It’s twenty three years since I last saw my father. I can remember the day but I can’t place the exact moment I saw him for the last time. I was six years old and Tuesday 13th April 1982 was just another day of the Easter holidays. On that morning my father woke me up and pulled back the bedroom curtains with his usual cheerful refrain for me to “rise and shine”. It would be the last time he said those words to me. They were amongst the last words he ever said to anyone. A massive heart attack killed him later that morning.
If I can’t remember exactly when I saw him alive for the last time, I can certainly remember the place he died, the sight of him lying on the pavement, the crowd of people gathered around him and my mother screaming his name. You certainly don’t forget something like that. That kind of thing stays with you. It’s hard to think of a more unforgettable experience.
Abstract images. They’re all I have when I try recall the rest of 13th April 1982. I remember the ambulance journey to the hospital, the paramedics performing heart massage on him and know I knew he was gone. That wasn’t my father lying there. Nothing of the man I knew of as my father was still with me. Two words from one of the paramedics confirmed it, “he’s gone”. I didn’t cry in the ambulance. I didn’t cry for years. Twenty two years to be precise, when the anger came with a torrent that shocked me to my core.
Time passes and the next memory I have is of being in a small room in the hospital. A nurse was comforting my mother and asking her questions about my father. I found out then that he was sixty two years old. I thought he was twenty four. That’s what he told me when I asked him. You don’t spot irony when you’re six and I had no idea that my father was so much older than my friend’s fathers. I wonder why I ever had asked him his age. I suspect now, although I have no recollection, that it was an issue for him and I must have sensed it. The gossips must have noticed his age when he came to collect me from school. He must have felt the eyes of those other parents upon him. That must be why I asked him.
Later that day I had dinner at a friend’s house. His mother served spaghetti on toast. I’m told family members came and stayed until after the funeral. It was thought I shouldn’t attend and thus began the policy of sweeping it under the carpet. They meant to help, they tried to shield me from it but it was the wrong thing to do. I know that I used to act out the scene of his death. I’d lie motionless and still, my mouth agape. An uncomprehending child trying to understand that grotesque image burned into my young mind. Child psychologists would point to classic behaviour. I wanted to understand. I wanted to know what would happen to me when I died. My mother caught me and through her tears I was told never to do it again. And so it was bottled away.
We are, so the adage goes, also what we have lost. The man I am today was forged twenty three years ago. I was sixteen when the panic attacks started. The chest pains, the morbid fixation with death. I started counselling but I couldn’t face raking up the past. I found that cutting myself would ease the pain. I was given drugs but I didn’t want to be dependent on them. I couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t face the daytime. Since then I’ve not stayed in continual employment for more than four years. I racked up huge debts convinced that I’d be dead before I had to repay them. I’ve drifted from job to job, from town to town and from failed relationship to failed relationship.
This September I will return to University and I will begin the rest of my life. It might be another abortive attempt at putting the past behind me or it might be the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ll only know when I try. I’m no longer afraid to fail. I held my stepfather’s hand when he died in February. I’m no longer afraid at all.
Twenty three years ago my father died. It’s time to rise and shine.
