September is just a month - until it isn't. Every year, I am reminded. Every September, comes the breakdown of winter, the birthplace of spring for my antipodean existence, and the name of the month in which my Father died, so many years ago. It was the seventeenth.
As a child, I would tell you that I didn't have a positive relationship with my Father. Next year, it will be twenty years since I got that phone call.
My old(er) hand, holding the last known photo I have of me and my father, together. I think I was sixteen or seventeen.
Who was he? I remember him always in motion, always working. He was the breadwinner, but to me, he was just perpetually absent. A fitter and turner with hands good enough to build anything or fix anything. We never turned a spanner together. I would always get in the way. The books and the electronics were for me, not for him. He loved motorsport and soccer, and he’d spend hours under a car or in the back shed, making or fixing something.
These were the things he gave his time to, the things he seemed to understand in much more depth than whatever fatherhood is meant to be.
He was married my mother, through the act of arranged marriage - a common practice in the Greek Orthodox religion of that time, and one that probably persists today. I don't see myself as religious, and I don't think that he was all that saintly, either. What I didn't know, until his funeral - was that he was married to another before my mother - but I have no half brothers or sisters sired as a result of that union.
I guess, he was damaged goods to the Orthodoxy, where people famously stay mad at each other for decades, dying instead of divorcing.
A man, a father, is always a child before he progresses through to life as an adult, however, and whenever that may end. He was born in 1965 in Cyprus, and came to Australia as a kid. I don't know much about his child hood. I know that when he met my mother, he drove a Renault, a hot-hatch of sorts, based on some sort of Rally Car.
When I was born, it was replaced by something "Sensible" - a Nissan powered six cylinder Holden Commodore, built for the Australian domestic market - the VH - to be exact - something which is now a classic, collector's item. It, like him, is now, too gone. Stolen, joyridden, and then found by police, burnt out in an industrial estate some days later.
A version of my father's car - Image source
Still, I remember the sounds of that car - the motor, the sound of its doors, and the texture of the fabric in the back seat. The smell of leaded petrol leaving the exhaust pipe. All those ephemeral memories - and, too, the cigarette smoke. My father smoked. It was the 90s - basically everyone smoked. I can't tolerate it. Everytime I smell a cigarette, it is a noxious pang of grief, and one that fills me with disgust and absence. Not only does it remind me of him - but it is a metaphor for shortened life, life that has quite literally, faded away, like the last embers of a cigarette in an ashtray.
He left my mother's home when I was about thirteen. They had some fights. He wanted more freedom. I don't blame him for it. She wanted another kid. I thought there was too much of an age gap. I'm still an only child, and will forever remain so. I don't know if he wanted another kid - he never really seemed to pay me attention or express me any real love - the way men often struggle to articulate, or demonstrate affection. It was worse then - I think it is better now.
I hope it is better now.
Anyway, some six years later, he was dead. Like I said earlier - it was September. It was my first year of University.
I had been enrolled in my undergraduate program in Visual Art, and whether it was the stressful environment of a university, a poor diet, or other influences upon my health, I found myself in hospital during the first break in study periods - not close to death, but having spent my entire time away from university in a hospital bed - that was a time when I started, I think, to get my relationship with my father back on track.
He had moved to Melbourne, 800 kilometres away from my birthplace, and was planning to come back to Adelaide to celebrate his 50th birthday. He had probably hoped to build a stronger relationship with me as I moved into an adult hood of my own. We never spoke of those things.
Then, one day when I was sitting at the computer - the phone rang. It was my father's sister - who I had not heard from (ever) - and she had news. "Steven, your father is dead." She told me the details, how he was found, and I was shocked. I won't go into details, it was too rough, but as I put down whatever I was working on for my university studies, from that moment on, my life was forever changed. I was father-less.
I remember little of the events that followed, of getting to arrangements, working with his side of the family which I never really had contact with - (I don't even remember the names of my Aunts) - and the funeral.
I think I remember carrying his coffin on my shoulder with the help of other men who I don't remember. I remember eating fish and chips at the wake. I remember riding in the limo with his family members. I remember the sloppy embraces and affections and apologies of strangers - and I remember the anger at them seeming to know him better than I ever had.
And then I remember being handed this book, by another stranger, and it says it all.
I didn't know I had a "god brother". I have a book, I have a September, and for however many more of them I may have left, I will remember him, and lament the adult relationship that I never will get the opportunity to nurture. I am now double the age I was when he was lost, and he will forever be waiting for his fiftieth birthday.
