Grieving with Genesis

I don’t know how to cope with loss.

Last year, I found myself faced with the loss of my uncle, Mike. Mike and I had never truly been close. Family politics kept certain relatives away from my formative years and by the time grievances had been aired, I was getting ready to move away for university. I never got to form that familial bond. I don’t think there’s any pictures of us.

Mike had been dealing with long term health complications for years, and I was updated regularly by my Mum of his revolving door hospital admissions. It never seemed anything that the NHS couldn’t solve, and I foolishly never paid too much mind apart from sending good wishes his way.

It became unsolvable about 4 months into the grips of COVID, and he was placed on end of life care. He was cared for by his immediate family and various masked visitors. He was constantly surrounded by love and was as comfortable as he could be.

I wasn’t comfortable. I’ve never been comfortable around sickness, let alone death. I don’t think many people are. I hid in my discomfort, and used the pandemic to my selfish ends to not have to confront the uncomfortable. I made an excuse as to why I couldn’t visit — a government enforced excuse — but an excuse nonetheless. Truthfully, I was just being a coward.

Before I knew it, I was flying along the East Coast mainline dressed in all black, bleary eyed and paranoid about the carriage of people around me. Going to a funeral 200 miles away of a relative I was never close with in the middle of the pandemic felt strange and a bit stupid. I nearly backed out, several times, but I knew it was important to my Mum. I hadn’t seen him in his final days, and I felt an obligation to be with my Mum to support her through closing the chapter.

My self-preservation method is to disassociate thanks to a bucketload of trauma through my life. I find myself disassociated when I’m put in situations that make me feel uncomfortable, distressed or extremely anxious. Turns out this funeral was all three.

I don’t remember much of the service itself apart from my cousins accompanying the coffin in Hawaiian shirts, lots of people making shitty comments about some family drama I did not care about and seeing my grandma hysterically scream “no mother should see this” in a mask 2 metres away from everyone, grasping around for a crumb of physical comfort. It was fucking awful, and I ended up knocking back a lot of gins to pass the time until my train back to London.

I rested my dehydrated eyes on the green and yellow countryside swirling past me on the train. In my previous three experiences with loss, I’d become familiar with the numb feeling of knowing my immediate world was different without being able to do anything about it. This time, I felt a vice-like grip of guilt and regret at my selfishness of not properly saying goodbye in the pit of my stomach.

As the green and yellow made way for towers of grey, I was crying my way through ‘Invisible Touch’. Probably the first person to cry along to Genesis on an LNER train in a surgical mask, I’d assume.

Over the ensuing months, I found myself falling deeper into a Genesis and Genesis-adjacent hole. Phil Collins’ ‘No Jacket Required’ became a comfort listen, much to the annoyance of my boyfriend and pretty much everyone on my social feed. I bought Phil Collins merchandise. ‘Sussudio’ became my 2020 anthem, and not just because it’s an absolute slapper.

I have some vague recollections of sitting in Mike’s living room floor in the early 2000s putting in videoes at his command of various sessions from The Old Grey Whistle Test, and I’ll cherish them forever.

The 1986 Peter Gabriel interview was the first time I saw the video for Sledgehammer and was in complete awe of how fucking surreal it is. Every time I watch it, I feel nostalgic for being a kid and watching it on a fuzzy TV with someone who loved it as much as I do now.

In the same year, the Old Grey Whistle Test did an interview and live session in Genesis’s studio of ‘Tonight Tonight’ and ‘Invisible Touch’. I remember hearing the single ‘Invisible Touch’ for the first time in this session and not really understanding why the rest of the family maligned Genesis as weird. To me, growing up on a diet of Pantera, Deftones and Take That, it was refreshing to see a bunch of dads making fun music. It was wonderful to see my uncle light up too. Even as a child there was so much joy in experiencing a shared appreciation for music.

I wasn’t comfortable with the way I was told to grieve for him at his funeral, and I guess that’s why I’ve never felt known how to deal with loss. I didn’t need to sob or cry or share any memories. Most of the negative feelings I experienced were down to the expectations of my family and the assumptions of how I should behave. Turns out I just needed to find something that made me sense to me.

Listening to Genesis this year — Gabriel and Collins — became a way for me to connect to Mike that felt authentic. As I’d not been given the time to bond with him, my memories with him are sparse. The eulogies at the funeral were beautiful and brave, but they were about a man I didn’t really know because I never got the chance to.

All I really knew was he was a hilarious man who loved Genesis and wanted to share that with as many people as possible. I’m really glad he did.

Thanks Phil.