Fathers and Sons

The story of my dad

My dad and me, drawn from a photograph.

I don’t remember the exact day when he died, or when we heard the news.

Memory, for me, has always been a very fuzzy thing. Ill-defined. Blurred. Time gets away from me, and I am rarely able to estimate the time distance between memories.

I do remember what I did: I went out with my buddies to skate the day and night away, to flush the initial emotional turmoil out of my system, and then drink heavily. That was usually how I handled heart break: physical activity, followed by alcohol. The emotions had this strange effect of boosting my skill and confidence level on the skateboard. Most likely, it was due to becoming less inhibited, less afraid of pain.

I didn’t cry. Not at first.

It wasn’t until I was standing at the rostrum of the tiny little funeral chapel near his home in Queensland several days later, fumbling with the papers on which I’d printed out what I intended to say, that it all came pouring out.

The tears made it impossible to read from my notes, so I set them aside and just spoke.

Of the 5 people who attended, only 3 of them knew anything about my Dad, and I was one of them.

My dad was born in Germany, and emigrated with his family here to Australia when he was 10. Coincidentally, he travelled here on the very same boat at the very same time as my Mum, but it would be another 20 years before they’d meet each other for the first time. My mother and her family were coming from France.

My dad had 3 brothers, one of whom had severe cognitive disabilities. Being the eldest, he protected them from their brutally violent stepmother, who used to beat them with all her strength, at every chance she got, for no reason. Dad would physically place himself in the way, and take the blows meant for his disabled brother.

As he grew up, he took numerous different jobs, all generally within his areas of interest: he once drove freight trains across the nullabor, and later became a hospital pathology technician. Sadly, he didn’t get far into his independent adult years, free from his sociopathic stepmother’s beatings, before he became stricken with a chronic, incurable, and awfully painful illness.

Crohns Disease is auto-immune. The body’s immune cells detect a foreign invader, and set to work to destroy the invader and cleanse the body of all traces. The only problem: the supposed invader is not an invader at all. It’s your own intestines.

For whatever reason, the immune system no longer recognises those cells as your own. Gradually, over time, more and more of the intestinal wall is wiped out.

The disease is rarely fatal on its own. You can live a long time with it, especially with modern treatments that have come about during the past 10-20 years.

In my dad’s lifetime, though, it was yet more pain and suffering; the kind that you can’t even defend yourself against. He required regular surgical interventions to cut away destroyed tissue. He wore a colostemy bag. His food intake was necessarily restricted. He required strong opiates and sometimes morphine to ease the pain. This would be how he’d have to live his life, for as long as it lasted.

I am his only child. None of his brothers had children of their own. Although their relationship didn’t last long, my mum and dad remained friends. She would try to have dad spend more time with me, but it was sadly rare for me to actually see him. At the time, I couldn’t understand why. I don’t think mum could, either.

A lifetime of pain surely must effect the human psyche in profound ways. Long after his death, I came to realise that he hadn’t really been living: he’d mostly just been existing.

Life in his case was simply a matter of the next go round through surgery. If you lived, then you had a bit of time until the next one.

When people say “live your life as though today could be your last”, they usually mean something very different, but this was his life: each day, you were never quite sure if he’d survive it, but somehow, he did. Day after day. Waiting.

Breathing because his body made him do so.

Eating for the same reason.

Allowing the heart to beat merely as so he would need not be bothered fighting it.

He thought. He sometimes continued doing mathematics, concocting formulas in theoretical physics, studying electrolysis and astronomy. He loved his car, a classic and very rare Mercedes, which, like him, was always in the shop.

His wife kept him company. He followed along.

His accent still had a faint hint of his German boyhood.

If there was more going on underneath, it was utterly concealed.

He was almost never visibly angry. The one time I can remember, his anger was like a snapping spring: very briefly in rapid motion, but then gone just as quickly. That was it.

He didn’t have any strong friendships. He rarely engaged socially with people. He was quiet, nerdy, somewhat unkempt.

For reasons I simply cannot figure out, women found him irresistable.

He left very few markings on the world in general. It has made me feel a kind of responsibility, a duty, not to let him be forgotten, because I suspect if it weren’t for me, he almost certainly would be.

But those times when I did get to be with him, just Dad and me, formed some of the strongest memories I have.

The times we went camping out in the bush near railway tracks, recording the numbered engines of the massive freight trains that criss-cross the state of New South Wales. The times we visited some of Australias most famous telescopes and observatories. The days he taught me chess on an old German electronic chessboard. Reading to me from his highly technical astronomy and physics textbooks, which I never understood a word of, but I loved it because they were things that he loved.

When I was in my mid-teens, he and his wife moved a long way away, far up north, almost on the opposite end of the continent. From that time on, my only contact with him would be by phone, or the internet.

I resented it. I resented the woman he married, choosing to believe that she was the one taking my dad away from me. I still carry some of that resentment to this day.

By the time I gave his eulogy at the rostrum in the tiny little chapel, in front of the only 4 other people in attendance, I hadn't seen him in person in over a decade. It had been planned for me to visit him that year. Some things just don't go to plan.

Yet, my dad was never bitter about his circumstances. I never heard him complain. Unlike most people, I don’t see that as a virtue, but it is an indicator of his character. Through all that pain and trauma, he became effectively numb to the world. He dismissed it with nonchalance. He owed it absolutely nothing, and that’s how he lived.

We are tempted to believe in the idea “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”. Based on my experience, I don’t know if that really holds water anymore. What is clear to me, is those tempered in fire can be made brittle, despite the appearance of great solidity.

Others have already been shattered, and there is nothing left to break.