Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Perfect is the enemy of good.
My dad died in 2001 aged eighty-five. I was forty-eight then. He had been in a nursing home for about six months. I was asleep in bed and was woken by the phone ringing next to my bed. I picked it up to have my brother tell me that dad had died, apparently in his sleep, and my brother was contacting our mother and his sisters and arranging that we would all make our way to the nursing home and meet up in his dad’s room. My brother or oldest sister would bring mum to dad’s room. Mum lived in the same nursing home.
My parents had had six children, a son first, then five daughters. My brother, as the oldest and a male, followed by five girls, had always taken a role as a second father and so it was as would be expected that the nursing home had contacted him and here he was taking the organizing role in the immediate aftermath of our father’s death. My husband, in the bed beside me at home, and also woken by the call was privy to my conversation with my brother. I would have preferred my husband drove to the nursing home with me, but he didn’t want to so I drove there alone and, as I had feared a little on the drive, I was the first family member to arrive. A kind lovely staff member of the nursing home, with whom I had become a little acquainted in the previous six months, ushered me into dad’s room and left me there with him and I sat with him for about fifteen minutes until other family members arrived.
It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person. I felt anxious and strange. Dad was in his bed, the covers on him, just as he had been sleeping. I looked at his face fairly closely and then sat there with him, or is it with his body, on a chair a few feet away.
All my life, I had known very little about my father, compared to what I knew about my mother. They were both migrants to Australia from Europe after World War Two. They were from different parts of Europe and had met and married shortly after the war when my dad was a displaced person. Throughout my childhood and later life, my mum had spoken often about the family she had left behind. Her mother had died of natural causes during the war and her father died about 12 years after she migrated. She had a sister and they corresponded weekly; one of those light blue aerogramme letters of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s arrived in and got sent from our home every week. My mum had a large extended family and often talked of her life in Europe.
My dad rarely spoke about his life before he came to Australia. When he did speak about it, it was in response to questions, not volunteered, and he was often vague and troubled and it became part of family culture that you just didn’t talk with dad about these things. Through occasional snippets we gleaned that he had left parents and a sister behind. He had no contact with them and he would not try to make contact with them or find them. He had left a country now under the Soviet Union and he believed his family would’ve been deported to Siberia. He said he’d been born in the United States because his parents had migrated there but they had returned to Europe when he was a baby so he had no memory of the United States. He said he had changed his name, just a few letters he said, after the war.
So, dad, it’s been really hard coming to terms with having had a father who I felt like I never knew. I associate a sense of yearning and longing with my relationship with you – yearning to get to know you. I always felt like you were a distance from me. Feel very loving of you while also knowing you did some hateful things especially as my mother’s husband. Sometimes I think my experience of loving a man – as a partner – includes an experience of yearning for closeness to that man. And feeling sorry or sad for them – throughout my childhood I sensed a very deep sadness in you.