I felt nothing but numbness at my dad’s death – but then I read the book he gave me on my wedding day

I expected to break. But I felt nothing. I did not cry, nor struggle to sleep. I seldom thought of him. I felt only guilt about how little I felt. Ours was a complex relationship. As a teen, I often resented my dad, occasionally despised him. I expected the world and found disappointment. But, as I grew older, I understood that he had struggles of his own. I learned to appreciate his decency and humour, his ability to make everyone laugh with only a few words. I loved my dad, from the first time he held me to the last time I held him.

But still, as weeks turned into months, I struggled to grieve. Then, when my partner and I rearranged our bookshelves, I found the first edition of Under Milk Wood that my parents gave us on our wedding day. I turned the cover and saw the note: “And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for our wedding.” It was my mum’s writing, but my dad’s idea. The man loved literature and poetry and considered Dylan Thomas, along with his dad and the Welsh rugby full-back JPR Williams, one of the best man to ever occupy our world.

I decided to re-read Under Milk Wood. I took in the first few lines and I suddenly missed him so entirely. My dad grew up in the most northerly village in Wales, on the shore of the Irish Sea, a place full of humour and surrealism. It made him a glutton for wordplay. Names in Under Milk Wood felt all too familiar: Dai Bread, the baker with two wives; Evans the Death, the undertaker; Nogood Boyo, the troublemaker. I heard my dad laugh at the Preacher’s words: “Will you take this woman to be your awful wedded wife?”

Thomas, like my dad, leaned into linguistic excess. Consider the sea, the jollyrodgered sea, dab-filled sea, still still sea, seesaw sea, seas barking like seals, seas green as a bean. I read the play in my old man’s voice, that London-diluted Welsh, with rolling Rs and whispering double Ls. It helped me access grief and mine proved a good grief: I laughed as I cried, cackled as I wept. My grief reminded me of all we’d lost, all we’d been lucky to have.

Small towns and villages possess their own mythology, secured by whispers, spread by gossips, growing wilder by iteration. I remembered my dad, sitting with me in the garden, a laugh so laughable it made me laugh, telling his child stories of his own childhood. A woman in his home town once grew a potato so big they had to build a chip shop round it. There was a crab who people knew on a first-name basis. Sledgehammer-wielding men could not break a boulder, size of a house, until my dad’s taid (grandfather), a stonemason, drew a small cross in white chalk. “Hit here,” he said, walking away. The boulder shattered into a thousand pieces.

Under Milk Wood brought the stories rushing back, with its own chronicles of absurdity. A sea-lawyer from Mumbles dies from blisters. It is always opening time in the never-closing Sailors Arms, because the clock has been stuck on half past 11 for 50-odd years. And Nogood Boyo was a fisher who never caught a fish, but did catch a woman called Mrs Samuels. Stories spread in winding whispers, embellished at every turn. The stories are seemingly implausible. But they are without doubt true, ask anyone.

I realised, spending time in Milk Wood, that there are no roadmaps for grief, nor a right way to grieve. Mine proved tragicomic: pain laced in laughter. And I’m lucky because next month, perhaps next year, I can pick up Under Milk Wood and it’s as if I get to see my old man again. I’ll listen to his stories. I’ll get to hear his voice. So, with that in mind, best to depart on the best part, Eli Jenkins’s prayer, and a stanza that truly captures my dad:
We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.