Dad - 10 Years After

5 January was the 10th anniversary of my father's death.

A milestone.

I remember one significant thing: That it was Dad's death that made me finally understand what the word 'sad' meant. 'Sad' is such a well-worn word, and often when you say you are sad, you merely mean you are disappointed, or angry, or hurt, or some other such thing. But sad is something else. It is a feeling of nothingness, emptiness. And I never knew what this word really meant till I felt it for the first time in my life, and I was already not such a young adult then.

So, on 5 January this year, I dug out what I'd written on the 1st anniversary of Dad's death and I share this now:

My sadness over Dad’s passing was often triggered whenever I watched Hannah at play. It is at these moments that I can most directly and most personally make the connection between his love for me and my love for Hannah. It is only at these moments that I actually understand his love for me, understand not in the head, but with the heart.

What do I understand? It is that such love has no rational basis. You love regardless of anything, in spite of anything.

I think of something else which can explain part of my feelings of sadness about Dad’s passing. In a letter I had written to a friend in Melbourne, I had said the following:

Once, as Serina and I pottered around the room while Hannah was quietly asleep in her cot in my parents’ home, an image suddenly flashed into my mind and I saw that 40 years ago, another young pair of parents, Nancy and Hannay, too, pottered around their room in Hannay’s parents’ home as their first-born, Sonny, slept quietly in his cot. The same kind of love hovered in the air over that cot 40 years ago as it now does over the sleeping Hannah. Hannah and I share the same privilege of being the first-born, for together with the love we invoked in our parents, there was also the awe of first-time parenthood and the freshness of first-time joy. In the first few months when Hannah was with us every day of the week, she was the first thought on Serina’s mind when Serina awoke in the morning, and she was the first thought on my mind when I came home from work in the evening. In short, I am able to see my own parents now with new appreciation. Even more importantly, I am able to share in those special joys in their early years as a married couple. They are not merely “parents of mine”; they were two human beings who were once young and in love, and who carried with them all the hopes that young human beings carry when they face the future, when the years ahead seem to roll far into the distance, offering so many unknown and tantalising promises. Now, as they face the ever-shortening future, I only hope they can feel that most of those promises have been delivered, if not in their original desired forms, then at least in alternatives that are equally satisfying. I think, by and large, they do.

Reading the above passage again, I can see the two thoughts that were in my mind. One is the love that “hovers in the air over the cot”, and this was what I meant about the parental love that has no rational basis - it is a love that hangs in the air, that simply exists, it is simply just there. This is a love which I now understand.

The second is my ability to connect with my parents’ early lives as a married couple, and to be able to see the beginning, the middle, and now, the end of something that was signified by Dad’s passing. On the one hand, there is something sad about this, but on the other, it is merely a part of the cycle that life offers.

All this is part of my complex response to the event of Dad’s death.


Sonny
7 January 1998