Still Life with Robin

This story contains sensitive content of mental health and substance abuse and death.

He was mad. And I mean that in a clinical sense—schizophrenia. For me it was like watching a person who was not just broken, but entirely fractured and splintered inside.

Madness crept in gradually and terrifyingly—removing the man I called “dad” and replacing him with someone else entirely.

He loved to read, and he loved to walk. He loved to discuss metaphysics and the mysterious, myths and legends, and to visit museums. He had the most wonderful storytelling ability, which I will be forever envious of.

He once told me that there was a special university for grownups where they could learn “how to do the voices” of the various characters from storybooks. As a result, I was determined to receive acceptance to this magical university.

When we would see each other, he would always tell me stories: the plot of a film he had seen, or a book he had read, or a tale from history, or some ancient mysticism. I would sit captivated. Those visits, and that time I spent with him, I really looked forward to.

That kind of excitement is rare, I think—or it has been rare for me. To really relish and enjoy someone from top to toe, to be so enamoured by their very essence that you just can’t wait to see them. Because even though you don’t know what they’re bringing you, their very presence is enough.

John Donne wrote in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:

“Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion.”

From my childhood to my adult years, I have always felt that my father and I endured only distance, but no real separation. There was such real love between us—love that, looking around at the world, I know is rare. So rare that even a small amount of it can be life-changing.

One of my favourite memories was of our repeated trips to a museum. There was a display in this museum that had seen our footsteps more times than I can count.

Large halls and high, decorated ceilings, all singing with memories and knowledge of days gone by. The museum was grand like a palace and seemed, to me as a child, to only open and open—like a vast, expanding horizon. I always felt incredibly small visiting the museum, but this was a kind of smallness that brought wonder, not fear. It was like being engulfed in another reality—one altogether more pleasant, brighter, more fascinating, and more magical than the real world. This was where his stories came to life.

It was the perfect stage, with a wonderful backdrop and amazing props.

The best, though, was small, dusty, and old, taking up such little space in the museum’s endlessness.

The display was of perfectly taxidermied woodland creatures acting out the scene of the poem Who Killed Cock Robin. Their bodies were frozen, the birds’ feathers collecting little specks of dust. Even the water stood still in timeless suspension. A fish, its head poking out of the faux water, its scales seeming still to shine as though mid-jump from the waterless water. All stood perfectly frozen in place, held in an instant of abstract but painfully palpable mourning.

All the creatures gazed down at the small corpse of the deceased cock robin, a spot of blood more crimson on its already red breast. Somehow, though all were dead, only the robin appeared truly so. The others were merely still, their life still palpable. My fingers would rest on the glass, pointing and tapping at each one’s mention. No matter how many times I looked at it, it was as though something new was always about to show its face. Secretly, I thought that one day I would catch the little woodland menagerie move and begin their funeral procession.

My dad had these wonderful moments—poetry that he could call to mind and speak with perfect emotion and cadence. But most of all, I loved to be truly seen and loved. John Donne understood that real love is more than just “moon and June.” It is deep and raw, and it can survive distance, separation, and absence.

My dad became increasingly separated and distant from himself as he became more unwell. So much of him was taken over by paranoia and fear. He had horrendous delusions that were both terrifying and embarrassing—believing he was enjoying correspondence with Alec Baldwin, that doctors had implanted something behind his eye, that the leader of the Church of Satan was after him and had unleashed little black marsupials into his house.

Some of these things sound almost humorous. However, when faced with someone who believes them so vehemently, and feels all the emotions that go along with believing such things, they lose any humour and become only painful.

I watched, in my formative years, my father go from a man who could take care of himself to one so overtaken by delusions and false beliefs that self-care became a thing of the past.

Indignity is the word I find most apt to describe what I felt as I watched him. I watched him become lost and tortured by reality and deception. He did not believe that he was unwell at all, and there was no convincing him. That lack of insight seemed only to add to the indignity. There is an internal cringe that happens when we see someone embarrass themselves; I believe this was made much worse because I loved him so much.

When we truly love people, we feel their pain, want to help them with their struggles—and when we can’t, it is a form of torture.

When I was 11, my dad went missing for nearly seven years. I later found out he became homeless, spent time in psychiatric institutions, and took to self-medicating with alcohol and drugs.

What started as small mental fractures and breaks in reality spread like a crack across a pane of glass. It grew in that sinister way cracks do, expanding like a web until more fractures existed than solid, and then a complete shatter occurred. The chaos inside my dad’s head bled into his whole life until nothing but chaos and deprivation remained.

I saw how people looked at him now—the services he was involved with, how they treated him—as though he had always been this way. They didn’t know he was the man who took me to museums and read me poems. They didn’t know about the voices in the stories or the tremendous amount of love he had and had given me. That was the real indignity. Made worse, I felt, because I was the only one who could see it and feel it. So insightless was my father that others’ perceptions never seemed to bother him.

I tried—God knows I tried—first to find him, then to get him help. Through my teen years, I became quite the amateur detective. I called homeless hostels, shelters, councils, searched missing persons lists, and even phoned morgues on a few occasions.

Then, in my twenties, I did find him—but it was anything but happy. I found the shattered version of my father, the one so broken that I was just a distant memory to him. His home was the very definition of squalor: flies everywhere, no electricity, a damp, dank smell in the air. Vomit and other fluids on the floor. No furniture. No bed. As I say—indignity.

I contacted councils, housing agencies, social work, mental health organisations, and his doctor. But all they saw was an alcoholic. No amount of pleading or tears could change that. They listened to him when he said he didn’t want help.

It broke my heart to see him like that. It broke something deep and profound within me. The very core of my being—where I learned to love and receive love—was shattered. I wanted to avert my eyes from him. I fought so hard, and it was all in vain. I could never have back the wonderful man I knew so well.

A year later, a robin flew into my flat. Small, timid, and flittering.

“Dad?”

I asked the bird.

Unsurprisingly, other than a little flitter and a jovial chirp, it offered no discernible reply.

The robin stayed for a few minutes, hopped a few steps along the inside ledge, and then, as quickly as it had arrived, it departed.

In the three years I lived in that flat, there were no other avian visitors—nor, for that matter, have I ever been visited by birds in any of my other homes.

I phoned my dad’s mobile. No answer. I phoned repeatedly for days. Not getting an answer was normal, but something within me was deeply unsettled and could not rest. I think denial had set in even then, because I sat with this feeling of deep unrest for two months.

Eventually, I phoned the police and asked them to complete a welfare check, explaining that he wasn’t answering his phone and that I was worried—omitting any mention of the bird omen that had sparked this.

He had died. He died in his squalor. He died in his indignity. He died roughly two months earlier, around the time the robin had flown into my window. He rotted in his house for two months, and because of the pre-existing levels of squalor and deprivation, no one in the surrounding flats noticed a change in the smell.

When the police called to tell me he was dead, I already knew what they were going to say. I kept repeating the word “no,” as though saying it enough times would force it into reality.

I was very quiet, but internally it was as though a brutal, primal scream was tearing through every fibre of my being.

I went through every stage of grief—often just as I thought one stage had ended, another wave would arrive. None of the stages happened in order or one at a time. Sometimes it felt like being set on fire internally; other times I was frozen inside, numb to the point of an arctic tundra.

Numbness was always more concerning to me than burning emotion. I was often acutely aware that I should be feeling something, yet it remained unreachable. Inside myself, I imagined a great ocean swell frozen mid-wave, its peaks and white caps suspended in a single icy instant before crashing down.

Frozen—like those taxidermied woodland creatures. How apt that they should all be frozen in mourning.

For the first year after his death, I couldn’t speak about him to anyone, and I rarely spoke about him even to myself. To touch upon it was simply too painful.

But gradually, a thaw happened—where he could be both beautiful and gone. There were still great and unpleasant bouts of anger and rage, and late-night cries of denial and bargaining. But the pain became more muted, more dull, and some wonderful memories could exist, even if only for the briefest of moments.

When the trauma, disgust, indignity, and pain had cleared somewhat, what remained was the realisation that it hurt only because such love had lived within me and between us.

My dad read me Winnie-the-Pooh when I was young, and A. A. Milne was right when he wrote:

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

Because John Donne is right. Love is a Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.

Reconciling brokenness and pain with love is an exceptional journey. When I think of madness and mental illness, I think of my father. But I also think it’s madness that I have been able to process the experiences I had with him—his death, and the love he gave me. Amongst all the broken pieces, there is such beauty, and for all the madness, there was so much to love.

For me, acceptance doesn’t mean that grief ends or disappears. Acceptance is a peace that comes with love still fighting to maintain an expansion from the living to the grave.

Acceptance for me was being able to write this piece—without trying to rescue him, fix him, or keep him alive inside me, and letting go of the belief that I had failed because I could not save him.