How my late dad’s impounded blue Skoda became a proxy for my grief

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/29/late-dad-grief-impounded-skoda-proxy-grief-bereaved

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My dead dad’s car has been impounded, and it is all my fault. I screwed up the admin, and now his much-loved 16-year-old Skoda Fabia faces obliteration. Given that I am the only child of two only children, both deceased, and that one of my 3am woodpecker threnodies of grief has been that my family has been wiped from the face of the Earth, I suppose that’s fitting enough.

Mourning, as you see, can be melodramatic. Because, in fact, I am nested in another family, huge and hugely loving, have stalwart friends falling over themselves to help, and plenty of material and practical resources to face the obstacles before me. Checking my privilege would require a long and detailed stock-take.

It doesn’t always feel like that in the early hours. Then, loss can seem like an isolation cell in which days, objects and sensations blur into one another in disorientating and befuddling fashion. A few hours that might have contained some productive work, a nice dinner, lipstick, chatter, red wine and the feeling that, “actually, it’s OK, I can do this”, abruptly recede and the mind is filled with the poetry of Sylvia Plath: “I am the centre of an atrocity.”

But back to the Skoda. I had been driving it even when my dad was still alive, to and from the hospital, to the next-door Sainsbury’s for more pyjamas and tissues and soft jellies and – God almighty, the hubris – to buy a cheap tablet that I hoped he might recover enough to watch football and cricket on (he never did). When he died in March, I knew I couldn’t keep the car indefinitely; I mostly live in rural Ireland and when I stay in London, have no real need for it. So I managed to pull off a self-deception – like all the best ones, with a grain of truth to it – and told myself it was useful to keep for now. For popping down to Dad’s flat, to clear it out, to ferry things to charity shops and friends, and (near-unbearable thought) to the rubbish dump.

Except I couldn’t bear to do that quite yet either, and there it sat, the clock ticking as its motor tax ran out. And then, quite unexpectedly, there it didn’t sit.

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At first, I thought it had been stolen – presumably by joy riders who found it an easy mark, because who would want to nick a 16-year-old Skoda in a street filled with far smarter cars? I wandered up and down the road, thinking I must have forgotten where I had parked it (the amnesia of grief or menopause, take your pick). No dice. And so I reported it to the police, who, after a few days, responded that in the absence of any evidence, there was so little chance of finding it that they would not be pursuing the case.

I put up a mild resistance: could it not have been picked up on CCTV? But unless I could narrow the time of its disappearance down to a 20-minute window, they countered, they didn’t have the resources to investigate. The end: and after some particularly vicious inner monologues (“You didn’t stop him dying, and you couldn’t even look after his car”; “he loved that car, and you lost it”, “he kept a photograph of Mum on the dashboard”, and so forth), I moved on.

So I was taken aback when a police officer called earlier this week. Your Skoda, he said. Not stolen, removed. No tax. Here’s the number to call.

Actually, he gave me the wrong number, and in any case, it was the first of many people to call. The car pound, the DVLA, back to the police on some point of clarification. Never, ever, through to the right person on the first go; a hell of automated menu options; quite often a mere instruction to fill out a form.

All my fault. I had an idea that the tax ran out at the end of June. But in fact it was the MOT that had expired during the car’s incarceration. The authorities had written to warn about the tax, and sent the letter to my dad’s flat. Yet you knew he was dead! I pleaded on the phone. But I had told the wrong department. OK, I said, but I’m in touch now. Can I pay the tax and get the car? Well, they said, of course you can. If you can pay the release fees and the storage charges that you had no idea you were racking up, which now exceed the car’s value by a significant margin.

Be kind to yourself, people say when you’ve been bereaved. You’ll be very tired (I am; shattered, save for weird bursts of manic energy). You’ll feel you should be getting on with things but you might not always be able to; you mustn’t worry about that, it’s quite normal.

But the people who say these kind things do not, sadly, make the rules. And the rules, even more sadly, do not stipulate that major life events deserve an amnesty in which you might be so focused on keeping your shit together that you will louse up the paperwork.

How could they? For all I know, I was the hundredth person to ring up with a dead dad and a sob story that day. That mine is true is immaterial. And so, ultimately, is the little blue Skoda. He won’t need it again. After a few days of tears and general existential crisis, I’ve picked up a bit and rowed back on the self-pity. “You know all this pain’s about your dad, not the car,” said my partner, very gently. Yes. Yes, I do. But sometimes, it’s easier to think about the car.