Goodbye Dad
A letter to my father, five years after his death
My father died at a time when I was entering the workforce in my early twenties. I’d had one overwhelming moment on a bus where grief ambushed me - the words of a poem struck a chord (Tending to the wound). But I’d pushed it back down. Buried the grief in work.
A few years later, my partner and I decided to travel to Australia. We were buying a car from the backpacker circuit in Sydney’s Kings Cross car park. As I was assessing the options in our budget, I found myself drawn – guided to a beat-up old Ford Falcon. It didn’t look pretty; I was visually drawn to other options. But it was like my father was standing there with me. His profession was a mechanic, so if there were anyone, I would listen to it would have been him. I went with my intuitive nudge and bought the car. Given the sellers needed to move it soon, as they had an impending flight to catch, they were open to generous negotiation and off we went on our Australian adventure.
Travelling around with a tent and a car the only ‘to do’ was where to go next, set up at our destination and what we would eat to concern us. I’d kept busy long enough, the path of grief still needed to be journeyed. Distractions removed allowed things to gently percolate to the surface.
I found myself sitting on a beautiful beach near Diamond Head, blue skies, the warmth of the early morning sun on my face. When thoughts of my father’s untimely death, and dreams I’d had at that exact time rose up.
I’d had a lucid dream where I was witnessing a boy running down a driveway out onto a country road. It was twilight. He passed by me running towards a cross roads, and was gone. I awoke, looked at the clock and later found out that was the time he died. This was before mobiles, and all the technologies we now so heavily rely on.
Sitting on that beach in Diamond Head, surrounded by all this beauty a heaviness began weighing in on me. I went through a phase where I felt like I was walking through mud. Heavy. Aching. A slow beating down. The unresolved grief resurfacing.
When I arrived in Darwin, I felt the need to express many things to my father. But he was gone, had I missed the opportunity?
I decided to write to him. Expressing all the things I wanted to say, how I felt about his passing. All the things I wanted to tell him, how I felt wronged (even by his passing). The guilt and regret for things not said and done, for issues not forgiven. I wrote to empty myself to get it out.
And finally, to forgive him, to forgive him for all that he did and did not do as my father. And to tell him I loved him and missed him but I now accepted the way it is.
This letter I wrote on and off over many weeks until I felt it was done. I acknowledged he had done the very best he could as my father with the awareness and knowledge he had, and that was enough. It was nothing personal, it was not about me. I honoured and celebrated his life and thanked him for the gift of life.
After that I went to the beach just before the setting sun. I lit a small fire, burnt some incense and quietened my mind and body and said a prayer inviting my father to be there. I read the letter out loud, tears streaming down my face. I sat with it and then burnt the letter in the fire with the intention of letting go. Almost five years after his death, I put my father down and let him go.
Years later I learned that in Japan’s Shinto tradition, people bring written messages to temple priests who burn them in a great fire — the smoke said to carry their words into the heavens. Prayers to loved ones that have passed, quiet requests, messages of gratitude and respect to Kami – spirits/deities. I didn’t know that on the beach in Darwin. But something in me already knew.