Charles Dickens

Tomorrow, we will examine my father's passion for Charles Dickens. He was read to us from an age even younger than my memory. Humility I've learnt, but now to learn more.

My dad

I need a new blog. 

My life has changed so much in the preceding years that it’s impossible to join the two phases. I could, but it would take a lot of work.

I cried for my dad today like nothing I’d done in a while. I actually woke up crying – it was just a horrible day altogether.

I have so many questions today. I knew when I said goodbye to my dad as he was dying, he was sorry that he had to leave his daughters. That much was obvious. But you don’t know your time do you? He expected it much sooner than it happened. Then it didn’t. Happen. When he expected it. He prepared us from birth but it never happened. It eventually did but it’s awful to have predicted something so awful and then see its realisation. You can never really prepare for that.

We can take the law of averages but yet we all know of the exceptions and randoms of someone taken so young and unexpectedly. We take that risk when we have children. That we’ll leave them alone and lost. But why go through it? I don’t know the answer to that question because I still don’t have children and am reaching an age where if I get any older, I won’t. I wouldn’t want them to lose a parent.

People need to become parents when they’re still young so that they can actually appreciate the pure joy of having a child. The older one gets, the wiser one becomes. With wisdom, no one can actually bring a child in this world to leave them alone and lost.

I became everything my father wanted me to be and nearly everything he didn’t. His effort almost seems futile because I still tasted that which he didn’t want me to know. How was he going to control that from the grave?

And who was he going to leave alive that could guide me? Which godparent did I get to have given he and I had buried mine years before?

And what do I do now? Where do I turn to? I’ve run out of his wisdom. I have no answers and just questions now. I have his cardigan and the memory of his smell. I remember the cigarette smoke over a faintly musky smell mixed with Brylcreem and a touch of soap. I remember his hairy chest full of dark and intermingled grey hair. I remember his stubbly growth that he’d use as a weapon to his daughter’s soft cheek because it made her squeal in delight and disgust simultaneously. I would squeal in a way that nothing else would make me and guess that’s why he did it.

I remember a walk or a drive, a laugh, a joke, a Christmas or easter, mass….but I don’t remember a whole week or a month or a year. I cry because I don’t how little I’ll remember in 10 years from now. And I will have even less to remind me.

I have my picture frame. I lost so much travelling and living but now I realise, they wouldn’t have made a difference right now. I crave the company even of people I hated just because they knew him. He was real to them and I want their memories of him. They differ from mine.

I wasn’t born at this age for him. When he was 35, it was 1968. I wouldn’t be born for another 8 years yet. And when I think of how much has happened in the last 8 years of my life, I can’t imagine what went through his head the day I was born, 8 years from the age I am now. But then, had he even lost a parent? He had a family, was about to have a grandchild, and I have achieved none of that. I have achieved what in his eyes was more important: the foundations of a good career. I just never stuck with it but there was no way he could have known or made it happen even if he did.