Fathers & Sons

Duty of care

It has been four years since I celebrated Father’s Day with my dad. Time has allowed grief and me to be in a state of détente. Different sorrows were born for me during the years that elapsed since the light in my dad’s eyes made a brilliant last flash like the burst from a camera bulb in the 1950s and then went still.

Cold to luck were the cards dealt me after his death: there was a brutal cancer diagnosis, then a worldwide covid pandemic. Now we face a cost-of-living crisis that, if you do not have assets, will be as harsh as the 1930s was for ordinary workers. But there are a lot of people that were dealt the same hand or worst than me these last years. I am not alone clinging to life in the debris of our society ruined by the greed of the 1% like a shipwreck survivor holds onto the side of a damaged lifeboat in the ocean.

Still, the ebb and flow of my human existence makes me think a lot about my dad and the relationships we all have with our fathers or they have with their children and their dads.

When I was growing up, Father’s Day was not a big deal as it is now. That is not because today, we cherish more the roles dads play in our lives. No, it is because capitalism never misses an opportunity to exploit our human emotions for the profit of its corporate entities.

The first Father’s Day I remember where I paid tribute to my dad, was when I was eight. My family presented him with an electric grass trimmer. That was in 1971, and we lived a carefree middle-class existence created by a fully functioning Welfare State. However, when my dad was eight, it was 1931, and it was a different world entirely for him and his working-class generation. Then there was no social safety net, and your survival depended on luck, good health, and your animal instincts. It was a watershed year for my dad’s family because tough decisions had to be made, and my grandmother made them for her, her children, and her husband, who was infirm from a workplace accident that left him unable to earn a living.

During the Great Depression, a worker who could not work was a dead weight, for his family. My grandmother made a harsh decision that the poor must always make to survive the weak are sacrificed so the strong can survive. She abandoned my granddad for another man who still had enough brawn to earn his keep and feed her children. My dad witnessed the dismissal of his father from his life, and it was a traumatic breach of the normal order of things.

That one horrible and tragic event shaped most of my dad’s character in youth, middle age and then in his final years of living. It made him believe that he failed to protect his father from being thrown to the wolves despite being a child when the abandonment occurred.

It created in my dad a lifelong urge to root for the underdog and protect and nurture those closest to him.

When my brother Peter took ill with schizophrenia, my father never gave up on him and devoted his retirement years to him and my mother, who became seriously ill with Rheumatoid arthritis. At seventy-seven he buried my mother, and then at eighty-seven, he witnessed his son, my brother die a horrible death. It was too much for him.

My father went with me to pick up my brother’s ashes from the funeral home. As I drove home with Peter’s remains resting in a cardboard box in the back of my car, I looked over at my dad sitting in the passenger seat. He was shorn of optimism, and his grief had jagged shards of acrimony in it that were as sharp as broken glass.

People around me said, “your dad will die soon because his heart is broken.” But I did not want him to die defeated by life and abandoned by it. During that first year after Peter's death, I realised trauma travels through the generations with the same persistence as DNA gives us the same nose or smile of a grandparent. Destiny shackled me to my dad's trauma because a father abandoned in 1931 still coded the interactions of his progeny 78 years after those tragic events transpired. My dad was in torment as an old man because my brother's death triggered memories of his dad being abandoned by his family all those years ago. He also believed he had abandoned Peter by not preventing his death. I had to do something. That something was the last nine years of my dad's life and the Harry's Last Stand Project. We are all interconnected with those we love, even those long dead. Our duty of care is to keep people feeling loved, valuable and needed. If we do that, we can beat the entitled class and return to a better way of living.