Saying goodbye to my father

Still in shock and a couple of planes later, I arrived at the airport and there was my brother. Was this the meaning of the plane I had seen in the museum? I hadn’t seen him since he was 11 but the family resemblance was so strong there was no doubt who he was. He whisked me off somewhere for lunch and for some reason the atmosphere of the restaurant has stayed with me – it was strangely Mediterranean as we ate under a vine.  The years melted into our life stories, shared experiences alongside completely different ones – a wariness and a closeness, an odd familiarity. Envy and sadness of a shared life with my father that I had never had. My father had gone to Australia when I was 21. Even before that I had rarely seen him. My mother had died when I was three and I had been brought up by my maternal grandparents. 

 

We embarked on a strange journey together around the last days of my father’s life. My brother and his family lived in a humpie amongst 80 odd acres of eucalyptus trees, scrub land and huge boulders of shining granite. This humpie was the most amazing collection of planks cobbled together to form a shelter. Pride of place was a bath outside, connected to a huge reservoir of precious water. The loo was a toilet seat resting on planks overlooking the sea in the distance. When you had finished your business, you just shovelled some lime on top and voila! One of the best loos in the world. Pretty quickly my two year old niece, India, became my companion. We would wander off into the wilderness every day and tell each other stories, have adventures. Even the bull ants became our friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a few days, as a whole family, we went on a road trip to see my father. He was unrecognisable and yet familiar at the same time. He was beyond speech but he would look at my brother, then me and smile. He hadn’t seen us together since we were children. I remember using a cotton bud to moisten his lips – I think it gave him some relief but in my grief it also gave me something to do. It gave me time to deal with the feelings that, at times, felt like a series of tidal waves all jumbled up with memories. Every day was the same, my brother and I cajoling him to follow the light! We were helpless over the timing of his passing. We knew it but we pretended we had the power to steer his destiny! Sometimes he would grit his teeth as if to say “not yet”. Then one day, we got the giggles. The more we tried to pull ourselves together, the worse they got. I became very aware of my father looking at us both benevolently like naughty children – a chunk of missing childhood fell into place.

In the end, we had to leave with the reassurance from the nurse that our behaviour was normal – really? We went to the campsite for a while, spending family time with Jenny, my sister-in-law. baby Jack and my mate India. Somehow we got it together enough to go back. Finally accepting it was time. There we were again with aching hearts and strangely I saw a Chinese woman dressed in traditional clothes trimmed with red appear by his side in the ether. Who was she? Still a mystery today – who knows if I will ever find out, perhaps in a meditation when I least expect it.. Briefly, I was put out she wasn’t my mother or grandmother. But then, my father reached for my hand together with my brother’s on the other side. He started to rattle, slowly releasing our hands. As if in a dream, I followed his spirit through the open doors to the beach.  It floated slowly towards the sky, towards the moon which was still out. Numbly, I looked down at my feet,  a white feather was just touching my toes. It was the Spring Equinox.

My father had been a fairly mercurial figure throughout my childhood. Each time we were together I would dread saying goodbye and the sadness at the end of each visit would be overwhelming. They were special times. I loved being taken to his office, mesmerised by a different world, a small crisply laundered towel taken out of a drawer to dry my hands when I went to toilet. The icing on the cake was the excitement of taking the train to my other grandmother’s house, home made jam tarts, farmyard noises and the mysterious woods. A memory of my father holding my hand, feeling safe. He was a quiet man, a gentle dry sense of humour and a quality of stillness that was very precious to me as it contained a true sense of presence when we were together. He had been a very young naval officer during the war, promoted beyond his years learning to use drink to help him survive. Both my brother and I followed in his footsteps using alcohol as a coping mechanism.  Somehow I managed to stop with lots of help and support from fellow travellers. Sadly they didn’t and eventually they both died from the effects of alcoholism. I now know historically our family was riddled with isms of one kind or another. As time goes by deeper understanding of addiction is available now but my father was very judged for it, particularly by my maternal grandmother.

Despite her attempts to distance me from my father, I always knew I was loved by him and the few photographs I have of us together confirms that. He was ill-equipped to be a conventional father and the grief of losing my mother was part of that. His love of sailing, books, history, exploration, travel are all embedded in my DNA. The metaphor of how to sail has guided me throughout my life and still does.  Being in Australia when he died was the beginning of his greatest gift to me. Since his death, he has been the most supportive, the best Dad ever. A white feather randomly appearing, the smell of a pipe in the middle of nowhere like reassuring signposts. Sometimes feeling a tweak of my hair, a feeling of being gently nudged or even a book that persistently catches my attention until I read it. This has been his way of equipping me for life. The little tribe of my sons and their children are testimony to that. 

From now on in this story, he is there – ever present in the ether. I suspect he always was even when he was alive. I just didn’t realise it

His funeral was something else and typical of the eccentricity of my father. It was in a little whitewashed church by the sea, he loved the sea, as I said loved sailing. It is in our blood. The service was taken by a Sally Army chaplain. The congregation made up of the five of us, the Launceston chapter of bikers and a lady in a wheelchair who was in the same home as my father. In a slightly out of body state, remembering all the rainbows we had seen on the way to the church, I gave a eulogy for my father. I heard the supposedly hard bikers, all Vietnam veterans, crying. Later they said  it had made them think of the loss of their fathers. How war had affected their ability to father. My brother’s only solution to his pain was to disappear into a haze of drugs and alcohol, going to Melbourne with his little family to a Rolling Stones concert. I still have the tee shirt he brought me back with Voodoo Lounge across the front. Strange the things we keep.

In the humpie alone, I was in that altered state of grief, walking everyday with memories as my companions. There was also a sense of being prepared to meet the tribe, my tribe of Aboriginals waiting for me on the mainland that I had been told about in Egypt. I got very lost one day, it was overcast and I realised that I was surrounded by the sea. My usual tools for finding directions were gone – no sun and too much sea! I found myself praying to my father for help. I reckoned, as a sailor, he knew how to navigate and had safely reached his destination in other realms by then. I had a sense that I needed to use the pouch I had hanging round my neck as a compass. It was the pouch I had been given by a Native American wise woman – another story. So, I gritted my teeth, like my father in his dying days, and drew a circle in the soft earth with a cross in the middle for the four cardinal directions. I would pick a direction and use the pouch as a pendulum for Yes or No. By repeating this process every now and again, I finally found my way back.

Whilst I was there on my own, in the middle of nowhere, I realised  I had to get used to being literally totally in the dark at night time, especially when I needed to pee. Whilst the others were there it didn’t bother me wandering outside but totally alone – hmmm. I suspected this was another part of the preparation for the future, so in a very practical frame of mind I put out a blanket, a glass of water and found a candle I could use. I sat out there whilst it was still light until it got dark, then lit my candle and waited! Well quite quickly I realised that the candle light limited my vision and the rustling beyond it was pretty spooky.  I was beginning to feel I was superglued to the blanket. Then I remembered the “follow the light” which we had said to my father. So slightly trembling, I blew out the candle and saw the stars filling the sky. I began to talk to the stars, why not, especially as they twinkled back. The mysterious rustlings were less and less frightening, becoming strangely companionable. At some point I fell asleep and interestingly didn’t need to pee.