble of him, but it couldn’t undo what was lost. Somehow, it was easier to pretend he was dead.
In 2022, my brother, panicked, wanted us to see Dad before he died. “I don’t want my final image of him to be a body in a casket,” he said.
I hesitated, comfortable with my frozen image of him – the receding afro, the crisp suit. But my husband’s quiet question pierced my reluctance: “Will you regret not seeing him if he dies?” I booked a ticket without answering, not sure myself.
My brother and I arrived in Lagos in November that year. We booked a hotel. It was a neutral place with no photos, no memories and all personal items tucked away in a suitcase adorned with a Virgin Atlantic tag. This visit was temporary and that offered some semblance of comfort.
The night before Dad arrived, my heart raced. I couldn’t sleep. What would I say to him? Nearly 30 years had passed. Would I hug him? Weep? When we finally saw him, I was shocked by how frail and slow he had become – what had happened to those gallant strides?
The French suit was gone, in its place a drapey agbada seemed to swallow him whole. His hair had vanished, his scalp had aged and he was almost deaf in one ear. He looked at me with a thirst, drinking me in slowly at first, then with a quick gulp. He held out his arms for a hug. I trudged awkwardly into his embrace. He held me briefly, for a second or two, and then I let my brother take his turn.
We sat opposite each other, with him stealing glances at me, our conversation circling around the Nigerian government and his farm. I didn’t ask the questions I had once had. They didn’t seem to matter any more. The visit ended, my brother asked for a blessing and he prayed – hesitant, surprised and a little sad. We bowed our heads, said amen, and left.
I was awake all night afterwards. I felt deflated, disappointed about the hollow conversations about nothing. I hurt, though I didn’t know why. I wanted more, but more of what?
On the flight home, my therapist’s words echoed: “Your dad can’t give you what he doesn’t have.” But why didn’t he have it? Why couldn’t he pretend?
I returned to the UK, put a mental block on the reunion and buried myself in writing my new novel, And So I Roar, where Tia, a character with a complex relationship with her mother, grapples with her mother’s impending death. Through Tia’s journey, I explored my own unresolved feelings and the theme of forgiving a parent I never truly had.
In the middle of December last year, amid edits, my husband asked for my phone, a request so odd it caught me off guard. He never asked for my phone. But I was too exhausted to question him. It had been a long weekend, and I just wanted to sleep. Later, I realised it was because he didn’t want me to find out before I was officially notified. He returned my phone with a wistful look.
Moments later, it rang. It was Mum. Mum, who had been both mother and father all these years. Mum, whose voice had always been a comfort. Mum, whom I had spoken to just a couple of hours before my husband took my phone. What could she possibly want? My mother started with a proverb and took meandering twists.
“What happened?” I cut in. “Who died?”
“Your dad.”
I was silent for a beat. Then I nodded, as though she could see me, as though I was sitting in an interview and had been asked if I fully understood the question. I nodded, hung up and went to sleep. I didn’t say a word to anyone.
I slept for hours and woke up around 3am. The house was quiet. I crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. I shut the door. Sat on the closed toilet lid. And then I began to wail – a guttural, seismic wail that gripped me at the core and made my stomach muscles spasm. I heard feet shuffling behind the door; my husband was listening to me cry, but wisely decided to let me be. I wailed like a broken animal for nearly 50 minutes. I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I knew my father was dead, but hadn’t he been dead to me all this while?
Then came the guilt. Should I have visited sooner? Not visited at all? My dad was dead. I knew I’d miss his laughter, those frozen memories. But beyond that, what else was there to miss? I was grieving two things: the father I briefly had and the one I wished he could have been. For weeks, I wept in unexpected places – in Sainsbury’s as I examined a box of cherries, at my daughter’s nativity play, in bed at night.
There was no rhyme or reason for this pattern of grieving. My emotions fluctuated between anger, sorrow and depression. I had dreams of him desperately wanting to tell me something, but the phone line was so faint and fuzzy, the connection useless.
I filled gaps with others’ tributes, piecing together a man I never fully knew. Slowly, the grief ebbed, replaced by a quiet acceptance. But the grief for what could have been the father he never was remains. Its wings are strong, its bite unrelenting. And it never comes empty-handed: there is always a tiny gift tucked into its dark, gnarly fist – the gift of imagination and of pretence.
And So I Roar by Abi Daré is published by Sceptre, £16.99. Buy it for £15.29 at guardianbookshop.com