I was sitting at the kitchen table the other day watching a TED video, as you do… and my mobile phone rings. I glance at the screen and see that it’s my Mum calling. So I answer the call, and say, “Hi Mum”, just like I always do… only to hear a male voice saying, “No, it’s Dad.”
*WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!?*
JTFC! This seriously and immediately did my head in, because my Dad passed away in 2007. It was actually my father in law, who is currently visiting from Canada and staying at my Mum’s house while she is travelling… and while somewhere deep down in my logical brain I knew it couldn’t be my Dad, the distracted manner in which I answered the phone and the expectation that it would be my mother, followed by a declaration that it was my deceased father, allowed an immediate, and completely irrational, reaction that stayed with me for several hours.
It happened in just a split second – I heard the male voice and was then frantically looking around the room in confusion and my heart felt like it had leapt into my throat… I felt like I was floundering and my brain was having trouble keeping up with the enormous negative adrenaline rush that over took my body. It was like some weird lizard brain fear/disbelief reaction that I have never experienced before. Absolute discombobulation. Then a fleeting moment later it penetrated that the male voice had said ‘Doug’ and not ‘Dad’… and I just burst into tears.
It was a truly surreal moment. I felt like my brain was trying to resolve some sort of unresolvable situation. I have no way to describe it other than I ‘freaked the fuck out!’… and I am not the type of person who ‘freaks the fuck out!’ about anything. Additionally, I most certainly do not believe in anything that would even remotely support concepts of contact and/or interactions with people who are dead. But my brain didn’t seem to remember any of that, right there in the middle of that bizarrely intense over-emotional unreasonable moment.
I would give just about anything for a phone call with my Dad, I have so much I would want to tell him, so many things I would I want to ask him, people I would want to introduce him to. So much has happened since he left. You know, most days I don’t think about Dad at all, and we all just go about our lives. But whenever I do think about him… I miss him so much it hurts.
