Remembering...

I have a few pics to share tonight.

Today marks 1 whole year since my Dad died tragically in a fire. I don't think that I dealt with his death last year but I believe that I've begun to now, as of this morning, thankfully. It was such a difficult thing to process as we didn't have the regular father/daughter relationship. Instead, we left QLD in 1980 (when I was 2yrs old) without him and I might have seen him a handful of times before my teenage years (and spoken on the phone maybe twice as many times). When I was studying at uni I went on a road trip by myself and visited him and one of my step-sisters, and we spoke on the phone and wrote letters pretty regularly from then on. He wasn't the best at keeping in touch though and I remember feeling disappointed quite regularly. We would always get back in touch after these periods of disappointment however, and, for what must have been a year before he died the contact had been more regular than before...he had a job he enjoyed, he had his brother next door, friends, and was planning a visit to see my sisters and I (and meet our husbands and his grandchildren). He never made it here in the end so I guess some things will have to stay 'unfinished'.

We travelled out West for his funeral (with one of my local sisters being the organiser) and saw the remains of his house (actually his brother's house). We each took a lump of some kind of quartz from the rubble to remember him by (apparently they were all lined up by a little fence). Our lump/rock has been in our garage all this time but today I asked Remmy to place it in our backyard. I don't yet have a photo but I'll post one up when I take one...we'll make it a little area dedicated to Dad. It's special that we were able to do that today, a year ago we would never have imagined we would own our own home and therefore have somewhere to place our lump!

Something else we took from the rubble was amazingly a poem I had written when I was 14 and sent Dad! It was about his mum (my Nan). When you look at the above photos of the rubble it's hard to believe anything could be found, let alone a solitary piece of paper! This was the only thing we were able to salvage so it's pretty special!

My Dad worked as a tour guide for a mine in Broken Hill. He would take people underground and teach them how the miners lived. He loved his job so we couldn't leave without doing the tour he would have taken people on many many times. It was truly frightening I have to say! I have never felt claustrophobic before in my life but I was too too close to screaming out that I couldn't breathe while we were undergroud with only the guide's torch on to illustrate the working conditions! My goodness I don't know how I got through it but this photo was taken upon emerging, was a great feeling to see the light of day again, I don't know how Dad coped! He used to be a bit of an adrenalin-junkie though, as I'm told. He used to drive like a crazy man on dirt roads, he loved doing stunts in his car just for the fun of it (for example, one of his colleagues told me how he would close gates by swinging his car around as if it were a hand!), and he even got his pilots licence. I guess a little underground darkness wouldn't pose too much of a problem!

He had a bit of a sense of humour that I'm guessing many people didn't know how to take! After the funeral we took home with us a briefcase full of his personal effects that his brother had kept at his house and, amongst it all, was this Christmas card he had written for Remmy, Jasper and I and never sent! He didn't forget to send it or anything, we definitely received a card from him that year...this one must have been one he had written and then changed his mind about sending as he may have anticipated that Remmy would be offended! It's quite funny to read but, like I said, I'm guessing that he offended his fair share of people with his kind of humour. It's admirable that he recognised this in himself though, not many do! I appreciated that he was never pretentious. He used to be very honest to me even when it made him look atrocious! He also gave me his candid version of events between him and my mother and, based upon all I had ever heard, he was honest about this too.




Before we left Broken Hill last year we took one last trip to his grave site and placed some flowers.

So did my sister's as they left town...



So one year has gone and I still haven't got to see my Dad, Remmy still hasn't met his Father-in-law, and Jasper hasn't met his Grandad. I have been unsure about what I am supposed to be feeling for most of the year but now I realise that whatever I'm feeling is ok. What I'm feeling now is incredible sadness. Sadness that Dad won't get to enjoy all the good things in life again, sadness that there were so many disappointments, sadness that we didn't get to see each other just one last time. One of my sisters says that when it comes to losing someone there is never enough time you can spend with them, so there's no point dwelling on this. This is true I guess so I won't dwell on the sadness, instead I will just 'remember'...