🪞Stained Glass

Stella Dove PDCH MBSCH
Aug 14
9 min read

Updated: Nov 24

On Mourning The Father I Hardly Knew

🪞Stained Glass

I sat in the stillness of the chapel, the coloured light from the stained glass falling across my father’s face — red, then blue, then green — and I realised I was really looking at him for the first time. He was gone, yet in that quiet, I could finally hold the little girl inside me who had waited decades for him to show up.

That moment — raw, unplanned, and strangely peaceful — is the kind of turning point I now witness so often in inner child therapy. We can’t rewrite the past, but we can meet the part of ourselves that’s been carrying the weight of it, and offer the safety it never had.

My father spoke like a matinee idol. Not the silent kind, obviously, but the perfectly enunciated consonants and slightly exaggerated vowels of a David Niven type, or a Rex Harrison. He used the third-person pronoun, “one.” The King uses it, and my old head-mistress did, but I wouldn’t, because when I do, it sounds ridiculously pretentious. He never abbreviated terms; so it was taxi-cab, motor-car, wrist-watch, refrigerator and perambulator. Maybe he just had plenty of time to say the long version of words. Indeed, his accent was the first thing I noticed, when I was twenty-two years old, and I finally met my father.

Not so very long after that, I found myself staring at his lifeless body. Apparently, the massive heart-attack would have been painful, but quick. My uncle, who looked like unbelievably like Kenny Rogers in the Gambler, told me that it happened at the bus stop outside his home in Maida Vale. He was to receive immediate family [sic] at his temporary pitstop; the non-denominational chapel of rest at St. Mary’s, Paddington.

I went along to say goodbye to my father, to the man I hardly knew; a relative stranger, yet so very strangely relative. It felt impostorial be considered immediate when I truth, I felt so incredibly distant. There’s no one closer than a parent, and other than a mother, there has to be a father; fertiliser of the ovum and provider of my first last name. I have since then had so many names, from deed-poll changes at my mother’s whim, to a temporary identification borrowed from a man to whom I am no longer connected and finally to a name of choice and a celebration of all that I am, Stella Dove.

But now he was dead, and sympathetically laid out to rest on a cloth covered slab, with a neat sheet and blanket pulled up high over his chest. I wondered if that that for modesty because obviously he no longer had a need to keep warm. It was extremely curious, looking at him; the dead version of my father. Just like him, but without animation; without breath, without life. Gone. Definitely absolutely final.

Yet it did seem incredibly unfair. I hardly knew him, and now there would be no more knowing. No more finding out, no more discoveries. No learning about his favourite colour, or movie star, or favourite pudding, or subject at school. I knew so little, but the little I did know was that he loved wine, France, hippos (both real and ornamental). I also knew he liked scratchy towels that hadn’t been softened in the tumble dryer, a hangover from boarding school since the age of seven, along emotional detachment and, typical of his kind, a classic ability to detach and isolate.

I was glad of the opportunity in that still and quiet place to really scrutinise his face, to leer deeply into it, and take note of all his features, right up close. After all, it’s not the sort of thing you do when you hardly know someone, so I had never done it, well not to him at least. I do not think I had spent more than two dozen occasions in his company, so I

hadn’t got to really familiarise myself with his face, which is incredibly ironic; him being actual family and me bearing a fairly strong likeness.

Being awfully old-fashioned, any outpouring of emotion would have made him uncomfortable, so my step mother deftly arranged our encounters include more never more than five minutes alone-time with each other, in case our solitude would feel awkward. They were pleasant enough get togethers; convivial and sociable. It was all very nice. Drinks, dinners, a couple of joints and a couple of day trips; one to Le Touquet, the other to meet my uncle (the Kenny Roger one) at Ford Open Prison. He was directing a pantomime. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and it made for a considerably unusual and interesting

afternoon.

I spent some time in quiet contemplation sitting in a chair at the head of my father, who was now deceased, which seemed terribly final and extremely unfair. It felt like the right thing to do because the opportunity to hang out with him wasn’t exactly going to repeat itself. The

determined April sun had climbed to its full midday height, illuminating the tastefully non denominational stained glass widow of the chapel of rest. It threw beams of light onto the dome of his head, bereft of hair, save a few silver white strands. By leaning this way and that, in turns his pate glowed from red to blue, then purple and green to yellow. To my shame, I was entertained by this. I was sitting with my dead father and finding amusement in the refracted light bouncing on his bald patch. It was just at that moment that I noticed we had similar high foreheads.

But what other similarities did we share? Would I ever recognise them now? I felt the bile rise from the pit of my stomach. Anger churned in me from the depths of my soul. My father. My father lays there, dead. Honour thy mother and thy father. Yes, the giver of life, but not the sustainer of it.Not the provider. Not the comforter or the cleaner-upper or the confident.

Not the bailer outer or advice giver or mean boyfriend defender. Not the picker upper from school or the tucker inner at night. Not the remover of monsters in the wardrobe or under the bed. No, he was none of those things. And now he would never be. Ah, but suddenly I was so angry!

Why did you leave me when I was just a few weeks old? I remembered a conversation from one of our earliest meetings. He told me that he couldn’t cultivate a relationship with me because at the time of my parents’ separation, I was a baby. In 1969, men simply didn’t change napkins…

My mother sent you away. She was angry. Because you didn’t send maintenance, she punished you and your mother by denying access to me and my sister. She justified her actions by saying it was inevitable that you would disappoint us. But I might have been the judge of that.

She returned your gifts, I never knew about them at the time, and you stopped sending them. It was just about her need for control, and an inability to share or communicate reasonably. And you backed off, knowing you couldn't ever win fights with my mother and knowing my childhood was going to be inevitably gloomy.

You came to my school once, with your mother, my grandma, when I was seven. The headmistress was under instructions not to allow access. I didn’t know you’d come, until you told me, by then I was twenty-two.

“Go to your father. See how much he wants you...” But I couldn’t. And you didn’t come. I couldn’t even get my own father to show up for me.

Why were you so passive? Why did you tell me that you always knew I’d come to find you eventually when the time was right? Who does that to a child? Do you know how I felt while I waited? Can you imagine how I watched with endless inquisitiveness, the fathers of my friends? How, in idle moments, I would long for one of my own? How I looked at strangers on the tube or walking down the street or waiting at bus stops or sitting in cafes wondering if that man might be my father?

You said you always knew I’d come to find you and eventually I did. Your passivity paid dividends while my curiosity coughed up the cost. And finally I sat there at your corpse and the questions remain unanswered and you were gone...

But that little girl with the deep wounds had grown up and I sat there in a chair at the head of my father, who was definitely absolutely now dead, and never coming back, and I comforted my younger self, and held her close. That abandoned child, who just wanted to be loved had become a woman of considerable strength and resilience but she never knew real peace. That moment of sitting with my younger self was the kind of turning point I now witness so often in my inner child healing London work - where we meet the ache, not to erase it, but to hold it until it softens.

I stared at his face; in truth it was a sweet face. In my evolving mind, I simply couldn’t be angry with such a passive and weak man. He was not really a bad person, although his inactions had led to consequences resulting in enormous pain and considerable anxiety.

But, could I forgive him, for even though it was unintentional, he still had caused unquantifiable suffering?

I sat there, for an inordinate length of time, undisturbed in the calm and cathartic silence of the non-denominational chapel of rest at St. Mary’s, Paddington, and eventually arrived at a final place of peace. My father, may his soul rest in eternal peace, did what he could; what was within his capacity, and what he believed to be right. Now it was my turn to be the adult, and all I could do was make peace with the man who was my next of kin but whom I hardly knew.

When I saw the plain coffin draped in blue velvet, I felt nothing but sadness for what never was and now, what could never be. My adult self mourned for the inner child within me, and then as he was lowered into the ground, I let it all go.

Mother Earth swallowed up my pain and absorbed the tears from both our broken hearts. Back into the dust from where we all come and where we all must go.

It can be a struggle to let go of grief, and it is definitely a process, but in the end, just like Stained Glass, you will see such beauty in the fragments. This is the same steady, compassionate process at the heart of my inner child healing London therapy, where past and present finally learn to coexist without constant pain. Revisited here on the 25th anniversary of his passing.

💔 What the Father Wound Teaches Us

When a parent is physically present but emotionally absent — or, as in my case, simply gone — the child grows around that hollow space.

It isn’t just a story of loss; it’s a blueprint of attachment.

The body learns that love can leave. The nervous system hardwires vigilance, and the brain adapts to expect disappointment.

This is why so many survivors of the absent father wound struggle with trust, boundaries, and belonging. The ache we feel isn’t only emotional; it’s neurological. Early separation can disrupt the developing brain’s capacity to regulate stress, leaving the adult self oscillating between longing and defence.

If you’ve ever found yourself:

drawn to emotionally unavailable partners,
over-performing for affection, or
fearing abandonment even in safe relationships —

you may be living out the echoes of that early fracture.

In trauma-informed inner child healing, we don’t rewrite the past — we reparent the part of us that still waits.Through emotional recalibration, we gently rewire the nervous system, teaching the body that safety can be consistent, and love can be calm.

We meet the grief, not to drown in it, but to hold it — until the nervous system learns that being held is safe.

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