Father Dearest

World Traveller Series III ~ Relationships ~ Episode 7

If I were asked to write my memories of my father, I could fit them on a coaster. Not a large one, either. My mother and father separated when I was five, and by then the shape of my family had already been set: five children, me the youngest and the only boy, scattered across an eighteen-month gap between the eldest two, three years to the middle child, another three after that, and then a four-year stretch before I turned up. By the time I have anything resembling a memory of my father, he was already someone I visited rather than someone I lived with.

The Caravan Park Weekends

The occasional weekend was spent with him at the caravan park where he lived, and it’s there that most of what I do remember took place. He had ditties for days — little rhymes and turns of phrase he’d trot out on cue, and I still catch myself repeating them decades later without quite meaning to. They’re good memories. Fun ones, even. The kind that surface uninvited when you least expect them, and you smile before you’ve worked out why.

What doesn’t get repeated, and never made it into the family folklore in quite the same affectionate way, are the other lines. The one about champagne tastes and a beer income got a fair workout. As did a steady supply of other observations about who I was and who I apparently should have been. As a son, I didn’t fit the mould he’d built for one, and he wasn’t shy about letting me know it. Working on cars with him meant, more often than not, being yelled at or quietly diminished in whatever way the moment called for.

A Family Thin on Grandparents

Being the last of five, born well after my siblings, came with a strange inheritance: people around you start dying earlier than they’re supposed to, relative to your own age. My relationships with grandparents were sketchy at best. My Nanna I remember as sweet, though barely. My mother’s father died before I was born. I never met my father’s father either.

The exception, oddly enough, was my father’s mother — the one grandparent I actually spent real time with, because she lived out her final months in our family home. It’s worth sitting with that for a second: my mother, who by all accounts despised the woman, still opened her home to her. That’s not a small thing. That’s character.

The Packet of Cigarettes

The other vivid memory I carry of my father is smaller and stupider and has cost me more than anything else on this list. During his infrequent visits, I’d steal cigarettes out of his packet. I was ten. It was, as it turned out, the opening move in what’s become a long and ongoing fight with lung disease of my own.

It was years later before I put together the obvious part: smokers always know exactly how many cigarettes are left in a packet. He knew. He must have known the whole time and said nothing.

The End of It

He died of complications from chronic lung disease when I was seventeen — my first real experience of death and loss, arriving earlier than it does for most people my age. The months before it were ugly in the plainest sense of the word: constant gasping, the sound of someone trying and failing to breathe, over and over, like a fish left out of water too long.

When he finally went, I think it was more relief for him than sorrow. I’m not sure it was much different for the rest of us.

There’s no tidy bow to put on a relationship like this one. He gave me a handful of rhymes I still say out loud, a lifelong health complication I picked up trying to be closer to him, and not much else in the way of warmth. I’ve made my peace with the coaster-sized version of events. Some fathers leave you an inheritance. Mine left me a punchline and a warning, and I’ve spent a fair amount of my life laughing at one and living with the other.

This story appears in Q Magazine and on the Ask Brett blog and podcast at bretthayhoe.me. Watch more on YouTube [@hayhoechannel].