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Dad, you’ve been gone a long time and we didn’t speak for decades before you passed, but I’ve been thinking about you recently /1
I’ve been sorting through old family photos and documents. Pictures of you fat and smiling in your mother’s arms in a sunny garden, the war a world away. /2
Your first communion prayer book. The proud gaze and snaggle-toothed smile of your first pictures in uniform. All the life you had before we had life. /3
I can trace the trajectory from choir boy to ship’s captain and wonder what navigation error ran you aground in our home. What left you raging like a castaway watching ships pass, blind to your waving and deaf to your crying? /4
When I think of our time together - father and firstborn - I am immersed in the fear of it. The fear that a wrong word or a wrong move might trigger your temper. There were times you tried to cement a bond and all I could do was sit still, suspicious of every effort you made. /5
Now I’m a parent I have a sense of what it must have been like to look at me and see me, eyes deflected, face full of resentment. /6
Then the shouting, the broken plates, the “clips round the ear” or worse, the Sunday afternoon tension, solid enough to dash a vessel on, all vanished when you did. You were rescued from us and started afresh elsewhere. /7
Then I had a different fear. Was whatever soured you going to build in me? Had your nurture of me cultivated the same bitter roots of rage that had entangled you? /8
Holding your old watch, with its stained strap, I want to tell you that I’m still at sea. P and the kids are the fresh wind and the light on the crest of each wave. My family is a freedom for me. The fear is gone. /9
But now it’s gone I can clearly how full of fear you were and I’m sorry that that was where your journey took you. I hope that in the last part of your life, when we had ceased to be father and son for any purpose beyond public records, you felt free and you were happy /10
Though you’d hate it (and not because you’d hate it), I pray for you from time to time. I hope the perpetual light shines upon you and I hope you are at peace. So, Dad, Happy Father’s Day. /end
