December 7, 2021

Today at the morning job, everybody had something to tell me.

One of the handymen stopped by for a long, digressive and very amusing chat.

The colleague who takes over from me when I leave was eager to talk about his weekend and even show me some photos from it; he's normally reserved so I felt very honoured.

The receptionist asked about my plans for Christmas and from there we got talking about family Christmases and from there she segued into a long description of her brother to which the only possible response was, "Deb, your brother's autistic." This prompted a deep and thoughtful conversation about autism.

But most surprising of all was Captain Chaos arriving, and instead of radiating stress like he normally does, all was calm and he even initiated some small talk - a first. He asked if I was from Cardiff; I said, no, Kent. He told me his nan had lived in Dover all her life and when she died they'd scattered her ashes from the top of the White Cliffs.

Then it transpired that this had happened quite recently, during the first lockdown, so they'd had to do the scattering surreptitiously, at night. Then he told me his dad had died just a few months before that, and that he dreamed about him all the time, often woke up crying, felt guilt and regret about not taking better care of him while he was alive, has been haunted by thoughts of death and dying ever since. He won't succumb to these dark thoughts because of his kids though, he wants to see his kids grow up.

This was not a conversation I was expecting to have at eight o'clock in the morning with a bloke who never normally speaks to me. But it explained a fair bit. I told him I'd had the same death-thoughts constantly after my dad died 10 years ago. The dreams too - the waking up with a face damp with tears: yes. And oh, the regrets.

I found after becoming orphaned in my 40s that nobody knows how to have these conversations unless they've gone through it themselves. You need to say these things out loud to another human being, but the people who won't recoil when you start talking about death are few and far between. So I sincerely hope speaking about this stuff heart to heart with someone who understood helped him a little today. It's a heavy burden to bear.

On a lighter note, before he left we also found out we're both Sagittarians and are equally outraged that we have to work on our birthdays next week. 

After he left I thought about Philip Larkin's The Mower and how true, how very true, those last sixteen words are.

Reporting this unusual turn of events to Deb the receptionist afterwards I mentioned how amazing it was that everybody had confided in me this morning. She said, "You've just got one of those faces."

When I got home, I wondered what that might look like so I took a selfie of the morning job face:

How can they tell???

Today's Photo: Re Leaf