Voyage One - A Son, A Father by Michael Brohier

Voyage One - “A Son’s Perspective”

“ Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.” Guy de Maupassant

Adelaide, Australia, 6th June 2010.

Nineteen, which is one more than eighteen, is almost twice ten, which can, at times, come close to a complete or perfect waiting period; the perfect waiting period that ushered my father into the nightmarish theatre of a World War. Was he complete? Was he ready? I don’t think so, but then, is one ever ready for a war? Here I am, in Adelaide, spending a few days with my sister. The house is empty, and I am at a loose end. It is one of those biting cold, bleak Adelaide winter afternoons, on the birthday of my father. Trees are stripped of leaves, and endings seems more plausible, life more tenuous, even finite. It is a time for reflection, for whimsy, for looking back into a neglected past and making sense of fragmented memories. I open the intricately carved teak chest in my sister’s lounge room, bursting with albums packed with fading photographs. With each new snapshot I am drawn, insistently, into a world of ghosts. All no longer what they were. All grown older now. A world where my parents are younger than my 55 years; where my father stares back at me from a sepia print, taken in the post - pandemic world of 1922, in a staged studio photograph, aged two years, with his tentative smile that I would come to know so well, propped up between his father and an aunt. His mother, my paternal grandmother, an indistinct memory, consigned to the Angoda Mental Institution, as these places were called in that age. I never knew her nor knew of her. If my father were alive today, exactly to this day, the 6 th of June 2010, he would have been 90 years of age. It is five years ago that he died, just nineteen days after his birthday, in a bed, in the Kingswood Aged Care Facility, with the self-same sister in whose house I am, by his side. He had been dying for the last eight days. No food, no water, no words, no recognition. Simply a state between waking and sleeping. And I was with him for some of those eight days, with my mother, who fretted and saw hope of a recovery when all hope had fled. In little over half a century that he was my father, I fought with him, loved him dearly and wanted and needed his approbation. And yet to me, he is still here, dominant in my mind, my thoughts, and my stories. It may be the photographs I have of him scattered around the walls of my house, that rouse memories, but I do know I dwell on him. I dwell on my mother too, but the ones with whom you had a harmonious relationship are not the ones who resurface repeatedly. It is the contentious ones that flick the switch on and off, light and dark. I remember him. I love him. I ask forgiveness of him. I forgive him. Crouched over these old photographs, my mind inexplicably shifts to the afternoon of the death of my paternal grandfather; a quiet, thin man, shadowy (to me) and dressed in sarong and singlet, lounging in a rattan chair. In the stories handed down to me, death came to him, on a Christmas But that is another story for another time.

MICHAEL BROHIER

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