Maya Angelou once said “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” There was a time about a decade ago, when I was very prolific, and also more inclined to share my experiences, when people I knew would ask me to write a book about my life. I had always wanted to, but like every artist, I was always waiting for the right moment; some apt moment when time stretches out and conditions are perfect, when the opening of the door to the soul won’t get in the way of laundry or something. In the decade that followed, life took even more extraordinary turns, and there were many times I thought, while still bearing the ever expanding burden of the untold story, that I was glad I didn’t try to define it quite so prematurely.
Always living under my skin, like an itch that needs to be scratched, it has become more and more apparent to me that a lot of the ways I feel distracted, aimless, and isolated are down to this ‘great agony’ Angelou refers to. I learned during the most acute phases of my PTSD, some years ago now, to feel like existing on a different plane to those around you.
There are two specific times in recent memory that the weight of the story sat the most poignantly in my body, and I was reminded that the only way out is to write my way out. One of those times is now, or rather, the last few months. A curious sensation, that hits me in waves, is the grief of getting better. Since May of this year, after years of crawling out of the depth of COVID, and after many and varied adventures in biohacking, my body finally felt lighter, livelier; there was a sort of release as if a giant’s hand had been crushing me for so long it almost didn’t even feel like illness anymore. Sometimes you can’t tell how ill you are until you’re not. At the end of May I did a 20km hike on the north coast of the Netherlands, at the end of which my very sore muscles and I sat at the edge of the water at Egmond aan Zee and watched the sun set. As I marvelled at the beauty of the moment and the serenity of the ocean, life, too, seemed to stretch out in front of me with a new sort of infinity.
Much happened in the next months that continued this shift out of the laborious , marshmallowy state of chronic illness, almost in a jolting fashion. One of those being the sheer whiplash of the clarity, the emotional destabilization, and ultimately, the deep sadness of being well again. It’s like waking up from a long coma and realising that all your bills are unpaid. There’s no payoff to getting better, no reward for your suffering. It’s just you navigating a long forgotten bodily landscape, bursting with energy and enthusiasm, but starting life over, rebuilding it from tatters. No one remembers who you were before you were sick.
I remember a similar experience this time five years ago when I originally survived COVID, having come face to face with my mortality in a very real way for the first time. I had lay helplessly in bed, alone, reckoning with the sheer attack on my body, not knowing if I would live. I thought about every moment that led me to this one, every misstep, every consequence that rolled over into the next until eventually it was this one, this moment I could never take back. It was ‘life flashing before my eyes’ only it was more like life sluggishly ruminated before my eyes. I spent my five year recovery aggressively trying to do everything I could to not take life for granted in light of these hazy visions and somehow keep the pieces of my life together by mere thread, in a body so broken (and a bank account so broke) I would only continue to break it further. This deep sadness that accompanies the ecstacy of recovery can often be a regret that, if I can feel this good now, could I have felt this well again earlier, had I done something differently? I’ve had to combat many such thoughts with the acknowledgement of, not only the extraordinary circumstances I was dealt, but also the disadvantages I faced. Of course things might have been better, sooner, had I been wealthier and had better supports around me, but only to a certain degree. Recovery takes time, and wishing for better circumstances only pulls you down that same path of tracing everything back to some origin point of your misfortunes, which for me is largely things beyond my control.
The other of the two specific moments when I felt this weight and urgency of storytelling was when I read the eulogy at my father’s funeral in Spring 2023. There were people who were at the funeral who had never met my father but were there because they knew myself or my brother, and they would come to me after and say “your dad sounds like such an amazing person, I wish I had known him.” Standing at the pulpit in Mount Jerome, in a silky black jumpsuit and a smart blazer I had just bought, since most of my clothes didn’t fit me after COVID and besides, they were in Amsterdam. I felt sophisticated in a way that was nostalgic from a more glamorous time, but also unique from this new burden of adulthood.
It wasn’t just about memorialising my wonderful father, a rarity on this earth, but a reverend return to a self that I’d forgotten, the little girl who was just like her dad, before life, and people, kicked her down. There was no room in the Victorian Chapel for the vitriol of the years, nor for the walls I build to keep the world out, or the crippling phobia of the vultures that wait to devour me when I show myself. There was only room for us, for who we were, for soft, solemn truth. I had a sort of out of body experience, where I was both standing at the pulpit orating my tribute, but also looking at myself from elsewhere in the chapel, now standing tall in sort of jaded maturity and command, my brilliant father’s daughter whom I had been tasked to take care of.
He never got to know me in my wiser days, mainly in my wilder days, and in some part, the days where I left to another land to become a scientist, right at the moment when his life began to end. Despite not being to blame for any of the ways others treated me, I felt this tinge of quiet shame that I had allowed so many cruelties and indignities to tarnish this amazing man’s daughter. He didn’t deserve that any more than he deserved to know only the version of me before finding my way out of the dark. Looking upon myself standing tall and vulnerable at the pulpit, that old, worn out part of me died and went into the fire too.
And why is my story so important to share? For one, everything that’s happened to me, happens to other people, and in many cases, it’s due to something systemic. All our stories are interesting and important. Mine also happens to be very comprehensive, that is, many different struggles and misfortunes layered on top of one another, as if I fell at a hurdle somewhere deep in my history and have forever been catching up, always out of alignment and tripping on every hurdle along the way since. Above all, stories are liberation; vulnerability is connection. Back when I used to be a lot more vocal, and very candid online, especially about mental health, people would often come to me and tell me that I helped them, that I made them feel safe to face their own mental health difficulties, that I normalised it, gave it a voice and form, and took away the shame. It was always meant to be my purpose to continue that work, not just as a person, but as an academic. The cataclysm of PTSD, and moving away to study Psychology, and the events that transpired since had shoved me into both a fearful silence, and also ‘waiting mode’, waiting for the clouds to part, for the coast to clear, for the brain fog to lift, for the right time to open doors that can’t be closed again.
After all, the stories we do not tell, will be told for us, and often not by people with our best interests in mind. If we do not give our stories a voice, one will be assigned without our consent, and often without our knowledge. I always knew this, but the road back to finding that voice was…a little longer than I anticipated.
To begin with, I want to share a different story, the one I told a congregation of family and friends on the 10th of May 2023. One about a father and a child, full of hope and life. Death brings reminiscence of the days before the shadows fell, a portal to ourselves before the weight was upon us…
John Tait-Doak (6th September 1952 – 29th April 2023)
– Eulogy by Claire Tait-Doak
Firstly, I want to thank everyone who has come today, or joined us yesterday, and for all your beautiful messages of condolence, and all the ways that family and friends have supported us over the last weeks and especially in the week since John’s passing.
As many of you know, John had Parkinson’s Disease which was diagnosed in 2015, but would have started at some impossible to determine time previous to that. While I don’t want to focus too much on his illness, I don’t want to gloss over it either. There are many of you who had not seen him much or at all in recent years. I hope I can offer words of comfort in reassuring you that if you ever felt that John quietly or abruptly withdrew from your life, it was merely the subtle barriers the Parkinson’s Disease began to place between himself and an otherwise convivial life, and that he very much enjoyed whatever part you had played in his life. I know because he always spoke so fondly and enthusiastically about family, friends, and colleagues he met along the way.
And it is that person we are here to celebrate and remember today. Challenging though it is to eulogise a person that one feels they have lost in so many little ways over the last years with each little piece that the thief of disease steals away from you, even still, all the memories of who he was are firmly and eternally etched into my being, as if he had never been touched by illness at all.
To tell his life story would be a substantial and, dare I say, academic undertaking. So I prefer to tell the story of a little girl who was so eager to watch her father conjuring up his latest ambitious culinary project, that she would pull a chair over to the kitchen counter to stand on to be able to see. Or the story of the teenage girl who’s mother was determined would play in an orchestra, but who insisted on learning to play the guitar like her dad instead. Or how he would sit with me for hours teaching me mathematics, or web design, or the latest photo editing software, or how to use a digital camera. I rather tell you how I know few better feelings than the hours and hours we spent driving – whether around the Floridian coasts and swamp, the French countryside, the New England Mountains, through the Alps to Italian coasts and Lakes, the width of Britain many times, the Wild West desert, or just the beautiful landscape of home – my mother in the passenger seat with guide books and maps navigating us to obscure and interesting places, my brother next to me with a stack of novels reading and never getting motion sickness, John driving for hours and seemingly never getting tired, and me gazing out the window at the different landscapes, and never getting bored. To John, even running errands was an opportunity to enjoy a drive with some great music, and would often take the scenic route to and from the shops just to get a good stretch of road at the right time – after all, there’s nothing worse than being stuck at the traffic lights when the really great guitar solo plays.
To be the child of a father like John is to be, by default, a computer nerd. And not just any computer nerd – a computer nerd from the 80s and 90s when there were so few of us and we spoke a completely different language to our peers. We didn’t care, we were just so giddy and proud to be part of this brilliant, geeky journey with our exceptionally intelligent dad. John didn’t live to work, nor work to live. His work as an IT Systems Consultant and developer was just one of his many passions he delighted in indulging in as much as he possibly could. And it wasn’t just his job, it was our world. He was always bringing home exciting new gadgets and showing us how they work; or marvelling at the latest technological invention, like CD’s, or a touchscreen attachment for a Mac Computer, or the earliest version of the internet long before it was popularised. He would bring us to Club Mac meetings, and find us work in our young adult days at SystemAction or at their various prestigious clients. He was always learning a new piece of software and then showing us what he knew, or getting us all together to play an exciting new computer game – we would spend weekends gathered around the kitchen table where we would set up the Amiga console, and spend hours figuring out puzzles together in Kings Quest or Monkey Island and many others.
Of course, this wouldn’t be a eulogy by my father’s daughter unless I tried to sneak in a little of my own wisdom. There’s something that I’ve noticed as someone so young who’s been to too many young people’s funerals, including this one, a paradox of life and death; that is, the closer we are to death, the more we come to life – the way we learn to speak a little more when there’s one less at the table, the way we reveal ourselves at wakes and funerals when we would otherwise hide, the way we gather outside churches and say “we should be making more of life”, the way we start to truly live only once we feel that time is short, and the way we seek out an intensity in life as a way to push back grief.
John was never like that, he never needed such an invitation to seek out life, he found life in every moment. He was always thinking about the next thing he wanted to do: the next skill to learn; or piece of music that captivated him; or new recipe to cook or reason to cook an old favourite, like the many dinner parties that guests would talk about for years after; or new place to visit; or an excuse to visit somewhere familiar where he felt content; or how he was always ready to take his camera somewhere and delight friends and family with occasions he’d captured for them; he was never bored or idle at parties, instead always engrossed in some deeply rich and interesting conversation, or telling a story he found funny to make someone laugh – it would never matter if you were old friends or had only just met, he was warm and friendly just the same. It was not uncommon for complete strangers to meet him and come away feeling like they had just met with a friend, like the time I was browsing around Music Maker on Exchequer Street while he was buying guitar strings, and I came to find him at the cashier deeply engrossed in a conversation with the man serving him who threw in a free packet of Hannabach Gold Plated guitar strings to try, just because he thought John would really enjoy playing them. He never bought any other brand of guitar strings after that. Throughout my whole life until the present day I have had a myriad of people from John’s life telling me of ways he impacted their lives that stayed with them or indeed became a part of them.
In truth, I will always be waiting for summer days to roll around again, to pull out the garden furniture and scrub it clean of the winter’s indolence, to set the chairs around it with his favourite at the top, where he would sit with a cigar and a cold beer or maybe a coffee, getting the most out of a sunny day or relaxing after one of his many famous barbecues…or he could be sitting in his spot in the living room after a long day, or outside a restaurant in Paris with a glass of excellent wine, or on a hotel balcony on a warm night, or at the Mexican Cantina in Disney World in Orlando overlooking the lake and drinking the best frozen Margaritas in the world, or at charming spots himself and mum would find around France and Spain, enjoying local Cava and obscure and delightful liqueurs – to him each one was a moment to be fully savoured.
No matter what needed to be done next, or how busy he was, he was never in any rush to depart from these moments of contentment. He loved to sit and think – his brilliant mind was always busy, and he would share whatever he was thinking about – an old joke he was amusing himself with like “Did I ever tell you about that episode of Monty Python”, or a mad cap story from his youth of which he had many, or an interesting conversations he recently had, or something fun he was planning to do and wanted you involved with. He was never not trying to include those around him in whatever he was doing.
So, if you ever find yourself wondering “how do I seek out life in the face of death?” – live as John did until the absolute end: Permit yourself your every passion, never wait; grant yourself unconditional moments of stillness; inspire those around you with an insatiable hunger for life; and love fiercely from your first until your final breath.