This was me, sitting on my father’s lap, over 50 years ago. A rare occurrence, even then. We weren’t close, and since I have grown up, until his stroke three years ago, we only met once a year for lunch when he returned briefly to the UK from his home in Dubai.
Now everything has changed, this very successful international businessman is barely still wtih us, has forgotten most of his past and is confused about the present. It’s so sad to see what a human being can be reduced to, as a result of a biological event.
There is nothing I can do to change the past and there is nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. If sadness or regret arise, I allow them to stay as long as they want but I don’t feed them. There is an ebb and flow.
On Sunday, however, I helped to make my father’s day. My brother and I visited him at the nursing home in the late afternoon. It was tea time when we arrived, and I took over feeding him mouthfuls of baked potato followed by cheesecake. He said it was lovely. This is the man who ate regularly at expensive restaurants on The Palm and only a year before his stroke told us all about dining at the House of Lords.
I held his hand. We listened to him trying to tell us little details about his current existence, never knowing whether he knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t find the words or was failing even to grasp his own train of thought. I suspect it is the latter.
But this is the thing. Before, when we met, after a year, for lunch, there would be a polite embrace and a peck on each cheek. Perhaps a joke from him about how we had aged. Now, we walk into the room and his face, which looks 20 years older than his 77, cracks into a delighted smile. He tries to say our names, and is delighted that he has succeeded. A far cry from running a hedge fund and doing some consulting for international clients, which was how he kept himself amused in retirement up to 2012.
I have made my peace. I’ve let go of the need for anything to be different, now or in the past. The details no longer need to be scrutinised. No-one knows what will happen. But I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that on Sunday, just by being there, I made my father’s day.
