Nic Dempsey

My Dad has been on mind over the last couple of weeks.

It’s coming up to 10 years since he died.  My relationship with my Dad was difficult and I’ve probably spent the last 20 years coming to terms with it and with not having a father, that he’s been dead for 10 of those years is an irony not lost on me. Mostly out of sight is out of mind and I don’t really talk about him.

He’s been on my mind because a couple of weeks ago, I walked past someone who looked just like him.  Not the physically wrecked man he was when he died but the young guy I remembered from my childhood (if I had a scanner, I’d show you pictures but I don’t). It was strange, I stood in the street and wondered if this was what going mad felt like. Turned around and checked, realised that although this guy had the ginger beard, was about Dad’s height and was wearing a very similar hat, the eyes were brown not blue and it wasn’t Noel.

That night was a planning night for the ‘God’s Not Fair’ service and we decided to use Romans 8: 31-39, which is what I read at Dad’s funeral.

I’m still thinking about him.

When talking about my life, I often talk about my Grandad, who taught me a lot about walking with God when life is tough. When my Grandad died, I was there, I held his hand.

When my dad died, I hadn’t seen him for 5 months. Dad went to Australia, with no medical insurance but with chronic airways disease.  We didn’t hear from him for a couple of months and had reported him missing.  Eventually we heard from the FCO, confirming that he was in a hospital in Australia and about to be deported. He’d been back a week or so when he died.

There are quite a few pictures of my Grandad on the picture wall in the flat.  There isn’t a picture of my Dad but I’m still thinking about him.

I’d been expecting Dad to die for about 10 years before he did, so when he did die, my approach to dealing with it was to deal with the practicalities, arrange funeral, pick up ashes, sort out probate. I did those things, point of fact, I’m still paying the DSS back the money they paid Dad while he was in Australia – long story.

The hardest thing about Dad dying was other people’s reactions. I called my father, Noel (it’s ok, that was his name!) rather than Dad and I’m still more likely to do that in certain situations, although I’m happier using Dad than I used to be.  It was a coping mechanism when being his daughter was totally impossible. It seemed that the only people not offended by that, were him and my immediate family, but once he was dead, I was apparently a cruel and unfeeling person for not calling him Dad.  There’s also this assumption that once someone dies, all is forgiven. Sorry, death ends a life but not a relationship and in order to acknowledge the good stuff, I had to first deal with the impact of the bad. How I do that, we can talk about (my brother and I did it in very different ways, and Ben is the only person who can tell me if he thinks I’m doing it wrong)  but bottom line, you weren’t his daughter so you don’t know how it feels and you shouldn’t tell me how to feel.

I knew that my father loved me, as much as he was able. I know that if he had known better, he would have done better. (One of the nicest things, has been watching my brother as a father, doing all the things he would have wanted Dad to do!). Noel was a man that should have never got married or had children (being married probably extended his life – but not by much, he was 53 when he died) This doesn’t mean that it was all bad or my childhood completely miserable.  Noel taught me to climb trees, he was brilliant in some ways. How many fathers do you know who will honestly and with no embarrassment explain how babies are made to a 6 year old? (who then went on to tell her grandfather and entire school class that mummies have eggs and daddies have squirms and the baby grows in the mummy’s tummy and comes out of her vagina!). He was there when Ben and I were born (this was very unusual in 1973!). If you weren’t related to him, he often showed you his better self, there was a man at his funeral who told us that Noel saved his life.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that this week, I put a picture of my father on the photo wall because good and bad he was my father and I need to acknowledge all of that.