In my teenage years he chased a boyfriend out of the house. He ran down the road with a rolled up newspaper. Glasses hung around his neck and slippers slapped against the tarmac. It was almost vaudeville. Was it so long ago?
Stare at my father.
He blew up my paddling pool in the summer or tickled me when I thought I was being funny. He’s shrivelled now and silent. His hands are placed on his lap. His skin is the same colour as the inside of the casket.
I’m a black dress, chipped nail varnish and tears. My brother comes up beside me and says nothing. We don’t get on. He looks like my father but today I can forgive him for the way he treats me. Arms are lowered. He has learnt to shut up. At least until this is over.
“Everything happens for a reason,” said Gloria the Christian who lives next door. I wanted to take her gardening shears and snip her head off.
“How’s that for a reason?”
This was on the day we learnt my father was going to die. He was in recovery. Hope came back into our lives with a flush of health. We believed our father would get better, even when he said. “I’m not going to survive this.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I’d say to him and really mean it this time.
This was after the chemotherapy finished. When the skin stopped being grey. After his stomach was cut open. After tumours were removed and after the first phone call that turned my knuckles white.
My eyes could not look at Gloria. A floral print begged for my attention and the shears were waiting. The clang of a dustbin lid was the only real answer. The chances of survival equalised before they dwindled. Despite the tumour’s malignancy or the number of lymph node glands it touched. My father could have come back. Who decided that he shouldn’t?
So I leave Gloria in her garden with her God.
So I leave Gloria in her garden with her God.
My brother stands next to me in the funeral parlour. He doesn’t have to say anything. We both know we took him for granted. We let our own lives get in the way. When the illness came we paid attention, but I guess it was too late by then.
Father always held onto our balloons despite the helium that pushed them away. We didn’t know that one day he would let go and leave them to the wind.
Christian Martius (2005)
