The obituary

My dad passed away about 11 years ago. At the time, there was no funeral, no “celebration of life, no “reading of the will,” not even a family get together to say goodbye and honor his memory. Infact, I can’t recall anyone in the family calling or saying anything to me about my dad’s passing except for my mother who called the morning it happened and she called to ask if I would please come up to the hospital. So at six AM that morning I took the thirty minute walk to the hospital and saw my father for the last time.

A few days later, my aunt flew from Germany to be with my mother and my brother and his wife drove down from Prince George, again to comfort my mother, but no one thought to ask me how I was feeling. I guess they thought I wasn’t close enough to my father to have much of an emotional reaction, or maybe they just didn’t care how I felt, I really don’t know, I just know that I feel like I have never had a chance to grieve my father’s passing.

The closest I got was when I finally read his obituary. It had been mailed to me by my sister in law who had had it printed in the Prince George “Citizen”, rather than the Nanaimo “Daily News”, because it was thought that my father would be more recognized in Prince George where he had worked most of his life in the CN train yards as a machinist.

When the letter first came I paid it no attention as I had little to do with my brother in those years (even less now) and I didn’t recognize the letter as being something important I should look at. I don’t think I really even looked at the envelope when it first came, I was sort of living in a daze at the time and I simply threw it on my kitchen table and forgot about it.

About a week or so later I picked it up again and to my surprise found that the envelope had been opened already by someone other than myself. I was horrified when I realized it containied my father’s obituary and that someone had callously opened the letter and probably read what was in it before me. Likely they thought that the envelope contained money or a check and when they found that it didn’t, simply put it back, not caring that I would be able to tell that it had been opened. (I was not keeping the most savoury of company back then).

I felt raped. It was a violation of my memory of my father. Someone who I probably didn’t even like very much (anyone who goes into your mail thinking there might be money in it is not someone you like a lot) had read the summation of my father’s life before me. I couldn’t even bring myself to read it after that and I tossed it back on the table where it sat until one of the more sensitive people in my group of fringe dwelling aquaintances, took it upon themselves to frame it for me. That broke the ice around my heart and I finally read the obituaty.

Outside of the few tears I shed (partly because I was so touched that someone who didn’t know my father at all was kind enough to frame what amounted to a scrap of newspaper) I have not cried or felt any real heartfelt emotion concerning my father or his passing. I feel like I have never mourned him at all and that a part of me is still wounded.

Its true that my dad and I weren’t close; not then when he died, and not in the fourty some odd years before that. I would have to say that I really didn’t know my dad or his history other than what my mother filled in, but he was still my dad, the only one I will ever have and I wished then and I do still, that there had been something, anything to give some sort of closure to that chapter in my life. As it is, it is still a vacant opening inside of me waiting to be filled.

Maybe this will help. Thanks for the challenge.