He is striven

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

AT 5.05 pm on Easter Sunday, my father was dead for 28 years. In 1993, April 4 fell on the Sunday before Easter, so in a sense, he’s gained an extra week of death since passing, which would have pleased him. My father’s whole life was trying to better himself.

Especially on the horses. Even in smoking cigarettes, drinking Johnny Walker Black, eating rich foods and keeping poor exercise habits, my dad strove to outdo all others at everything.

Except when it came to communication with people he loved. My father preferred no communication at all for weeks to a single word that might upset him; and the overladen apple cart of emotions he trundled through the pothole-ridden streets of our daily family life.

I knew him for 35 years before he went, too early, two months after his 62nd birthday. I know, now, how cheated he must have felt, in that last week, when he realised he was dying.

And I knew he knew he was.

The last time I saw him alive was the day before, the Saturday. I’d driven up to visit him at Mt Hope, tied to a bed with tubes and wires. The nurses told me he was sedated and unconscious but I could sit in his room and pray; clearly, they weren’t readers.

There are few mental images as distressing as the last one I have of my father alive. The back of the bed was tilted up and he was half-sitting up. His eyes were closed and he was breathing fairly easily.

But his hands gripped the metal rails on either side of the bed so tightly, I could see the blood vessels in his arms straining against his skin. This was a man fighting for his life.

Within 24 hours, he would lose.

I wish, now, I’d stayed longer with him. But I ran out of that room like the bed had exploded.

My dad would have been proud.

In the two years before he died, I had laid at my father’s feet the majority of the bones I had to pick with him and, if he never worried at them himself, they were at least no longer buried deep inside me. Largely speaking, we had made peace.

Most observers would have called our adult relationship “turbulent,” but the last thing my father did with me while he was conscious was make a very good joke poking fun at authority. A High Court judge had that week threatened to jail me for contempt of court. The very last words my father said to me were, “Go to jail. It’ll do wonders for your career. Look how well it worked out for Ramesh!”

I feel sorry, now, for everyone who never got the chance to clear the air before a parent went.

Five years after he died, my first child was born. My own children are 23 and 21 this year. In my father’s absence, I’ve learned how difficult it can be to talk to your own children, especially in adolescence; and I own that my relationship with my father remained adolescent until a couple of years before he went, when I first laid my selfish charges of parental neglect and/or disappointment against him.

And he said nothing in his own defence.

Another man – me – would have found it impossible not to argue.

Of course, his silence could have been his simple modus operandi modus-operandi-ing.

But I had a real need, as a man, to confront my father about how he had let me down, as a boy.

Nearly 30 years later, I know how easy it is to fail your children, and how hard it is to allow them to accuse you. Especially when they are right.

And what a blessing it was for me, and for all the people that I’ve loved, that my father could be gracious when I needed it most. Without that grace, I would never have forgiven him for what I imagined were his many failings, as well as the handful of real ones that held us both back from mutual adult respect and friendship.

And he would have died with distance, not closeness, between us.

And I would not have missed him so deeply at every high point of my life since.

BC Pires is the shepherd of the black sheep flock. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com