Guilt

It’s five years since we bade farewell to my old dad.

To be honest, neither he nor we expected him to reach the age of eighty-three.  A self-proclaimed grumpy old bugger, he was old Labour, anti-Royalist and fiercely patriotic.

There were times when he and I had fierce disagreements. Having Trotskyite tendencies in teenage years, I drifted steadily toward the centre, paying for a public school education for my children and having a subscription to the Financial Times.

It was odd. We were never closer than in those final couple of years. Conversations were had that should have taken place a long time previously. Sadly, it was too late to do much about most of those things that had continued to cause hurt.

One of his great disappointments was that I had been ordained.  We were blue collar people and my university education had demanded sacrifice on part of my family. A bigger disappointment was that I had left Somerset to live in Northern Ireland, a place he hated for its bigotry and hypocrisy.

For years, I only managed to get to Somerset once or twice a year. When our children were born, my former wife tolerated a visit to my parents once a year, and that for no more than two or three days. I complied with her insistence. The year before I left, she told me that she hated visiting my parents, perhaps our working class family had never met with her approval.

I didn’t mind any backlash that came in my direction, I thoroughly deserved it. I had begun a relationship with another woman and any hostility I received was entirely merited.

What most saddened me was the attitude of my daughter, a twenty-four year old doctor when I left, who decided to cause as much hurt as possible to my old dad. My parents were never told by her that she was getting married and when they sent her a cheque for £100 in September 2019 as a wedding present, she never lodged it nor wrote a word of thanks. Dad was hurt, he couldn’t understand what he and my mother had done.

The morning Dad was dying, five years ago today, I tried to phone my daughter to ask that she speak to reassure my mother, she refused to take the call, nor on a single moment since has she spoken to my mother who expresses bewilderment that her only granddaughter will not speak to her and has never sent her as much as a single photograph of her great grandson who was two years old before Christmas.

Looking back five years, I realize that the guilt lies with myself. Inaction is as much a failing as wrong action. I should have stood my ground. I should have said that people deserved respect.

Dad said to me a few months before he died that he realised how things had gone and that what mattered was that I had come back. It was scant consolation for the three decades that had been lost.