Father's Day-And The Awfully Big Adventure..

The last Father’s Day I spent with my dad was June 2018. I made a roast dinner for him and a cake for dessert. I am sure he had a shandy with his meal. But Dad was tired because he was still recovering from pneumonia that developed after his autumn book tour.

On that last Father’s Day, he was also exhausted by a recent trip to Ottawa, where he met Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary to discuss the refugee crisis. During the meeting, I remember he was asked his thoughts on Corbyn who was then still Labour leader. Seemingly the Trudeau government’s only intel on Corbyn was coming from the corporate news media. Dad was asked “Is Corbyn who the papers say he is?”

Soon after Father's Day 2018,, my dad died. Even if you live to 95, as he did, there does not seem to be enough time to experience the wonders and sorrows of our bitter-sweet existence.

Seven years on, I miss him but the ache is different than at his death and the year following it. Time is a relentless forward journey but it provides a detente to our grief. Objects of our affection grow smaller and smaller as we look back through the rear window of our existence because there is no option to remain in the present tense.

So, we must press on and live with our mourning as if it were a chronic condition that flares up on occasion. Being alive is to exist with people ebbing and flowing through our lives. One moment standing beside us and gone the next instant- like passengers on a crowded city bus- until we too must move to the exit doors.

With or without the ceremony of Father’s Day, Dad knew his children loved him. He never doubted our undying affection as my mother did from time to time.

The gifts my father most appreciated and remembered were the ones that involved moments spent with him, which didn’t come on Father’s Day. He loved it when his children worked in the garden with him. As we aged and grew older Dad liked it when we faffed about with him over a beer after the work was done.

During my boyhood, I asked my brother Peter if he had ever seen our dad cry. Peter replied yes. He told me he had seen it after someone pressed Dad too hard about what life was like as a lad growing up in Bradford in 1931.

From then on, I never pushed him too hard about his past. Instead, I let my father tell his ancient mariner tales of those years before the Welfare State at his pace.

Much of my dad’s character in youth, middle age, and then his final years of living was shaped by the events he experienced in childhood. He never got over how his father was abandoned by his mother during the worst part of the Great Depression. It had to be done because Granddad couldn’t find work to feed the family, and my grandmother needed a breadwinner for her kids to survive those harsh years of poverty.

Despite being a child when the abandonment occurred, my father never shook the notion he failed to protect his dad.

From that- was born a lifelong urge to root for the underdog and protect and nurture those closest to him.

When my brother Peter died in 2009, I knew Dad wouldn’t live long if I didn't harness that grief into a purpose, which became a warning to the 21st century not to make his generation's past our future.

Seven years from his last Father’s Day alive, much has changed for the worse in the world and in my life. But wherever I eventually wash up on shore and wherever society tumbles, the journey around my father for 55 years in all its light and darkness was one of the most profound experiences of my life. It made me a much better human being.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. There will be beer at the dinner table tonight to celebrate the awfully big adventure of living which you were once part of.

Much Love, John.

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