A few days ago, we received the post-mortem on my Dad’s death and it has sent questions and reverberations through me and others in my family. Some of the language is too medical for me to understand, even with ChatGPT support, and anyway, I prefer to talk it through with human beings. So I was hunting for the document this morning to send to a doctor friend and, as I put “Post-Mortem” into my computer search, three separate Post-Mortem folders came up.

It was such a shock. Though on reflection, why would I even be shocked? Of course I have three post-mortem folders on my laptop.

One for Julia.
One for James.
One for Dad.

I wonder how many people, other than coroners, pathologists and procurator fiscals, have three folders called Post-Mortem on their computer? Not many, I suspect. At least, I hope not.

Three folders. Three sudden deaths. Three attempts to understand what happened, even when, despite having multi-page reports, we will never really know.

Not really really.

Having found myself in this territory more often than I would ever have wished, I’ve come to understand that there are at least two purposes to a post-mortem. One is medical and legal: establishing the cause of death, ruling out foul play and satisfying the state’s need to understand what happened. But for those left behind, a post-mortem serves a different purpose. It becomes an investigation into the story surrounding a death. Somebody who appeared healthy, vigorous and very much alive is suddenly gone, and the people who loved them find themselves trying to understand what on earth just happened.

What happened? What didn’t happen? What do we know? What don’t we know? What did we miss? What was hidden? What will now be out in the open?

All of those “What…?” questions are simply masking a heartbreaking “Why????”

Dad died eight weeks ago yesterday and, for all of that time, the story was straightforward enough, even if devastatingly violent and sad. Dad was walking on the Isle of Lewis with friends from The Arthur Ransome Society. He fell to the right, down towards rocks, and sustained a significant head injury. There were witnesses and the explanation seemed evident: Dad misjudged the path and the edge due to being blind in his right eye and fell to his death.

Like all plausible stories, it quickly took root. I told the story to friends and clients. I wrote about it in my blog. My brain did what brains do, constructing narrative and images to support the story. My dad losing his footing. My dad tumbling into a void. My dad dying from the head injuries sustained in the fall onto rocks.

No wonder my sleep has been so elusive.

From 1.30 a.m. to 6 a.m. my mind would rewind and replay the tape of this version of events. Real or imagined, it’s all the same to the brain.

Then, late last week, the post-mortem arrived and, instead of confirming the story, it scrambled it.

It turns out that Dad died from ischaemic heart disease caused by significant coronary artery disease. There was evidence of previous damage to his heart and evidence that his cardiovascular system had been under strain. There were also a couple of other things going on that I am sure he didn’t know about.

My mind has been whirring for days, trying to rewire one story into another, even though there is not yet a definitive version to settle on. Had Dad slipped, fallen and then suffered a fatal cardiac event? Or had a fatal cardiac event cause him to fall?

I know that the outcome is the same. I still have a dead Dad. But I noticed how much I wanted the story to be “heart first, then fall” rather than “fall, then heart”.

Today I had a conversation with a retired doctor, Dr Christopher Birt, who went to Dad’s aid immediately following the fall, and I now have some finer details with which to enrich my mind’s images.

Much needs to change about my visuals and the storytelling. Much needs to be revised.

I now picture my eighty-eight-year-old Dad doing something he loved. Walking in big, wide open spaces. Exploring. Being curious. Looking at waterfalls, landscapes, maps and geology. A man who, despite losing two children, despite being mono-ocular and despite the increasing indignities of ageing, remained immensely connected to life.

Then his heart gives out. He falls, bashing his head on rocks. He comes to rest on a grassy slope. He dies within minutes.

He might have lost consciousness immediately. Or not.
He might have experienced pain and shock. Or not.
There is still much that cannot be known for sure.
The fullest, most detailed truth remains opaque.

As this new understanding takes up space in my neural pathways, I notice that my nervous system is settling. The loss is the same, but the story feels different.

Less violent.
Less nonsensical.
Less utterly heart-breaking.

Grief is not just an emotional process; it is also a narrative one. Particularly with a sudden death, we scramble to make sense of what has happened. We create stories, revise stories, abandon stories and discover new stories. Sometimes a single piece of information challenges our entire understanding.

I knew nothing of Dad’s heart disease. I don’t suspect he did either.
What of the old brain bleed? Was that related to the car accident three years ago when he lost sight in one eye? Or to the two epileptic seizures he experienced decades earlier?
How many secrets can a body hold?

For nearly eight weeks, I have been living inside a story that felt complete. It wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole story. I’d been given some basic facts and my brain went and made up the rest. But now I need my brain to take on a different activity: re-storying.

Some of the facts themselves remain. Dad was walking on Lewis. Dad fell. Dad died. Yet the spaces between those facts have shifted, and as they have shifted, so too has the story I tell myself about what happened. The loss is unchanged, but my experience of it is changing. The images are changing. The emotional texture is changing. My nervous system is changing.

Thinking ahead to the writing retreat that I will be helping co-facilitate next week, I find myself noodling on truths and secrets — one of our themes. As I sit with this recent experience, I wonder where truth resides. Is it in the facts themselves? Is it in the stories we create from those facts? Is it in the weave and weft between them? Is it in the images our brains construct? Is it in a post-mortem report? Or does it live somewhere in the conversation between all of these things?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that facts and truth are not quite the same thing. For eight weeks we had facts: a fall, a head injury and a death on a Scottish island. Then the post-mortem revealed truths that had previously been hidden. The secrets hidden inside Dad’s body became truths. The facts would never have got us there.

What I also know is that I now get to carry a gentler story of Dad’s final moments than the one I was carrying even a few days ago. And after eight weeks of replaying the old one in the small hours of the morning, that feels like no small thing.

I think I might sleep better tonight.

 

Image – generated by AI, based on a photo I have of my dad out hiking.