The snow had fallen hard that Christmas and the journey from Norfolk to Oxford was a perilous expedition through an enchanting winter landscape. Abandoned cars lined the A34 on the long stretch north of Kidlington, and I felt a comforting sense of relief flood over me as I settled back into a lecture theatre chair in the fuggy warmth of St Catherine’s College. Many of the guest speakers at the conference I was attending had decided to stay at home due to the arctic conditions. Consequently, there were only about eight of us in attendance on that first evening. Our speaker was a poet and academic called Bernard O’Donoghue. My expectations were low given that I had struggled with poetry at school. I did not feel that I ‘got it’. Furthermore, I was very bad at committing verses to memory. I remember stumbling over an extraordinarily dull poem about autumn leaves much to the amusement of my classmates and the disappointment of my English teacher.
The Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue is an extraordinarily erudite and thoughtful man, and I have to say that I really enjoyed listening to him read his own poems on that bitterly cold evening. However, there was one particular poem which made me sit up in my seat and focus very intently and it was the poem that follows:
The Day That I outlived My Father.
Yet no-one sent me flowers, or even
Asked me out for a drink. If anything
It makes it worse, your early death, that
Having now at last outlived you, I too
Have broken ranks, lacking maybe
The imagination to follow you
In investigating that other, older world.
So I am in new territory from here on:
Must blaze my own trail, read alone
The hooftracks in the summer-powdered dust
And set a good face to the future:
At liberty at last like mad Arnaut
To cultivate the wind, to hunt the bull
On hare-back, to swim against the tide
In 1962, Bernard O-Donoghue’s father died suddenly, whilst watching a Gaelic football match. Soon after, Bernard’s mother sold the farm and the family relocated to Manchester and so the trauma of loss was compounded by the upheaval of moving and the challenge of starting over again in a place that felt unfamiliar. In this poem, Bernard reflects on what it feels like to live beyond the age at which his father had died. Of course, to some people it might seem a little strange to compute the precise age at which one will outlive a parent. It might feel a little irrelevant or even grimly morbid. However, for me, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to do. My father died suddenly from a heart attack on 23rd May 1983, and in a few weeks, I will be precisely the same age (to the day) that he was when he died. Actually, the precise date has been engraved on my mind for many years. I have been facing that date with a sense of sadness, gratitude and anxiety. It feels like an incredibly important day – a day when I will enter unchartered territory or ‘extra time’. It feels a little bit like I am travelling to the far side of the moon. The morbidly superstitious part of me has a real sense of foreboding. After all, life is full of coincidences and in my darkest moments I see an elderly man sipping a cup of tea at a funeral reception. He raises a quizzical eyebrow and murmurs, ‘and to think he died on precisely the same day as his father!’.
The date upon which I outlive my father occurs during Mental Health Awareness week which is either perversely ironic or deeply apposite. Personally, I can think of nothing better than using that day to focus on fundraising for our new Health and Wellness Centre. After all, there is nothing to be gained from staring out of the window and simply hoping for the day to pass by uneventfully.
It is incredibly important to have honest and open conversations about mental health. It is important to know that it really is fine not to be fine. I feel no shame in sharing with you that I am something of a hypochondriac or that I often feel a sense of social anxiety when entering a crowded room. Furthermore, I have gone through life feeling like something of an imposter and I have tended to view success as accidental rather than earned. At every stage of my life, I have made excuses for success. My ‘A’ at GCSE Maths was due to a combination of poor marking, historically low-grade boundaries and numerous administrative errors. I felt that everyone at Cambridge deserved to be there much more than me and that the admissions process had obviously failed to shine a light upon my intellectual weakness – I had somehow slipped through! Professionally, I have tended to imagine that any success has been down to stars aligning or serendipitous circumstances as opposed to skills or experience.
I am nostalgic to the point of being an obsessive curator of my own past. I am a self-confessed collector (my wife would say hoarder) but I love objects that remind me of a certain time or place. Like many adopted people, my sense of identity is continuously evolving and there are those times when I have felt that I am alone or that I don’t quite belong. Two years on from my mother’s death, I still miss our daily chats and subconsciously seek her approval. At times, the world can seem a lonely place without your parents and the child within us is never far beneath the surface. We all want to feel reassured that we are doing ‘OK’.
Of course, I am human and so there is nothing extraordinary or particularly interesting about the fact that I have so many obvious shortcomings. All of us faces a unique set of challenges and I expect many of you can identify with at least some of my anxieties and sense of self-doubt.
Mr Logan said at the beginning of the year, ‘you never know the cards someone else has been dealt’. This is surely true for each one of us possesses a unique combination of genetics and lived experiences. The person sitting to your left or right this morning may have experienced trauma or loss of which you know little or nothing. They may come across as assured and confident whilst feeling fragile and apprehensive. You might think they have got all the answers, that they have life ‘sussed’, but they are most likely searching for meaning like the rest of us. They may be looking in different places and for a different purpose, but they are looking all the same.
There is a lot of pressure to present ourselves to the world in a certain way. For example, people often think that those in positions of leadership should possess superhuman strengths and act with absolute certainty and a supreme level of confidence. Some schools make grandiose and unrealistic promises about equipping children with the necessary tools to make a fabulous success of their futures. Buy this ticket and follow these instructions and we will guarantee you success. Do not believe such extravagant promises.
Of course, most challenges have positive and negative consequences. For example, the loss of my father has meant that I tend to dwell on the finite nature and relative brevity of human life. It means that I can want to move things forward at a speed that can be disconcerting and frustrating for others. However, at the same time, it inspires me to live with an incredible sense of gratitude. I believe that our most precious commodity is time and that every day is a gift. I take nothing for granted but I also believe that the next moment is full of potential and may well be the moment that might transform you or inspire you in ways unimaginable.
Recognising one’s vulnerabilities takes real courage. It also makes us more empathetic and open to friendship and love. Realistically, our mental health may well fluctuate throughout our lives. There will be times when we feel energised and elated but there will be times when we feel despondent or alone. After all, nobody has provided a foolproof guide to living well despite the enormous number of self-help books published every year. In the Unites States of America, over fifteen thousand different self-help books are published annually, and the self-help industry is valued at $10.5 billion. Of course, part of the problem is that we do not get to live in a state of suspended equilibrium. Instead, we must contend with circumstances beyond our control, and we must learn to thrive within challenging and changing contexts.
So, the day that I outlive my father is a bittersweet day, but I am an enormous optimist and the unchartered territory which lies beyond this day possesses endless possibility. I do not pretend to have figured out how to live perfectly but I do feel that I am learning to live well. Most importantly, I know that much of what I do and much of who I am is directly attributable to the very real struggles that I have faced. I accept that I will never banish my anxieties, superstitions or personal sorrows but I think that I am beginning to learn to thrive alongside them. Furthermore, I have made my peace with these aspects of my personality, and I no longer wish to throw them overboard.
As we approach Metal Health Awareness week, it is my sincerest hope that you should feel comfortable being ‘you’ and that you recognise that your wonderful uniqueness is not dependent upon your ability to live a perfect life but rather arises out of an extraordinary combination of genetic traits, lived experiences, past accomplishments and incoming personal challenges. Everyone who has ever achieved anything meaningful with their lives has done so despite facing significant challenges. Meaning and purpose is often achieved through adversity and happiness is dependent upon gently finding a way to thrive despite the cards that we have been dealt. Acceptance should not be confused with passivity, and vulnerability should never be dismissed as weakness. Our imperfections should not be a cause of shame, and it is always good to talk. Above all else, it is worth remembering that we are all work in progress and you are loved for you and not some idealised version of you who, which would be much less interesting than the real you.
