I’m Empty and Aching, and I Don’t Know Why
Remembering my father, George Georgiou (2 July 1959 – 9 January 2016).
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
Content warnings: Death; Cancer; Bereavement.
Today is the eighth anniversary of my father’s passing. He died, too young, from a combination of pneumonia and shingles; complications arising from slowly progressing but incurable brain cancer.
I have spent my thirties grieving my father. I spent my twenties grieving him in anticipation, so drawn out was his illness. My life now is defined by his absence. And yet he is a constant presence in my dreams, in which I am nearly always in dialogue with him. And whenever I am in conversation with my own children, I hear the echoes of the conversations I had with him, and I sometimes feel like I am playing a part that he had already etched out as a young man.
And so I find it hard to believe it is just eight years ago that he died. And I find it hard to believe it is as long as eight years ago that he last lived.
I always feel the most appropriate way to commemorate my father is by playing Simon & Garfunkel. They made his favourite music, songs that were like him: gentle, humorous, nostalgic, wistful, bittersweet. Those songs ground me in relation to the world that preceded me, the decades before I was born, just as he did.
This is the song of theirs that I feel best embodies my connection with my Dad. I remember us singing along to it together. I think its final lyrics embody how I feel in a world without him in it better than anything I could write.
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