My father has been dead for three whole years on Sunday and I still haven’t cried for him.
Perhaps that’s wrong, I’m not sure.
After William my whole perspective on things changed.
Not long after he died, David’s Nanna passed away. I thought it was October but my sister in law reminded me, years later, that it was actually in the July. I went to that funeral with Dave’s family and I felt
nothing
and no tears came.
I just felt kind of numb inside.
Not to be disrespectful or anything.
That’s just the way it was.
I could see that everyone else around me was upset but I felt removed from that in some way. I’m not sure if it was because my body was still in enormous shock from birthing Will, having a monstrous operation, losing a huge amount of blood, watching him die and then finding someway to keep going because there were five other children to look after.
It was July after all and William was born in April.
The initial oof! from all of that must have been beginning to wear off.
I allowed myself that excuse, though because I didn’t want to believe that I had become a cold unfeeling zombie, that I didn’t care enough for one of David’s most favourite people in the world, that I had nothing to give.
A year later I knew my father was going to die.
He said bowel cancer and I started to let him go.
Those friends who have been reading for a while know that my father was no saint. He was a mean person at the best of times and in the worst of times, well…
I spent a good portion of my life in fear of him
but
he was my dad and he was ‘Gramps’ to the kids and I loved him.
I loved him and I hated him.
I always needed his approval to feel right with the world.
It was a weird relationship.
One I am still trying to work out, even in his death.
I cried a fair bit over the diagnosis. I was pregnant with Ivy and Noah and I knew they would never know him.
I cried when he told me he was cancelling his Around The World trip and pursuing treatment.
I wept when they opened him up and found cancer on his bladder, in his peritoneal cavity and on his lungs as well as a primary and secondary tumour on his bowel.
I sobbed when he told me I was just a lousy ‘nurse’ and knew nothing, when I took all my courage, in a paper sack, to his house, one day and told him I thought he should get his affairs in order and take his holiday.
He was going to listen to what the doctor’s suggested.
They suggested they lop off a large portion of his liver and tie off another part. Essentially starving the cancer. That was after removing the bowel cancer and having radiation therapy for the other ’spots’.
I cried when I went to see him and he told me that nothing else mattered but family.
He was the crappiest of crappy fathers who had taught me that I was nothing and I believed him for a very very long time.
He pushed money and touted career as the most important things in life and said I would never amount to anything if I kept on having children, so to hear that revelation… it hurt
and then he told me I was the best thing he’d ever done with his life.
I’ll never know if he meant it.
He was scared beyond belief and after telling me I was the worst thing to ever happen to him many times before, the whole statement was kind of confusing.
It didn’t matter at the time though.
I cried just the same.
He never made it home after the second operation.
When Ivy and Noah were released from the NICU we made our way down to the hospital where I found my father small and jaundiced in a four bedded room.
My father, who was always as big as a bear, with the blackest of hair, swept back in an Elvis style, first with Bryl cream and later with gel and fudge, as the times had changed.
My father with his big hands and his bigger voice and even bigger opinions.
Frail and alone, all his hair shaved off to nothing but fuzz and waiting for us to arrive.
My father never waited for anyone or anything.
My head spun at the change and I cried then too.
When he lost feeling down one side of his body from metastases on the spinal cord, when he called us all in one by one and spoke to us before he lost the ability to talk;
his last words to me were that he would say hello to William.
I cried.
I lay my big head on his too small, bony chest, and howled like a baby.
I gulped back huge tears the night I had to tell my stupid, mean step mother that he was not going to live and that we needed to help him with his pain, not his physio exercises
and I cried when he became incontinent because I couldn’t get him on the oversized bedpan in time.
After that though, I didn’t have anymore tears.
I told the doctors that we didn’t want anything more, other than to make him comfortable.
I made the nurses push his morphine up every time he cried out, on the last day that I was there. I made sure everyone who was able to stay with him knew what to do.
It wouldn’t be much longer.
I told him… I walked into that room and I told him that I couldn’t watch him die, that I was going home to look after his grandkids and that I hoped he had a safe journey and I turned around and walked away.
In his semi conscious state, he was still trying to fight, still picking his limp arm up and bending it back and forth, doing those pointless physio exercises that the step mother had drilled into him.
I was a coward and I walked away and I didn’t cry.
When the phone call came that he was gone, I felt nothing.
On the day before the funeral, I told David that I hated the man who had kept me as a prisoner for so many years.
I felt angry.
His funeral was a miserable excuse of a tribute to his life, the whole thing was so fake. People who barely knew him, who couldn’t give a damn, who were only there because they thought they were going to get some inheritence, all hanging off each other, crying out in ravaged, strained voices
and I felt angrier still.
It’s been that way for three years.
Maybe I’m ready to cry now.
Some beautiful friends are coming to terms with the possibility of losing their matriarch and I have been crying.
Alot
and the tears, they just keep coming.
I am angry, ashamed, embarrassed, confused and sad.
It is for them, that my eyes seem to be constantly leaking
but maybe it’s for my father as well.
