THERE'S NOTHING ROYAL ABOUT THE PLACE WE'RE GOING TO

CW: Detailed descriptions of death and dying.

This blog was supposed to be focused on Marxism and psychology, and I promise my future writing will be more directly related to those themes, yet it seems I have chosen to open this post with an account of the death of my father.

My Dad was a good man. We were close. I have honoured his character, life and memory in words elsewhere. However, this post will be written from my own positionality and about my own experience of his death.

Honestly, whilst it may come across as self-indulgent, I think I needed to write these words as a therapeutic exercise. To empty my overwhelmed and overfilled psyche onto the page in the search of relief. To document what happened in the hope I can process and make sense of something I still don't really understand.

My aim is to talk about my personal experiences in Part 1 so as to be able to springboard into wider psycho-social-material considerations relating to how we struggle to process grief, death and dying under late-stage capitalism in Part 2.

Part 1 – The Wellbeing Wagon

On January 25th, 2025, I was in the pub with my father. By 8th March he was dead. He was 68 years old.

In between these two dates came a cavalcade of emotions, events and change alongside days of waiting and introspection.

From the initial notion that my father’s lethargic symptoms suggested his lymphoma had returned (and an assumption it would be treatable), to the relief when the doctors told us his bloods were normal. From the creeping dread when mom noticed how his gait had changed, to the shock of being stuck in a windowless side-room in Royal Stoke Hospital’s A and E department in shitty February weather and told that they’d been looking for the illness in all the wrong places. A CAT scan had revealed a brain tumour. In the week since I’d seen him, Dad had gone from being the man I knew to a scared, angry and upset individual, confused in a manner that resembled late-stage dementia and unable to get out of bed.

I knew from the start this was ‘it’, I felt ‘it’ in my gut (does this count as evidence?). My gut felt that a hospice would be more appropriate than a sterile hospital ward and could provide both of my parents with appropriate support. Instead, the following weeks were filled with waiting and promises of treatment once Dad, clearly declining, was ‘well enough’ to have a biopsy so diagnosis could be confirmed. The tumour was caused by Primary Central Nervous System lymphoma, a rare instance of lymphoma developing in the central nervous system and a disease with what the literature refers to as ‘dismal outcomes’.

Dad, only weeks ago sharp, funny and obstinate, lay in discomfort yet alarmingly passive for weeks in a shared ward. He spoke in garbled terms about his long dead mother whilst convinced his childhood friend was in the bed next to him, happy to receive our cuddles and affection but mostly unsure as to who we were. At the time I felt his reduced cognitive state was a blessing. Though ultimately it never came, I was terrified of the moment where treatment returned just enough cognition for him to truly comprehend the dire situation he was in.

On Sunday 2nd March I arrived in the midlands prepared(?) to have a difficult conversation with the consultant the following day. By this point Dad had become very sleepy, gaunt and weak. He wasn’t eating much. I wanted to ask the consultant ‘are you really going to try and give chemotherapy to a man in this state?’ It just felt cruel to me, but they still wanted to attempt treatment. ‘It’s what your dad would have wanted,’ we were told a few days earlier. An assumption made by medical professionals that cruelly fuelled a false hope in those closest to him.

However, on the Monday morning at 2am any hope was finally extinguished when we got an unexpected call from the hospital saying that they were no longer going to attempt treatment and instead that dad had hours to live. By 3am we were by his bedside and the very last words I heard from him were his now hoarse and papery voice finishing my aunt’s sentence. ‘We’re making plans Basil’ she said. ‘For Nigel?’ he replied. I assumed this was a final attempt at humour and a reference to the XTC song. Appropriate, I feel, for a man who enjoyed saying silly things to make people laugh.

Then comes the palliative care drugs, the deep sleep, the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. The drinking to decompress (you can still get a pint for £3.50 in Stoke on Trent…one of the few upsides of being stuck on the city’s hospital site for so long). The drawing close of family, sharing the final loss of hope in solidarity with each other. The cliched lines (the hearing is the last to go), reading the football scores out loud by his side, playing him his favourite songs (can you hear this one Dad? Remember when we used to listen to the Pixies on long car journeys?). The smell, the death rattle, more waiting. The banal NHS artwork in a faceless room (a painting of a window looking out over a mountain). Endless walks round the campus eating sweaty supermarket sandwiches. A static caravan emblazoned with the words ‘Wellbeing Wagon’ (*always* padlocked shut). The breathing, the breathing, the breathing (they said hours, but I guess no one told us how many), the breathing then stops.

I spoke at his funeral, I spoke well and I am proud of myself for keeping my shit together enough to honour him with a eulogy and only crumbling into small whisky-soaked pieces later on (should I be proud of hiding my grief in this way?) I went away with my partner and son for a bit. I managed to do a good job of forgetting all I had seen, heard, and felt. However, we all have to come home sometime. And when we do, the dead stay dead whilst everything else has changed, never to be the same again. And the drawing-close has become a retreating-back as friends and family deal with the loss by cracking on and ‘moving forward’.

Now, almost 6 months later I feel stuck in a grief that I can’t process. The cycle is always the same. I don’t think about ‘it’. The tension builds in my body; I struggle to concentrate and get irritable. I feel destabilised and confused. Then I think about ‘it’ and a million memories I didn’t even knew I had present themselves. I look down and my feet are my father’s feet; I greet my son with a hug and my father’s voice comes out of my mouth. I have a bit of a cry, and I feel better. I forget again. I’m stuck on the carousel of this process, and it keeps repeating and it’s tiring.

Part of me keeps thinking of the scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry, a man in his mid-70s, refers to himself as an orphan now that his parents are dead. This is played for laughs, surely an adult has well outgrown their parents and could not therefore be considered as such? I’m almost 40 and have long since thought of myself as an independent adult. So why has this experience left me feeling so lost?

Part 2 – The Purple Ribbon Scheme

From a very blunt economistic perspective, my father’s death could have been made a lot more dignified and a lot less painful if he’d have had proper care provided to him, within a properly funded NHS. At 6 foot 2 inches, the bed he was provided with was too small and despite our protestations he remained on it for most of his illness. The food was inedible and so we had to bring him food from home. The nurses were so time stretched that if we weren’t around no one would feed him as he was unable to feed himself. Consultants had to be chased for answers that were sometimes delivered insensitively. And I am now convinced there is a special place in hell for anyone who profits from a hospital car park. Everyone was doing the best they could, but they were doing the best they could within a very broken system.

There was no time to transfer my father to a hospice once he got his terminal diagnosis. One of the nurses proudly announced to us that, due to my father’s imminent death and in lieu of more comfortable surrounds, we were now eligible for the purple ribbon scheme whereby the family of a dying patient could have access to *one* free parking space, staff would now knock before entering the room and occasionally we’d be offered a cup of tea. In a more just world these would be presented as basic expectations, not bonus rewards for those who are unlucky enough to check-in to a hospital but never check-out.

Moving towards more psychological considerations, one of my biggest problems in relation to processing my father’s death is that I can’t attach any meaning to it. There’s no narrative I can draw. It didn’t make a lot of sense. It was an awful and random set of events that culminated in a very definitive outcome. A thing that just sort of happened. There’s no story I can tell myself that leads to some form of satisfying resolved narrative or has any coherence. Just a series of awful moments.

Sense making can’t happen using the standard medical narratives we all use (was he a smoker?). He was healthy and fit for his age. The cancer was rare and not linked to any lifestyle choices he made. Furthermore, he wasn’t able to make sense of it himself. One second, he was the person I had always known, the next he was not. When he first arrived in hospital, whilst he still had a limited ability to speak, his own sense-making was that he might have had a stroke. However, he didn’t have any time and space to properly comprehend his situation, say goodbye, or put his affairs in order. When I go back to the house he shared with my mother, tools are still left out on the shelf in the garage, briefly put down to be returned to at a later date that never came.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is theorised that subject formation occurs at the level of the imaginary order (images - how we see ourselves in the mirror, the face a parent makes when they look back at us, the commodities sold to us) and the symbolic order (the prohibitive world of language and the laws it produces). It is vital to note the social and split nature of this process. As we grow, we become ourselves through images and words that belong to the ‘other’ (whether this is a parent, or society). We do not choose the language we are born into and as small children we are split between the chaotic feeling of being ‘in’ our own bodies and the seemingly coherent image we see of ourselves in the mirror, which is both us and outside of us. Our desire is always the desire of the ‘other’, internalised into our subjectivity from the outside (regardless of what some of you might think, I was not born desiring a pint of beer). Despite these complexities and incongruities, for the most part we are able to subsume the outside world of images and worlds into our own subjectivity in a way that feels coherent and stable.

However, there is also a third order, ‘the real’, a remainder or by-product of subjectification which cannot be subsumed into images or language. It is ineffable. It can’t be comprehended or made sense of. ‘The real’ is a terrifying void that we are unable to articulate or internalise into our subjectivity. The experience of trauma is often understood by Lacanians as the experience of coming into contact with ‘the real’. This strongly resonates with my own experiences of dealing with familial death.

Yet I can’t also help but think we live in a time where we are particularly susceptible to ‘the real’ because subjectification of images and symbols seems to be more challenging in a world without rituals to help us make sense of the images and symbols thrown at us. As social theorist Byung-Chul Han observes, whilst rituals can bring with them brutal oppressions (think of the history of the Catholic Church), they also provide comforting structure and narratives. Having rituals intertwined into our daily lives helps us make sense of the world and is vital for our mental health. Religion, previously the place where many of our societal rituals were developed, is on the wane. Its stories of life-after-death have been replaced with a terrifying and eternal void (‘the real’?) arguably more tortuous than the medieval visions of hell that came before it.

Furthermore, secular society has also been stripped of its rituals and structuring narratives. The postwar story of societal betterment (my children will have it better than me), the idea we are all in it together building a new social state (the NHS, the social care system, education), the knowledge that we can fall back on community, the notion that I might progress through a career with a clear start, finish and end. None of these stories hold up in the cruel and meaningless world that neoliberalism has created for us.

Within neoliberalism there are few rituals (shopping on a Sunday) and only one narrative - growth. Whether psychological (individual self-actualisation) or fiscal (profiteering), neoliberalism reduces all relationships and experiences to an exercise in growth. Growth here is always a zero-sum game. Often it is denied to communities in order to protect the growth of capital, and sometimes our own growth requires us to deny the growth of others. Community spaces are destroyed to make way for flats no one can afford. We can only reflect and grow in a place that isn’t our own house if we can afford to pay someone money. The gig-economy creates no space for comforting narratives of career growth or future comfort. No one has any time to engage in collective projects of growth anymore. Growth and development are no longer situated socially - always understood in individual terms. Even our most intimate relationships are desecrated by the mute compulsion of capitalist relations (the secret account a partner doesn’t know about, the power imbalance subtly felt during a period of unemployment).

Here, the controlling aspect of ritual, so useful to previous societies, is no longer needed. We all go to work, convinced that we are freely choosing to do so, and our desires for ‘individual expression’ (our social media posts, our dress sense, our taste in music) are certainly no-threat to capital, indeed they often act to support it. Therefore the rituals we used to employ to make sense of our lives, with both their oppressive capacities and structuring forces, either wither on the vine or are actively destroyed by the relentless flood of capital flows; a tsunami of unstructured images and words.

Only, there's one immutable fact that the logic of neoliberal growth cannot overcome. Human mortality. An individual can self-actualise all they like, go from zero to hero, become a 'self-made-man', pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even fly to space...but at the end of the day we're all worm food. And in a society so solipsistic, once we're dead, that's that. Our own annihilation is perceived as the annihilation of the world because, when you are the lead role in the theatrical performance of your own life, once you exit stage and the lights go out there's nothing left. An abyssal maw where you once you stood.

This, of course, is both a seriously unhealthy way of looking at the world and also evidently inaccurate. There is a whole world out there that continues on without us, and ultimately manages just fine. Every society prior to the one we find ourselves in understood this and decentralised the individual, whilst providing some form of continuation in a way that ultimately, I would argue, helped us make sense of our own finite existence in a much more healthy and psychologically supportive way. Diurnal rhythms, the next generation, the kingdom of heaven, a return to the infinite.

Of course it's vital to note that there are certain religious demographics in Western societies that continue to resist the neoliberal logic of growth via a theological path full of ritual (see zakat - the Muslim practice of giving away a proportion of one's earnings to charitable causes each year relative to accrued wealth), whilst maintaining the decentralisation of the individual and a sense of continuance. I would suggest that the sense-making such religious practices and understandings lead to is likely to be one of the reasons evidence suggests religious people tend to experience greater happiness than the non-religious.

But for the rest of us, in a secular and individualising world so devoid of ritual and meaning, how is one to process the apparent randomness of a traumatic event?

If only it were so simple as to just reintroduce the ritual. Yet are we able to do this without a return to the direct forms of oppression that came with it? Furthermore, the return of ritual runs the risk of playing into right-wing narratives. It has to be said that the right have cottoned onto the need for ritual much quicker and more effectively than the left. Suddenly buildings are smothered in Union Jacks and St. George’s flags. True patriots watch the King’s speech whilst erecting the silhouette of a World War 1 soldier on their front lawn. Defend our statues! Do you remember back when the bin men were hard? There is a clear libidinal desire for rituals and narratives that the right are managing to fulfil with their fascistic notions of an English ethnostate that never existed. I feel it’s vital that, if we do turn back towards ritual, the left challenge fascistic rituals and narratives with our own that prioritise inclusion, diversity and solidarity.

However, I believe our biggest barrier to the leftist development of some sort of ‘therapeutic ritual’ is the postmodern cynicism of our times, making it impossible to practice rituals genuinely and authentically even if we try. I would argue that genuine rituals are only produced when subjectivity has to engage directly with the world, rather than through some other mediating force (capitalism, tv, the food supply chain) that creates an artificial distance. Praying for a good harvest is no longer required when you can buy food which it is impossible to grow domestically from a supermarket whenever you want. And we can’t think back to a time when this wasn’t the case. If we were to pray for a good harvest now it would feel odd and inauthentic.

Ultimately, we no longer live in Lacan's pre-neoliberal (he was writing between approximately 1950 and 1980) world of order, and structure. The postmodern world we now live in is comprised of a confused morass of incoherent images and words. We live in a time of what Baudrillard called ‘hyperreality’, so bombarded by such a plethora of commodified images and words that we can no longer access the object as it really is, only seeing symbols that are so far detached from the thing-in-itself that they no longer represent the original they were supposed to be a copy of.

When we close our eyes and think of a ritual or narrative (or any other object of thought) we are only able to think of an ersatz and commodified copy of the ritual (a flower thrown on a coffin as it descends into a grave, tears in the rain), creating a post-ironic distance preventing us from engaging in genuine ritualistic acts. In every Catholic church and cathedral I visited this year I lit a candle for my father, but I couldn’t absent myself from the awareness that I was ‘doing a ritual’. From the feeling that it was probably all bullshit anyway. From the awareness that I probably don’t really believe in anything at all.

I’m left with a feeling that the postmodern subject finds it harder to become a subject. In our current conjuncture we struggle to be subjectified into images and words in the way Lacan suggests because we are constantly viewing reality from a distance. Our subjectivity is mediated by the ‘all-too-self-awareness’ of capitalist social relations, and we are left unable to engage sincerely. Maybe under these circumstances, overstimulated with a bombardment of unstructured images and words we can only relate to ‘knowingly’, the traumatic and ineffable Lacanian ‘real’ expands beyond its previous borders to occupy territory that used to belong to ourselves as subjects that could make sense of the world.

Death, at the end of the day is quotidian. It is part of daily life, it is coming for us all, there couldn’t be anything more normal than to grow old and die. And yet, without ritual, dying, death and grief leave us face-to-face with ‘the real’, terrified, confused, shaken and alone.

Despite all this, I still feel a certain degree of hope that we can re-attach ourselves to something that might help us create new meaning and new ritual which in turn allows us to process death, dying and loss in a way that keeps 'the real' at bay. I do believe we can rediscover enchantment in this gloomy and statistically reified world. Reflecting on my dad’s death 6-months on I now recognise two things. Firstly, family and friends partially fell out of capitalist social relations for a time (compassionate leave, combined with the self-given permission to just stop doing due to exceptional circumstances). And secondly, this produced rituals, narrative and meaning without us even noticing. As a family and friends we drew close, we shared jokes, we put down our phones and we were present with each other. It’s important to note that this is not a call for the return of the ‘traditional family’, some of the kindest and most relational acts were performed by someone I barely knew before and would now consider a close friend. The important thing is, we made sense of the situation together and in doing so, narratives and rituals emerged. I note that it is only now when everyone has gone back to work and drifted apart again, that ‘the real’ has crept in so much more.

The challenge for us then, is to create a world where we can step away from capitalism, giving us the space to step into something else. We need to fight for a world where resources are distributed in a way that means everyone can die in dignity, eating food they enjoy in a comfy bed that fits them, in beautiful surrounds that are freely accessible to all visitors. We need to fight for a world in which we can step-away from capitalist compulsions (earn, consume, enjoy) so as to create the space to be with each other. We need to develop new rituals and narratives, of a socialistic and inclusive nature, that help us deal with the hardships of life, making us happier and more connected whilst we don’t even notice we’re engaging in them.