A Thought for Fathers' Day

One of my earliest memories, when I was aged around four or five, is of my dad standing in the hallway with suitcases and then driving away, with me wanting to go too. That must have been my parents splitting up.

My mum brought up me and my younger brother alone. Over the next few years, there was sporadic contact with my father until it fizzled out altogether. I spent years wondering why my dad didn’t love me, but came to accept that’s just the way it was.

In 2005, I was 28 and at work when I received an email from my stepmother. We worked for the same organisation, but as she worked at a different site we seldom saw each other.

The email read something like: “Your dad is in hospital with liver failure and isn’t expected to live long. He’d like to see you.” It was a bombshell; I hadn’t given much thought to him in recent years.

I felt more confused than sad. The truth is, my father had spent his life in pubs, so such a death seemed inevitable. Even so, I was torn.

I didn’t want a cynical deathbed reunion. I wondered whether I could find out why he had attempted no contact during my childhood (we both lived in the same small town; I wasn’t difficult to find).

Another side of me thought I should put the past aside and forgive a dying man: my father, the man who gave me life, even if he had no interest in nurturing it.

Friends and family were supportive and non-judgmental, saying it was my choice. It was a torturous decision that I resented having to make.

In the end, the decision was taken away from me. About two weeks after that email from my stepmother, a colleague who had known my dad from way back came to tell me she had found out he had died a couple of days previously.

While I was shocked, I think she was more upset than I was. I was angry that none of the family had thought to tell me. To be fair, I hadn’t responded to my stepmother’s email or visited so they must naturally have assumed that I didn’t care.

I found out the date of the funeral from the obituary in the local newspaper. I didn’t cry; I wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to feel. I was about to attend the funeral of my father, a man I barely knew.

The room at the crematorium was packed; it was standing-room only. My mum and my partner came too and the three of us stood at the back. The eulogy was read; it celebrated his life as someone who was well-liked and always there for his friends.

That was salt enough in the wounds, but the worst was yet to come. Details of his life were remembered: his birth, in the early 1950s; his first job in the late 1960s; meeting his second wife in the early 1980s; and so on.

Strangely, the 1970s: a decade that saw his marriage to my mum, as well as the birth of me and my younger brother, were erased in a feat of revisionism that would have made Stalinist politicians proud.

I felt sick with shock. Was this revenge for not having visited and forgiven my dying father? Why be so spiteful?

I’ll never know why that decision was made. I’ll never know why my father wanted to see me on his deathbed. I’ll never know whether he loved me.

What I do know is that after five years, I’ve accepted that I didn’t see my father before he died and that I’ll never know the answers to those questions. It’s a sad fact and one I have to live with.