So my dad died 2-3 weeks ago, and it kinda broke me in a few ways and I just need to get my thoughts out.
When I first heard the news that his cancer was terminal I felt a wave of relief wash through me, finally the dreaded task of answering the phone on a Sunday to tell him I wouldn't be coming over the farm to stare at the back of his head whilst he fixed tractors like the little assistant who couldn't would come to an end.
I feel callous writing that and it surely appears I am but you must understand I barely knew the man, my father's side of the family are a group of autistic farmers who never learned how to socialise with most of society because they just never needed to, isolated on their own land, and for me, the last in a line of farmers who didn't get to live on the farm growing up and who was subjected to the horrors of being a closeted tranny in the British public school system I gained my own levels of social estrangement that made breaching the walls of solitude my father possessed an utmost impossibility for a younger me and an awkward challenge for an older and more socially experienced me.
However as much as I did try both before and after the diagnosis to learn who the man who was supposed to raise me was, I made very little headway. Instead all I have are the surface level things.
He liked fantasy novels, especially the works of Terry Pratchett (whom we both met in person). He liked clarksons farm, feeling a sort of kinship with the shared experiences of trying to run a farm. He liked to make his own moonshine. He liked to smoke pipes. He made and sold hand carved walking sticks. He ate like a medieval duke, his work lunches consisting of dried meats and berries and such. When he was a young adult he used to be in a bike gang, and used to write for a publication put out by the gang. He married my mother young after an accidental pregnancy with my older sister, and they divorced 4-5 years after having me. He was a handyman of many talents, electrical, plumbing, anything he was capable of fixing it installing.
You may think these are summaries for much more that I know but not so, each sentence above is a full sentence for what I actually knew about him. My younger brother who was born of his second wife lived with him and saw him.much more than I and he barely knows more than I do, possibly less as he never got to see how he was before he was born.
The times I used to spend with him in the cold farm workshops waiting for an order for a tool or to hold something were spent in silence, no casual conversation, no explanation of what we were doing or why beyond enough for me to complete the immediate task, not for my lack of trying but for our both limited skillsets in socialisation.
I saw him on the final day before he passed, he was withered from the lack of nutrients, his body missing every gram of fat, and his skin yellowing from his kidneys and liver shutting down, he told me how proud he was of me, and how glad he was that I was the one who was with him, I was the first son, the one I assume he thought would follow in his footsteps to become some handy family man, someone to help him run the farm when he retired there after grandma passes, instead he got a disabled tranny who can barely get into work on time let alone be as skilled as he was at such tasks. I told him there that I always wanted to know more about him, but could never find the words to ask, what do you ask? When the main form of communication you have known is silence? And he confirmed to me that that's just how our family is, nothing offered, just a simple acceptance of fact, we are not good at talking about ourselves, and that's the way things are. That statement alone was probably enough to help me to understand the man he was.
Now that he's gone and the rest of the family remain I now keep bumping into the edges of the hole he left in our lives, at family events he was the one I looked for as he would know what we were doing and where we were going, when someone needed something fixing he was the one to ask how and half the time he'd just come do it himself, he was the one who'd take me to see the rest of the family, it was through him that I kept in contact with my younger brother and had updates from my older sister, it was the same for them, he was the rock that we all revolved around whether we realised it or not.
Without him we're now going to have to start navigating our family in different ways, I'm going to have to make more of an effort to not fade into the background, and I'm going to have to start being someone stronger than I've let myself become.
I think I just miss my dad
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