a father charts the anguish of losing a son too young
- Written by Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Death comes at us, unswerving, immense, pressing on us its only gift, infinite absence. Mostly we face away from it. Too often we are faintly reminded of it when we deal with losses of one kind or another.
Elizabeth Bishop came at this connection in her own querulously open-hearted way when she began her famous poem of loss with, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
And when a 26-year-old Tennyson, confronting the sudden death of his close friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law, wrote, “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O sea!” his words almost howl at the vast inhuman presence of careless death.
But it is one (sometimes profound) thing to see and respond to the immanence of death in the world, and another thing entirely when a person you love, someone you might have raised from childhood or known intimately for decades, suddenly and too early dies. This exposes each one who experiences it to almost unbearable pain and almost complete darkness in the soul.
Warwick McFadyen, a journalist and poet, has published two short books, which he calls “tidal charts”, detailing his thoughts, feelings and memories in response to the sudden death of his son, Hamish, who died at the age of 21 in 2019.
Review: The Ocean: a meditation, in prose and poetry on grief/The Centre of Zero: poems 2019-2024 – Warwick McFadyen (McFadyen Media)
As with Nick Cave’s recent discussions with Sean O’Hagan in the book Faith, Hope and Carnage, there is no escaping the raw and catastrophic despair the loss of a child presses upon a parent. Both Cave and McFadyen take to articulating this experience in directly powerful and honest prose, and also take themselves towards song, lyric and poetry.
Some, in their grief will fall into a prolonged silence, while some go to painting, some to dance, some to meditation, or renewed friendships. Almost any discipline we choose can be our negotiation between denial and acceptance, celebration and curse, between ongoing love and love stopped in its tracks.
McFadyen’s book, The Ocean, begins with
Every day I stare into the abyss, and say good morning. Before sleep, I go to it and say good night, adding, See you in the morning. The abyss sits on a shelf.
The Ocean is a series of short prose reflections ordered chronologically according to the time elapsed since his son’s death, the first at two months and the last three years later.
Booktopia
The companion book to The Ocean, The Centre of Zero, is a series of poems broken into sections under the headings Water, Light, Earth, Voices, Time.
The opening section is a paean, a love song, a lament, and a sometimes joyous expression of his passion for the waves, currents, the movement of light on rivers and oceans.
Later, within the section on Earth he writes of the plaque prepared for Hamish and “for the sun to kiss”. The poetry is simple, the feelings direct, and within this McFadyen holds the long ache of love for a child who was so vividly on his way into life that those who loved him cannot stop keeping him alive in their love.
These books stand as tributes to that young life lost and as manifestations of grief. They might not be what you want to read now but they might be what you will be grateful to read at a certain time.
Authors: Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
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