The last letter my father ever wrote to me was written on Father’s Day 40 years ago. He thanked me for the two Father’s Day cards I’d sent. He underlined the two as if to emphasise either surprise or appreciation. I never got to ask which; he was killed exactly one week later in a car accident.
The letter, on weightless airmail paper that is beginning to show its age in faint sepia stain, is written in astonishingly elegant hand – for a bloke and a farmer. A seam has ironed itself into a central fold which speaks to the letter being read and reread a hundred times in the intervening four decades. For a long time after Dad died, I imagined I could smell traces of him on the paper – Old Spice, tobacco, engine oil.
For years afterwards I imagined being able to “unwrite” the letter, push some cruel genie back into a bottle, erase the words Dad had written because they described what proved to be an ill-fated weekend: where he was going, why, who he’d planned to stay with.
I was told of my dad’s accident the day after, over the phone, while at work. It did not occur to me as the sentence “Your dad’s had an accident” was delivered that it might mean he was dead. I remember that I asked if he was okay.
“No, I’m so sorry; he’s dead.”
I remember I dropped the receiver as if it were something hot. I imagine a voice kept speaking into the void – “Hello, hello, are you there?” – as the handset dangled above the waste-paper bin into which the remainder of my lunch – egg and anchovy on brown – would be tipped after a single bite.
I recall so much of that day with startling clarity, as if the cold, hard shock of it etched the day’s profile more sharply into my memory. I remember the taxi ride to the station to catch the train to my aunt’s to meet my mother; the worried faces of my two small cousins as they each clutched one of my aunt’s hands as she stood to meet me on the platform. I recall sitting in the bay window of my aunt’s kitchen waiting for Mum to arrive. I remember what Mum said as I delivered the news: “I should have been with him.” (At home in Kenya, not heading to Ireland to see her parents.)
I remember what I said. “No Mum, then you’d both be dead.”
My mother chose not to tell my brother, who was in the middle of his Leaving exams. What difference would it make, we rationalised: telling him won’t change anything, except perhaps the results he got, compromising his university entrance. I remember my mother sitting over a letter to him which she posted to my grandparents so that they could hand deliver the news, as if she was trying to couch this terrible finality in as many protective layers as she could.
My brother would tell me years later that he was confused when our grandfather collected him after his last exam (instead of the aunt and uncle he was expecting). He remembers the headmaster being unusually warm in his farewell to this young man whose life, he must have known – my brother says now – was about to be split open.
“I remember Grandad stopping at a parking area overlooking the Blessington reservoir and that’s where he told me what had happened. I went rigid and felt my legs were pushing through the bottom of the car.”
My brother boarded a plane for home – and our father’s funeral – the next day. He travelled via Amsterdam. He got himself a haircut during transit. On boarding his connection, he found himself in a seat next to one of our father’s best friends, who asked my brother whether Dad would be meeting him at the airport.
“How do you tell a 6ft giant that one of his best friends has died unexpectedly?”
How do you tell a barely 18-year-old boy that his life will never be the same again?
My little sister’s memories are cut-glass clear too.
“I was meant to be playing in a school match then, but the head told me I had visitors waiting for me in the car park.”
Friends of our parents, who broke the news to this small just-13-year-old.
“I think I said”, she remembers now, “‘Thank you for telling me,’ and turned to head back into school. But they bundled me into their car, men in the front, me between the ladies in the back. I remember I was given a spotted hanky to cry into.”
I ask Siân Williams at Dublin-based Marino Counselling and Psychotherapy why that day is carved so deeply into the distant past where time has blurred so many more recent days since.
“When the nervous system is jolted by shock, especially without adequate emotional support or physical safety in that moment, it often encodes the event in vivid, sensory-rich detail,” she says. “This is why so many people remember the smallest things: the room they were in, what they were wearing, what they ate just beforehand. These are known as flashbulb memories, deeply imprinted snapshots of a moment the brain registers as life-changing or threatening.
“The fact that all three of you have clear memories of that day shows how significant and defining it was.”
It makes complete sense that, as a parent, you now feel hypervigilant about your children’s safety. The nervous system remembers, and it does its best to guard against any repetition of past pain even if the original wound occurred decades ago
— Siân Williams
My siblings might share the clarity of my memories of that day, but mercifully, for they are both younger than me, not the nightmares that followed. I dreamt that Dad was alive but broken. Or I dreamt that he returned but he could not stay. Sometimes, in those dreams, I was relieved to be reunited briefly, but always freshly devastated at his forever-absence when I woke. The dreams lasted for 20 years.
Williams says my dreams are significant. “Nightmares after traumatic loss can be a manifestation of unprocessed trauma, particularly when there was no space at the time to safely grieve or make meaning of what happened. I believe that the mind often tries to complete the story it never got to witness – hence the recurring dreams of your father alive but suffering, or on the edge of returning but never quite making it.”
There is obviously more risk of this when a person is told over the phone – grief can be complicated then, says Williams, and can compound the resultant trauma.
I tell her that I worry our digital age means more and more people are in danger of receiving catastrophic, life-changing news impersonally or in the absence of checking they are supported before it is delivered to them. Or dreadful news seeping out before the right person has the chance to tell them. I imagine how I might have received mine had the internet been a thing back then, had news spread like the wildfire it does now: ‘So soz about ur dad’ crying emoji. At least my news came from a voice I recognised and loved.
“The absence of human connection, physical presence or emotional containment in those initial moments can leave a person feeling not only shocked but emotionally fragmented,” says Williams. This, she says, can impact people much later in life, “surfacing in anxieties, anticipatory grief”, or the kind of catastrophising I am vulnerable to and which I describe to her.
“It makes complete sense that, as a parent, you now feel hypervigilant about your children’s safety. The nervous system remembers, and it does its best to guard against any repetition of past pain even if the original wound occurred decades ago.”
Father’s Day the following year and the year after that – days of which I have no recollection – were hard but, with time, they became easier and, with more time, I could celebrate my children’s wonderful father; my sister and I could celebrate the extraordinary father our brother had become.
Many years later though, Father’s Day presented itself with a new memory. For a long time before my mother died with dementia her memories of Dad were non-existent or fragmented; certainly the memory of his death was.
“My husband,” she would say, in an indignant tone, “he left me, you know. He just upped and left.”
I didn’t always correct my mother’s fictive stories. But I always corrected that one: “He didn’t, Mum; he died.” I assumed hearing that might help, until one day I asked: “Does it help, Mum, to know he died and that he didn’t leave you?”
She thought about my question for a bit and then said: “I don’t know. If he’d left me, you see, he might still come back.” Very, very occasionally flicking through a photograph album, his young face might swim into a mind fragmented by Alzheimer’s. “Look at Jim,” she’d smile as Dad smiled back from celluloid. “He always made me so happy”.
On the 38th anniversary of Dad’s death (and I check my diary now, for it seems so implausible), and five days after Father’s Day, Mum asked when my father was coming. “Will he be here soon?” she wanted to know. For years she had not known I was her daughter, had certainly not connected her husband with me and suddenly and lucidly, there it was: her husband, her daughter in one sentence: Is your dad coming soon?
Did she know, I would ask myself, when she died six day later?
“Your mother’s question, ‘Is your dad coming soon?’ says Williams, “though perhaps startling, is something those who walk with the dying hear often. It is believed that those who have gone before us come to meet us, guide us, and accompany us across the threshold. So, when someone near death begins speaking of departed loved ones as if they are close by, we take that as a sign.”
I am not a person of faith, but this belief speaks to me. That Mum talked of dad in this context near the end was of enormous comfort; it made me think that not only was she prepared for what was coming, but she faced it with a calm that had been rare in those final weeks of dementia.
Her death was so different from Dad’s, a gentle parting at the end of a long life, not a brutal ripping away in the middle of one. And that is how I remember the anniversary of Dad’s death – and Father’s Day – now: with something approaching peace.
