Writer finds a way to grieve his father by rereading Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood"

A personal essay in the culture section of the British newspaper The Guardian describes how a book helped its author cope with the loss of a parent. The writer says that after his father died he felt nothing: he did not cry, did not lose sleep and rarely thought of him. The absence of feeling was itself unsettling, and it came with guilt.

The relationship had been complicated. As a teenager the author often resented his father and sometimes despised him, but with age he came to see that his father had struggles of his own and learned to value his decency and humour. Even so, months passed without grief arriving.

The turning point came when the author and his partner were rearranging their bookshelves and found a first edition of Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood", which his parents had given the couple on their wedding day. Inside was a note quoting the play, written by his mother but conceived by his father. His father loved literature and poetry and counted Thomas among the finest people ever to live.

A language that brought his father back

The author decided to reread the play and was struck by how much he missed his father from the first lines. His father grew up in the most northerly village in Wales, on the Irish Sea coast, and delighted in wordplay. Characters such as Dai Bread, the baker with two wives, Evans the Death, the undertaker, and the troublemaker Nogood Boyo felt familiar. He read the play in his father's voice, a London-softened Welsh accent.

That let the grief surface: he laughed and cried at once. He also recalled his father's tales of his childhood village, including a potato so large that a chip shop was built around it, and a huge boulder that only split after his great-grandfather, a stonemason, marked it with chalk.

The essay concludes that there is no roadmap for grief. For the author, the book means he can still hear his father's voice and stories.