I found out this morning that my friend’s dad died.
When did my father die? I can’t remember anymore. Was it the 3rd or the 9th of October? I remember the year, at least, 1997. Twelve years ago, not quite 2 months after my wedding, which he couldn’t attend.
It’s all a blur. The wedding, the new house and the landlord’s cat, dad’s death, visas, immigration, the funeral and the three months living with my mother, sister and husband all together afterwards, the unemployment, the lost university course, the relapses, the wheelchair, the steroids and anti-depressants, the generous gift from an anonymous stranger so I could get afford my visa and return to my new home. It all seems so distant and like it happened to somebody else. And the strongest memory of the day that he died is is not of the phone call but of our friends M and J buying us fish and chips so we didn’t have to cook.
I think he had already died to me, when his brain became too damaged to know anyone, remember or understand anything. He wouldn’t have known if I had managed to fly back before he died. I tried, but I didn’t make it. And he wouldn’t have known. The last time I had seen him was at the airport nearly a year before when I had to turn my back and walk away from him, wondering if that was the last time. I hardly knew how soon.
I walked myself down the aisle when I married. He wasn’t there, he was too ill, though I barely knew how ill. I had always said that it was either both my parents or me alone. So as it was, it was me alone, sobbing to Pachelbel’s Canon, part because at that stage of my new illness I was overwhelmed to be walking at all, and part because of an immigrant’s overwhelming experience of the simultaneous experiences of the joy of marital gain and the grief of homeland loss. And I knew he would die. . . though not so quickly. I knew I was leaving and losing everybody for good. . . though not that it would become so irreversible and sealed by so many deaths and changes. So I sobbed the whole way, clumsily knocking pew ends off with my massive bouquet of sunflowers.
I never really held the anniversary of his death, and so I don’t remember the date. I’m sure it was early October. I have a feeling he died on the 3rd and the funeral was the 9th. The time that reminds me of his death every year is not October, but actually in June when all of the shops start advertising for Father’s Day. People in the country where I now live scoff at the holiday as a fake capitalist construct by Hallmark, but it meant something to my dad. It took me many years to pass a shop in early June and stop thinking “Oh, I need to get a card for dad. Oh, I can’t.”
He just missed his 80th birthday, and his 25th wedding anniversary with my mom. That was 12 years ago, so that means that this month, had he lived, he would have been 92. wow. His birthday was at the end of October, either on Halloween or the day before, I never remembered. I just knew how much he hated Halloween. Not because of his birthday or for any principle or religious reason. . . it was just one of the many things in life that annoyed him.
Like the NASDAQ. He just hated the sound of it. He was obsessed with the news, but complained each and every time he heard a financial report, because he hated the pronunciation and the sound of the NASDAQ. Which I only mention at all to demonstrate that he was a strange man with many quirks. I inherited many of his quirks. I am bound by so many of them. We are so subject to what our parents give us, for good or for ill.
Dad was born in 1917. Which meant I had a somewhat different kind of upbringing for someone born in the mid 70s. The early 20th century in my home country (any country), was a very different world to the one I was born into, and he struggled to parent a child in the late 20th century. He saw so much. His brothers fought in WWII (one died in the Philippines), he was medically discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (or at least I was told once). He was in the army air corps, he ran his own garage, he kept and remodeled classic cars, he drag raced other drivers on the highway, he snored loudly, he was in a country band that played on the radio in the 1930s, he got thrown out of university for walking a girl home and standing on her porch, he was reinstated and became an engineer, he started his own gym/training centre in his 70s, he had been electrocuted so many times that when he tried to teach me to use a compass, the needle would point to him, not north, he would come looking for me at 3 am when I was 18 and out with my boyfriend, telling me to come home, or else, and when that little girl of his came home a few years later from a foreign land and could no longer walk or pick things up or write or see and could not even lie in bed at night for the raw, heavy pain of the sheets on her legs, he stayed up all night and let her cry. So much happened to and around him. I can hardly blame him for the things he got wrong.
I have not been to his grave since the day of his funeral (now that was a strange experience! The service was run jointly between my mother’s Evangelical minister, my sister’s high Anglo-Catholic, gay priest and a an old friend of my father’s, a man who had spent time in jail for militia involvement and tax evasion as he believed the money belonged to God and not Cesar!). My mother has moved on and can’t go back. I wanted to go there when I recently travelled to the homeland, but there was no one to take me, and I never dared ask anyone. There were too many memories to drag anyone through.
Dad didn’t want me to go, but he knew he couldn’t/shouldn’t stop me. And now, just as I never knew my grandfather, my daughter will never know hers. I wonder if he had lived, if I would have stayed here, in my chosenland quite as long.
I wonder what a person is willing to give up for their family. He gave up so much. Family was everything. It was the only thing.
And I still left. Sorry dad.
