When your old man goes

There's a particular phone call most men get eventually. Picture one of them: a bloke in his fifties, I'll call him Baz, standing in a hardware store car park listening to his sister say the words about their dad. He drives home, tells his wife, rings his brother, organises what needs organising. At the funeral he speaks well, shakes every hand, keeps an eye on his mum. People say he's doing incredibly well.

Four months later, Baz is a mess in the ute outside a job because a song came on that his old man used to hum. And his first thought isn't grief. It's confusion: I was fine at the funeral. What's wrong with me now?

Nothing is wrong with him. That's just how a lot of men grieve, and almost nobody tells us, so we go through it thinking we're doing it wrong.

Grieving sideways

Women, broadly and with plenty of exceptions, tend to grieve toward people: talking, crying, gathering. Men more often grieve sideways, into activity and management. There's a job to do, so we do the job. The funeral, the estate, the lawn at mum's place. Some men barely feel anything for weeks, because the feeling apparatus has been switched to task mode, and task mode is genuinely useful. Somebody has to ring the funeral home.

The bill arrives later, when the tasks run out. And it comes sideways too: working harder than the job needs, snapping at the family over nothing, going quiet, an extra beer becoming three, and the ambushes. The song in the ute. Reaching for the phone to tell dad something and getting halfway through the dial. His handwriting on the side of a paint tin in the shed.

None of that is failing to cope. That's what coping actually looks like in a lot of men. Dry eyes at the funeral and tears in the ute in October are the same grief on different schedules.

Fathers are their own category

Losing your old man carries extra freight, whatever the relationship was.

If he was a good one, you've lost the bloke you measured yourself against and the last person whose "good job, son" meant that particular thing. If it was complicated, and plenty are, you've lost something harder: the chance for it to ever be different, and grief for what never happened is heavier than people expect and comes tangled with anger and guilt.

Either way there's the quiet shift nobody names: with the old man gone, you're the older generation now. More than one man has described standing at his father's funeral feeling like someone had moved him to the front row of something without asking.

What helps

Let the schedule be yours. If it hits at the funeral, fine. If it hits four months later in the ute, equally fine. There's no correct timetable, and "doing incredibly well" in week one means very little about month four.

Talk about him. Saying his name, telling the stories, the daft ones especially, is how the dead stay with us properly. Men often avoid mentioning a dead father to spare the family, and the whole family ends up not mentioning him to spare each other. Somebody has to go first. Be the one.

Watch the sideways leaks. The overwork, the fuse, the drinking. If they're creeping, that's grief asking for a better outlet. Give it one: the yarn with your brother, the walk, the honest sentence to your wife.

And know the difference between grief and being stuck. Grief comes in waves and, over months, the waves slowly space out. But if it's been a long while and everything is still flat and grey, if you've lost interest in the lot and it isn't shifting, grief may have quietly turned into depression, which is a treatable thing and not a character outcome. That's a GP conversation. Or start with 1737, free, call or text, any hour. "My dad died last year and I don't think I'm right" is exactly the kind of thing they're there for.

Baz finished up all right, as most men do. He kept the paint tin, hums the song on purpose now, and got told by his own son that he'd started doing the same throat-clear his grandad used to do. That's how it's supposed to go: the old man gets carried forward, not carried silently.

If you need to talk: call or text 1737, free, any hour. In an emergency, call 111. The full list of helplines is at the bottom of every page.