Anniversary

The third anniversary of my dad's death today, and so we offered incense this morning. It seems already much longer ago somehow. Once events move over the horizon beyond immediate recollection there is no easy yardstick that we can use to measure their emotional and physical distance from us. Was it really only three years ago since that last sunny afternoon on the beach at Hasenuma before he took the plane back to England? One of his friends told me that after he arrived back he'd already started making plans to be 'back here for Christmas'. It was not to be.

I only knew my dad for just over one year as an adult, life's circumstances had kept us apart for nearly fifty years and when we did track each other down we had a lot to talk about. It was vital time for both of us. Just what exactly it meant for him I can't say but for me it laid to rest ghosts that had haunted me since my childhood, nightmares to do with seeming rejection. And I also thought that I had 'found my family'at last.

It all went terribly wrong three years ago today, that dream got blown away in just a moment. And I soon realised that he had left an awful mess behind him. For a time I was deeply, monumentally angry about it. But actually it was a lesson about trusting only in the deepest refuge because in the end there are no others. Good grief! It is still a deeply painful thing to be around, like an extracted tooth socket.

But one new part of this 'jig-saw' did fall into place for me during this year. A friend of his confided me that actually he had shared his plans with her in a converation just a couple of weeks before he died. So it was just his lack of strategy that had been the cause of so much grief, I knew at last that he had genuinely cared about me as much as his other children. That gave me something to smile about - a true 'old soldier' in every sense getting tripped up by his lack of strategy. His sense of honour was not the reason after all. Basically he'd just been dumb in the way he'd handled things, thought he would live forever. And trusted others too much. We all make mistakes.