Memories around my Father

My father was diagnosed with motor neurone disease or MND for short. Motor neurons carry messages from the brain to the muscles via the spinal cord and with MND these neurons become damaged and start to die. When this happens, muscles start to weaken and waste away and the usual path to death is two to three years, with no known cure for the disease. My father lasted just five months. There is, during the course of the disease, an inability to communicate and this aspect struck my father early. He was often the strong, silent type and then he was just the silent type.

As a child, the predominant feeling I had around my father was one of anxiety. Throughout my childhood, he’d seethe in his silence, breathing out cigarette smoke like a two legged dragon. At one time he smoked two packs a day. He believed that the stress relief from smoking outweighed any damaging effects that smoking caused. The morning cough, he said, was just him warming up for the day. He couldn’t beat life’s stresses without his cigarettes.

He seemed happy a lot of the time but some days inside him a rage boiled. He’d hold that anger in until there would be a breaking of the dam and his rage would pour out in violence towards another person or towards an object. I once saw him get into the family car and deliberately smash it into another car parked in front. That vehicle belonged to a so-called mate. Apparently, in the pub my father was leaving, this man, this “bastard” had annoyed him. This was one of the many occasions when I was left in the car to wait for him whilst he had a drink or two. It was unusual for him to do anything other than drive us home, breath clagged with beer and smoke fumes, his eyes concentrating on the road. So on the night of the deliberate damage to the car in front of us, I was left anxious and afraid for any subsequent incidents. That night I was sitting in the passenger front seat reading my book under torch light. As we hit the car in front I reached out with my hands and was lucky only to feel some pain in my lower arms as my father backed up and then repeatedly pushed the front bumper into the back of the other car. He did that three times.

He would often be gone from home for weeks at a stretch, my mother telling me that it was part of his job because he sold perfumes and household items, like special polishing cloths, door to door and he needed to travel to other towns because ours wasn’t a rich place. He’d pack the car, the sturdy Vauxhall Victor that had dents in the front bumper from his aggressive action outside the pub, and off he’d go. There were always a couple of bottles of gin and lots of tonic water packed in a cardboard box that went in the boot along with his shoes, at least three pairs shined to a gloss, and a suitcase of clothes packed by my mother. That suitcase sat beside his sample box, full of the items people could order once he’d demonstrated them in their home.

That moment of departure cemented in me a sense of satisfaction: just me and mother, her doing part time work at the local old people’s facility where her wage, although not much, kept the household running. I loved those days absent the clouds of smoke or being told to go with him on “adventures” in the car which would usually end up at one of the local pubs, me reading under torchlight. Sometimes the adventure might be a long drive and then a short walk to a look out where parts of the Hauraki Gulf could be seen in a dimming sunset from a cliff edge or to the start of a bush track where I was instructed to admire the native ferns and trees. We’d never do the actual walk. He’d get out of the car and smoke cigarettes. He’d tell me how lucky we were to live in our small town just south of Auckland with its market gardens and milk supply farms. He believed that it was the best town in the whole of New Zealand, the gateway to the Waikato, the mighty river valley.

In the garage next to our small house there was a set of free weights that my father used every morning for at least an hour. He was strongly built and could lift quite heavy weights. I didn’t have his bulk, more a runner’s build, lean and quick like my mother. One early morning when I was around ten year’s old, my father got me out of bed to start sets of weights with him. He told me that to be a man you had to be strong. That was very important. You had to be able to stand up for yourself, to not be afraid to be a man. He showed me how to lift starting me off with the lowest weights. He said the most important of the exercises was a squat with dumbbells, perfect for the core. He showed me a stiff legged deadlift and lateral raises. He did the workout with seeming ease, exhaled breath rather than grunts or acknowledgments of pain. It was only when he stopped that his cough would recur.

At breakfast that morning, he told my mother the plan of how he was going to build me up:

“He’s like all the blokes from your side of the family: all prick and ribs. We have to build him up.”

“Joe,” she said, “language!” But she smiled as she said those words, her admonitions always soft. She forgave him everything, was completely devoted.

I left for university when I was eighteen, strong now from the routines with my father, lucky to have won a scholarship and a place in a hostel close by the campus. I rarely visited home as I didn’t own a car and there was no spare time: I took a part time job in a restaurant close to the hostel, right on the edge of the Auckland Domain where I worked some nights and every weekend. I declined cigarettes, even the funky kind, the joints. I avoided smoky venues, although there was a smoking section in the restaurant. I enjoyed the free staff meals and serving at the bar, learning to mix cocktails and pour beers. I did all right at university, liking the chemistry major that was a challenge and yet a subject where it all fell in place for me, I even enjoyed the sometimes tedious lab work.

I met a nurse at the restaurant where I worked. She was at a function where I was preparing drinks, busy behind the dark wooded bar. She asked my name and smiled and smiled. She hung around the bar all night, just, well nursing a couple of drinks, and when I got off work she was waiting for me in the car park. I told her I walked home from work as the hostel where I stayed was quite close.But she offered me a lift which I accepted, kissing her passionately as we said goodbye. After that first night, we met regularly, well as often as her shifts and my studies and part-time work allowed. Cheryl just said that as soon as she saw me she’d known, she had a special feeling as if I was already in her life. I was the one that she would be with, must be with. It was flattering as she was both attractive and practical and very decisive. After only two months, I moved into her apartment.

On the telephone, I’d told my mother that I’d met someone and that we were living together and she’d asked to meet Cheryl. So, I took Cheryl to meet my mother and father. We drove south in Cheryl’s car. It was a weekday evening where we both were free of our work and study responsibilities.My father greeted us, cigarette in hand.He opened the from door wide and said in a loud voice: “Done well for yourself, lad, nice to meet you Cheryl.”Mum had made one of her roasts, the vegetables cooked until soggy and the meat well done because my father’s teeth were now brown and thin, cavity full. He never went near a dentist. He smiled with his mouth closed. There was feijoa wine, green and sweet, made from the native fruit and added sugar. They had three feijoa trees in the backyard and my father had fermented this drink in the garage, many bottles stored amongst his weights. The result was a highly perfumed and potent drink that cost very little. I didn’t imbibe, using the excuse of driving. But I detested the stuff anyway, disliking the sour guava taste of the fruit and finding no pleasure in its sweet derivative.

Cheryl had one sip and left what remained in the glass. She didn’t say much, seemed wound tight. My father regaled us with stories of his trips through Waikato towns, selling his wares, being invited into the houses of Maori people, who he said bonded with him. My father drank and sang with them. He could really belt out “Ten Guitars”, the song some people wanted as the New Zealand national anthem. It was his party piece as he sang the song for Cheryl, she and mother both smiling but with Cheryl not really knowing how to react, hands in her lap, looking at me with something like pleading. My father tossed back the feijoa wine, glass after glass.

Just before my mother served dessert, it was going to be her apple pie, I could smell it, Cheryl said she needed to use the toilet and my father said he’d show her where to go. Mum was fussing in the kitchen, whipping cream with the hand beater, and called out for me to help. As I was getting out the dessert bowls, I heard a sharp cry from Cheryl, then a loud “No.” I went to see what was going on. She came back into the dining room, red-faced. She said to me “Let’s go.” Nothing else.We left. I said nothing to my mother or father. We just left. In the car she told me that my father had goosed her and asked for a kiss. She’d pushed him away, slid past him back to the dining room, my father just laughing and laughing. In the car, she swore. She cried. And when we got to her apartment, she closed the bedroom door on me.The relationship didn’t survive. She wouldn’t talk about what happened, wouldn’t engage with me. She shut down. And then after about a week, Cheryl asked me to move out. I spent the last year of my degree back in the hostel. Despite a depressive start to this new life, I did well in the final exams and lab results. There was only study and work at the restaurant. Nothing else.

After a while my mother called me at the restaurant asking if I was all right but said nothing about the dinner with Cheryl. I told her I’d moved back to the hostel. My father didn’t communicate at all. I stopped seeing my parents, part entropy, part dread. I made my life around my work.

I’d not seen them for twelve years then one day my mother called me at work, the laboratory where I do chemical pathology, mostly working on detecting markers of diseases such as cardiac enzymes or tumour markers. She’d gotten the number from one of my childhood friends who had also done chemistry and who’d kept in touch with me and his parents who lived in the same town as mother and father. She told me that Dad had been diagnosed with MND and that he could no longer speak.Would I come and see him, and her, as she was now at the end of her tether? He just wasn’t himself. He’d even given up smoking. I agreed and said I’d travel down on the weekend.

MND is a thief, but it steals in increments: first the voice, then the gestures, and finally, the man himself. And in those quiet, late weekend afternoons, as I sat beside him, I wondered if he too was searching for those lost words, for the chance to say something he’d held back all his life, for the opportunity to speak the truth.