My Papa,
Your ears are long. I always think we have the same lobes, fleshy, like ripe peaches. So I must have got them from you. Your eyebrows are busy, bushy and all over the shop but I think someone trims them for you these days – they look a bit tidier. I love how God made your nose. I think it was well-sculpted. He was obviously in a good mood when he made you. I think you would kill me if I did it – but I’d love to clip those stray little hairy tufts poking out of your ears. I wouldn’t dare. It makes me smile though. And it makes me feel your vulnerability just looking at you. Your nails are a bloody mess Papa. Much like my toe nails, must have got that from you too. Is it your psoriasis or a fungal infection? I wouldn’t change them for the world though because I never have a problem picturing your hands, and they’re perfect to me, they fit in mine as though mine are your gloves. Your ankles are swollen more and more these days. That breaks my heart, I know it means you’re getting older. I love how you pretend to do a little Frank-Sinatra skip to cover up the fact you just wobbled on your feet. And then you grin. It is so you, cute, proud, positive, selfless. You think that we don’t notice but I do. The wobble also points to your aging. And the wobbles are more frequent. More vulnerability, another crack in my heart. Your shoulders are covered in an avalanche of dandruff – your own personal little ski slope on your back. It makes me feel protective of you, I don’t know why. You get annoyed when I brush it off, but I can’t help it. Your smile is enormous, and you show all your teeth like a grizzly bear – I love it, it makes me so happy. Why does your every sentence start off with a prolonged “well”…. I do it myself, it drives me nuts. I hear you Papa, “good morning my girl, what have you got going on with your hair today”. You’re a cheeky bugger. I can’t bear the thought of losing you.
I can’t stop thinking about you, I long for the days where I had the luxury of studying your every feature even if I was constantly fearing this day, your departure from earth.
You arrive from nowhere, I find you at the bottom of a cup of coffee, or sitting at the end of my bed in the middle of the night, rolling around a pile of peas on my plate, staring out at me from a frame in our flat – you’re everywhere in my mind and my heart. And everything is heavy with the weight of losing you. Life is in slow motion but I don’t mind because I find my thoughts suspended in time, and I traverse between memories some old and some new. As I wade through these thoughts I am searching for answers about you – why you were so imperfect, but so perfect to me in many ways. Why you were such a stubborn know it-all, but how you could love harder than anyone I have ever known and forgive a thousand sins in the name of and pursuit of love. Why you loudly sang the chorus of objectivity when really you were the least objective person in the world. How you could delete someone from your life so totally but still love them intensely from afar. I can’t say I feel any closer to understanding anything at all. I just know as I always have, that you could be dark and deep and complex. More than anything, I know that you were to me, a very beautiful person whom I liked so very much.
You were terribly principled. You taught all of us life maxims that have shaped us in both good and bad ways. You taught us to be grateful and appreciative of life, to pursue opportunity with vigor and relish luck when it passed by our front doors. You taught us that 50% of luck is our own making, good fortune doesn’t just exit the sky and land on one’s lap. You taught us to treat others the way we wish to be treated, to love our mothers and treat them with respect, to care for our elders, to be polite, kind, thoughtful and to be generous to others. And generosity was the backbone of your being - you were enormously generous with your love and generous with your care and interest in what is important to others. It was this that gave you a certain way of making even a stranger feel like the most special person in a room. I don’t think we could count the number of life’s passers by that you charmed with your cheeky smile, curious good-intent and ferocious wit. You would never start a conversation by talking about yourself, it was always how are you? You gave everybody your unadulterated time, and you just let us all talk to our hearts content about whatever we wanted, listening intently and taking an interest. You were observant but not judgmental, it didn’t matter who you were talking to, where they came from, you would talk to anybody at all. And it was in your eyes where we could all discover your innocent joy in being selfless – the sparkle told of your love of giving. Watching people’s fondness of you over the years has over and over again reinforced their love of this astounding human quality of yours that we all loved you for so much.
Your principles were on occasion vulnerable to weakness. You could be so overly principled that I know you lost relationships along the road in the name of your own ideology. Your heart and mind adhered to such stringency when it came to the subject matter of love - there was no grey matter for you, just black and white. And this was your greatest and most special quality in my eyes. It was also your most frustrating flaw. You loved deeply, to the core, and I have often wondered over the years, is it this depth of soul that has moved your brain to suffer such catastrophe because you just couldn't handle pain and stress? When you were hurt it was profoundly and I have often used the analogy of how you get the scissors out to remove a person from your life because you couldn’t bear to deal with whatever disease that you perceived had beset the relationship. Wrong or right this is who you were. And I guess I have chosen over the years to view that as a positive thing rather than a negative one, even if it did indeed represent a personality failing. Most certainly it was one of the hallmarks of your fallibility and to me this was the antithesis of why I love you so dearly. Despite appearances you were fragile and vulnerable, hugely emotional and deep. I loved you for this, very very much.
You taught us all what love means from your worldy view. That to love truly, one needs to start with liking someone a great deal. Liking who they are, what they believe in and stand for. The greatest compliment anyone could receive from you was to be told that you liked them very much indeed. In the world according to you, love could be impulsive, too emotional and wreckless, and you would describe it as such, as though these were whimsical emotions that never afflicted your soul. This used to make me smile, as you were one of the most passionate, impulsive and emotional people I’ve ever come across. But I understand your sentiment Papa, that for love to weather and withstand the storms of time and human fickledom it must be underlined by a strong like and respect. My stomach hollows when I think of your parting words every time I put down the phone - “I like you so much my girl”.
But I am grateful that you taught me this lesson, for it has stood me well in choosing the person I have chosen to spend the rest of my life with – I like him enormously.
How can I describe your love of life? Inspiring would be a rather inadequate adjective. It was what characterized all our childhoods and earned you the love of so so many. I have sat for hours thinking of happy memories with you over recent weeks, the well is bottomless for me. I think of my papa building a wendy house for us in the garden, teaching the three of us to play tennis and golf, dragging me to the supermarket reluctantly but because you wanted company, waking me every Saturday morning at 8am to make breakfast all of us - you still wanted company, shouting at us to straighten our arms when you were teaching us to dive.
I picture you rubbing your hands together as a waitress approaches with a glass of wine, I can hear your laugh, big and proud. I can see you opening the door of the fridge and relishing the foil wrapper crinkles as you snapped off a cube of Milka chocolate. Just a cube, as though this was you being disciplined so then you would reward your discipline with another 4 or 5 cubes over the course of a night. Back and forth to the fridge for another little nibble.
For years you had been wondering why your lifelong devotion to the “bloody Atkins diet” hadn’t been working. I recall your absolute horror when I told you one day that your 4-finger-kit-kat ritual on your train journey home every night was double your daily allowance of carbohydrates. So cute Papa.
Every Valentines Day I would open my bedroom door to find a little red envelope from you, sometimes two, and a single rose or a little gift. I remember you arriving home one day during my GCSEs, a bag full of books from WH Smiths which were revision textbooks that you had read, cover to cover over the course of the past few weeks maybe on your lunch breaks or was it on your way home in the evenings. The realization was immediate – my sweet father had devoured every last word of these books, you had swamped your brain with all of this information to help me during my exams. The weight of your love was heavy and so incredibly special, what better motivator was there in the world? Yes, your love took my breath away. And so we would sit for hours in the evenings and weekends going through each and every subject matter with a fine tooth comb. And then we would finish and you turn to me and say "ok darling you must be tired let's have a little rest". We would then nibble on a little cube of chocolate or a slice of cheese as a reward for our hard work.
My brothers always thought I was the clever one with the brains. I never believed this to be true but rather that I had a secret and that secret was your love – it was the fuel of my desire to succeed, because all I ever wanted was to achieve your adoration.
I remember during my A-Levels, we had a rare, but enormous argument unsurprisingly when you were contacted by the school weeks before my exams to be informed that I had barely been to school in a year. I’ll never forget the pain and look of hopelessness on your face when you came home that night, the fiercely strained voice as you swallowed enormous tears of disappointment – as though the failure had been yours and not mine. I had let you down and it jarred me from a depression that had been hanging over me for months. Again it was the power of your love that transformed my depressed resolve and I managed to turn around my projected E’s to 3 very good grades. Your choked voice on the end of the phone the day I picked up my results made the endless 18hour days of revision worthwhile. I can hear it even now, 14 years later.
You had a fiery temper. A curse of the Pisces. Your passion often got the better of you and like a volcano, it would spill over like molten lava onto whatever happened to be in its path. We all stood in that hot lava many many times, and felt the heat of your fury and venom in your words. I think sometimes you hid your outbursts under veils of self-justification, your principles and life doctrines were often used as the pillars supporting your argument. But this was generally the language of your love and it would take all of us a while to learn to decode your weird and wonderful ways. Maybe some of us still are decoding.
I will never stop hearing your words of encouragement when I was having problems with other girls at school, nor will I stop feeling the love that you wrapped me in to protect me from it all. I can see you sitting on the edge of my bed, love pouring from your eyes like waterfalls spilling over on to me. I still chant your mantra “you are my girl, never doubt yourself” to myself whenever I'm walking into a battle zone, or feeling low, and I chant them with your voice ringing in my head and your love filling up my lungs.
It is your strength of character that I will give to our little girl. Molly will know and love her grandfather through loving herself because she will have great inner strength. She will give enormously to others and she will be loved greatly for what she stands for and believes in. She will make Alex and I proud I know for a million reasons, so many of them will be because of you. Yes, the world will like her hugely, I know it already.
You told me once upon a time that I love too hard. Well my Papa doesn’t it take one to know one? I love you so so very much that it literally takes my breath away. It arrests my throat, rendering me unable to breathe for moments at a time, at my desk, lying awake in bed, staring aimlessly out of the window – I think of holding your pudgy hands, your dreadful nails, your long eyelashes which stuck out miraculously straight, you chomping on some asparagus or a wedge of cheese with no knife or fork, I think of your little voice picking up the phone “is that my girl?”. And my throat is dry and empty and my stomach is raw and sick I feel like a monumental tsunami will come flooding through my ears and nostrils and eclipse what feels like these permanent ginormous reservoirs of tears that have taken residence in my eyes. The sense of loss is at certain moments, totally overwhelming. The desire to hold your face and to tell you just one more time that I like you so very much is a constant ache. But it’s OK Papa, the pain is temporary I know - I don’t mind loving too hard when it meant that I was loved too hard by you.
In the words of a poet you once introduced me to, one of the great Romantics – Emily Barrett Browning, I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. And I will until my own dying day.
