On the death of my father

When my father died after a brief illness, at 6 pm on 26 June this year, my brother rang immediately to let me know. So it’s probably a measure of my interest, or lack of it, that at this crucial time my phone was on silent and Matt had to leave a message, which I only picked up the next day.

As a teenager I had fantasies of my father’s death (you’re going to have to trust me here, if you haven’t read the book). In my imagination, his passing featured various levels of pain and suffering. He had joined the Merchant Navy at fifteen, and amongst my whims the gentlest was his being washed off the deck of his ship by a freak wave. I was dabbling in Christianity at the time and used to pray for this nightly, but no-one was listening: after every ten-day run down the coast and back he’d arrive home again, safe, sound and ready to torment his family anew.

But that was over forty years ago now. My resentment tempered over the years. I wouldn’t say we became friends, but I slowly lost any particular investment, either way, in whether he lived or died.

My father was never a kind or loving man. I had the opportunity to ask him about this in my late twenties, after an estrangement of ten years or so. ‘I wasn’t very paternal, I know,’ he said. ‘Maybe because my father wasn’t paternal.’

Really? Didn’t Dad have a choice? He had two sons and treated them with neglect at best, cruelty at worst, but both became kind and loving fathers.

About ten years ago, as my father descended into dementia, he started to roam. He had an Opal card and could hop on buses, ferries, trains or the light rail at will. At first his wanderings seemed to be random but in later years a goal became apparent: he was headed for White Bay, in the southern reaches of Sydney Harbour, to the west of the Harbour Bridge. That’s where the ship he’d captained for twenty years or so, the MV Macedon, would dock. Until the late 1980s he would pilot the bulk carrier through the heads, turn south along the east coast, navigate Bass Strait and the south coast to dock in Adelaide, where the cargo holds would be loaded with soda ash. Then he’d return the ship to Sydney Harbour to be unloaded. He took early retirement in his sixties when Howard Smith Ltd started computerising the controls of its vessels. But as he approached ninety and his confusion deepened, he again felt drawn to White Bay; the Macedon awaited its master.

Today, the Macedon is long decommissioned and White Bay – at least, the Glebe end – is a building site. In fact, Sydney Harbour has no working ports anymore. But it was the Anzac Bridge, which opened to traffic in 1995, that really seemed to stump him.

Back in June, when I messaged a cousin that Dad was dying, she replied, ‘How are you feeling?’ She was familiar with our family’s history so I knew that she was not asking out of concern, but out of interest.

Dad was cremated in Sydney on 8 July. My brother Matt wasn’t expecting a crowd – Dad had never had many friends and the few he had were long gone – so he didn’t book the chapel. He said that he and his friend Darren, an Anglican priest, would each say a few words, Darren in the ‘witness insertion lounge’ and Matt in the memorial gardens. He knew that Dad would have appreciated the economical touch.

I felt no compulsion to be there and travelling is complicated for me these days, but the Mechanic surprised me by announcing that he would go. He said something about ‘intergenerational trauma’. Something about ‘ruling a line under’.

Beside the crematorium car park that day the Mechanic put his phone on speaker so I could hear what was said. Matt’s speech was typically humorous but with a softer touch than usual. He told a few anecdotes, the final one being about Dad’s wanderings around the Sydney CBD – Matt had sewn a little e-tag into his cap so he could follow his progress and pick him up if necessary. One of these jaunts landed Dad in police custody, for his own safety – he’d been trying to climb over the pedestrian guard rails on the Anzac Bridge. But this last one ended with a bystander noticing his confusion and calling an ambulance. From there he was placed in a locked ward in Royal North Shore Hospital. He never went home.

My answer to my cousin’s question: ‘Truth be told, I’m not really feeling much of anything.’ But listening to Matt’s words in the car park at the crematorium, I entertained an uncharacteristically sentimental whimsy, that it would be apt to sprinkle Dad’s ashes on the water at White Bay. After all those thwarted attempts, Cap’n reports for duty at last.