Bereavement is a process loosely demarcated into stages. Individuals differ about the number; some say four, some say five and others outline seven, but they all agree that it begins with inevitable denial and anger and ends, hopefully, with acceptance. They are not a ‘linear timeline of grief’ but rather a tool to help us ‘frame and identify what we may be feeling.’ For me, there was less denial and more disbelief.
Dad was an ex County cricketer. A Glamorgan stalwart those in ‘the know’ called him. He wasn’t a star or a legend or a history-maker, but he was a name people remembered. In a country where being a sportsman was a passport to the collective memory bank of a nation, Bernard Hedges was a name that could conjure up thoughts of Summer and a hundred reminiscences framed in bright sunshine or dismal rain. In his playing days, every schoolboy in Wales would have known his name and the names of those he played alongside. Gilbert Parkhouse, Alan Jones, Don Shepherd, Peter Walker and Tony Lewis. Lists. Lists that went along with stories. Stories that said a lot about who we were.
Dad, practising an on-drive in the nets.
Feeling of disbelief (1) came courtesy of Sky Sports. Picking up on the tribute posted on the Glamorgan website they carried news of Dad’s death on their ticker-tape news line, and then with a brief story. The glowing pride I felt was swiftly doused by the indolence of the modern sports newsroom. The photograph that accompanied the news of my father’s death was that of Alan Jones. How could they get that wrong, I thought? Sadly, along with an ever-powerful media comes a creeping lack of attention to detail. Getting the story right NOW becomes more important than getting the story right.
The photograph of Alan Jones used alongside the article announcing the death of my Dad, Bernard Hedges.
Feeling of disbelief (2) came on the day of the funeral. We followed the hearse out of the house where Dad had spent his final days (the last thing we did for him was accommodate his wish to die at home) and down the hill into Oystermouth. I stared blankly out of the window, gently cradling the cue cards I had written for his eulogy. Everything was normal. People went about their daily routines without as much as an eyebrow raised at the passing cortege. How could they do that? Why were they not lowering their heads or lining the streets to honour my father? Bereavement, for the individual, is overwhelming and it is sometimes difficult to appreciate that for almost everybody else, life goes on. To use a cricketing analogy, one batman’s dismissal is the end for that batsman but the game goes on. In the game of life, there is no end of innings, just a procession of poor souls trudging back to the pavilion, more often than not to the silent sadness of onlookers and the soothing tones of an understanding bystander saying, ‘better luck next time’. Standing ovations are reserved for the very few. Even in Wales.
I was not angry. I was not denying it either. Dad had a long life. He had done most of the things he had wished. He had started out in the miner’s cottages of Pontypridd and ended up in a detached house in a private mews on the Gower Peninsula. He had come a long way, both physically and socially. And yet I felt there was something missing for me. Sport had always been our means of communication; our way of getting around the things that are left unsaid between fathers and sons. Although we were both complicit in the limited nature of our relationship I still felt responsible. About 2 weeks before he died, we transferred Dad from his own bed into what would be his deathbed, borrowed from the NHS and a requirement for having the palliative care team in attendance. As I carried him from room to room, I realised it was the closest I would ever come to hugging him. I owed him something that could, if not replace, then at least be a metaphor for that embrace.
So, I wrote about him. The fruits of that writing, ‘The Player from Ponty’ is soon to be published by St. David’s Press. All the interviewing and transcribing, all the time spent in libraries, all the mileage driving from Birmingham down to South Wales and back, all the drafting and re-drafting, all the discussing and editing; all of these were a small re-payment of a debt I felt I had recently acquired. I don’t know if all of that helped move me into the stage of ‘acceptance’. It was not so much that the writing allowed me to come to terms with his death, it was more that through it I came to a better understanding of his life.