The Yardstick of Nine | Dadadadad.

Dear Dadadadad,

It’s been nine years. The idea that it’s now just a skip and a little hop of a year to a full decade since I last heard your voice or held your hand, scares me. The marking of this time…the marking is a mixture of cruelty and healing. The marking is a reminder, and a yardstick that helps me take the next step.

That void of time seems to have moved so quickly and yet, I feel it like an ocean between continents. You are not here, and you have not been here for more of my adulthood than you were. Technically, you were with me for seven years of it, but you have been gone for nine years of it.

The time of you being gone is marked, indelibly, into each day, as I look at your first grandchild. Her growth is an indication of the time you have been gone, and she’s now growing into a young woman. She is no longer a little girl, and – just like she – my missing of you takes on new shapes, grows longer and becomes a life. I mark the years of you being gone, by the notches in her growth chart. The one she now supersedes. There is no growth chart big enough now, as she grows beyond the years marked on it. I wish you were here to see that.

As I screech towards the middle of my thirties, my auditory memories of your voice fade, and I hear that voice only in my own now, or in those of the people of our family. It is in the calm and measured planning, the carefully crafted words and the tinkering of 2am thoughts…that’s where you are.

In the time that you have been gone, my work has brought you closer to me. Sometimes your name even comes up when I’m in the middle of something…and like a spark in the silence of midnight, you’re there.

A few weeks ago, I had a health scare. The kind that kicked my bum, and had me lying on a bed in a medical examination room, staring into their light. As I lay there, waiting for some specialist I did not know, to come in and tell me my future, my brow furrowed and…I remembered your words “I’ve let the team down, duckie”.

You didn’t let the team down, Dadadadad. If anything, you taught the team the way forward. You never were letting any of us down, and I don’t feel you ever did.

But, if that appointment had not gone the way it had, at that time, I fear it would’ve been me who would let the team down. That scared me into a blinding realisation, and it wasn’t just the light shining in my eyes.

When this man-I-did-not-know, told me that I was fine, I uttered the words we as a family used to mutter. Mom, as she washed the dishes, you as you would on the phone, and my siblings and I, as we’d feel relieved over something. It is, as I lay there, the moment where I think I saw you, stomping your foot and clapping in relief.

I realise it’s just a reprieve. Losing your parents when you’re younger than most, ingrains into your days the fact that we are all mortal…we are all never safe from the other side. We’re just all moving towards it different ways – the end result is always the same. What is left behind, becomes our legacy.

And that legacy? Well the legacy you left, the one you created with The UM, has children in it. There are words in it. There are parties and dinners and love and stories. There’s history created and memories that become facts of our life stories. There’s legacy and there’s love.

I miss the warmth of you beside me, and the easy banter of a Sunday morning laugh over breakfast. I miss your teas and your spontaneous giggle. I miss the gentle reassurance of you, and the compelling motivation behind your “get on with it”. I miss your calming “cool your jets”. I miss your speeches and your absolute inability to not go off on a tangent. I miss you grabbing my hand and squeezing it. I miss the smell of you, and the knowing I can call you. I miss calling you, even though it’d mean yelling half of the time. Haha. I miss calling you so damn much.

Just as you have been gone from my life for nine years, you are still in it. But your voice is in mine, not outside of it anymore. So, really, maybe I should just call myself. That’s what you’d tell me to do, anyway.

Perhaps you already did, that day you said:

“I can promise you the excitement or the attraction isn’t ‘out there’, it’s in you”. 

FJD – 27/07/1933 – 12/07/2005