My heart on the left and my body on the right

The last week has been surreal. My body’s been doing its thing in Australia but it’s been without my heart. My heart is in South Africa, specifically in a hospital ward in Johannesburg where my father is recovering from open heart surgery.

In one way it’s a huge (albeit very selfish) relief not to be there and see my father, the strongest man in the world, with hundreds of tubes attached to him. We aren’t there now mainly because my dad and step-mom think we shouldn’t be right now. As soon as they give the word we will be. I’m not sure your eyes can ever erase the image of a person you love fighting to breathe. I know I can still see my baby on his ventilator as a newborn and he’s 12 and perfectly healthy now. Every time I speak to my step-mother I can hear just how hard it is for her to see the man she loves lying helpless on a bed, his body struggling to heal itself (with the aid of brilliant modern medicine).

And it seems so wrong to be so far away. So detached while still feeling so attached. It seems wrong for the world to be carrying on as normal while my father struggles to recover.

It feels like the sun shouldn’t be shining.
I should not be shopping or drinking coffee with friends or wasting my time on the internet.
I should not be counting down the days till we go to Europe.
I should not be sad about election results which ultimately are not going to change MY life

It feels wrong that everyone is carrying on oblivious to the fact that my father is in intensive care and my step-mother is spending her every waking moment taking care of her husband and my father while we carry on as if everything is the same.
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And the distance between us is highlighted by the fact that everything IS the same.

Every day I go about my day thousands of kilometres away from my dad and step-mom. Their nights are my days and their days are my nights.

I don’t know what they’re doing or thinking about the little stuff. The stuff that’s so important when you are family that love each other.

They don’t eat our alphabet dinners or get to come over for a meal once a week with the rest of the family and my dad doesn’t get to make ridiculous dad jokes in person – and believe me he is spectacularly good at dad jokes.

This living apart from people you love thing is the pits – when the person on one side of the world is sick, it’s just fucking awful.

Thank you for listening to me rant. And dad, if you ever read this please excuse me for swearing.

My son and the strongest man in the world

“The strongest man in the world”

That’s been my fathers line ever since I can remember. For 45 years every time I’ve asked my father how he is, its been the same response given in the same tone of voice. The strongest man in the world.

My father is not the type of man that suffers from “man flu”. In fact if he’s ever been sick with a real cold or flu, he’d just cough, sneeze and say “I’m the strongest man in the world.” Mind you it didn’t stop him from carrying around the neatest selection of Panadol, cold and flu tablets and antacids in his car that you’ve ever seen. But that was organisational rather than medicinal. My dad is rather pedantic, just like his youngest daughter (that would be me).

Last night he called me from his home in South Africa. How are you?” I said
“Strongest man in the world” he replied.

But what followed next revealed the chasm of distance, the true heartbreak of living in a different country from the strongest man in the world.

We hadn’t been there to see that he was feeling breathless, we hadn’t chatted to him about or even known to ask him what the doctor said when he went for a check up. We hadn’t anxiously awaited the results of his angiogram. We just heard the end result – he’s having bypass surgery this week.
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Mentally I am already packing my bags to go see him, thinking of how I can organise everything at home to be with him. Should I be leaving my mother and sister for the Jewish New Year this week or should I be flying on the first plane to South Africa?

He’s the strongest man in the world, my dad. He says we shouldn’t worry and I’m sure that flying to see him in hospital is not ideal because I know he never wants me to see him weak and vulnerable. He never even wants to tell me when he’s sick.  I am sure if it wasn’t for his wife he wouldn’t have even “worried” us with this upcoming surgery. He wants us to believe he’s the strongest man in the world and he would rather I be there when we can actually spend some time together. Not when he’s lying recovering from open heart surgery. Who ever thought a sentence could be so hard to write?

And I feel immediately like we don’t spend enough time together and I feel the huge distance between us. He knows how much I love him and I know that I’m his favourite – just like my sisters believe they are his favourite (even though I’m right and they’re not). I feel the pain of not having the every day with him, the quick catch-ups, the weekly dinners, the little things.

I know he cries when he gets off the phone and I have told him about the amazing things Little Pencil has been doing and he knows that my child is growing up without his physical presence in his life. I know that I need to be a better daughter to him – that telling him I love him once a week over the phone isn’t enough. And I feel the distance that I blame for stopping me.

Today everything made me think of him, the clothes in the shops, the food on my plate, the music on the radio, the tears of my sister, the voice of my son. My father seemed to be everywhere, but he was nowhere I could be with him today.

He doesn’t even know it’s Fathers Day in Australia today. He just happened to choose the right time to remind me how grateful I am for the father that he is and how much I miss him.

Now if we can just get through this week because it’s only 150 days before we celebrate his next birthday TOGETHER in Australia.

For the last couple of days I’ve been lost in the past. Sorting through photographs that I’ve found stored in the back of drawers, inside long unopened cupboards and sticking out of the middle of books. Photos in old fashioned sticky albums, in sleeved albums. Photos on CD’s, on laptops and phones and computers. Thousands of them. Some from weeks ago and others from decades ago.

I’ve always loved taking photographs, not in an creative artistic way but rather as a means of capturing moments in time. I’m one of those irritating people who get so caught up in ensuring that I ‘m capturing everything on film that I sometimes forget to live the moment. Sometimes it’s a pain but years later it pays off.

I’ve been living those moments again and again while I rifle through my past like a speed-reader glancing at a page and picking up the gist of the story. It’s not just for sentimental reasons, although it is certainly stirring up an emotion or two, rather I am making one of those super cool photo walls to make my house look more like my home. For this I need to choose my very favourite photos, the photos that tell the story of our family.

It is a strange and emotional experience going through your past in picture format.

It takes you right back to your earliest memories when you see your favourite scarf, the one whose tassles you pulled through your fingers as you sucked your thumb to sleep as a little girl. It’s overwhelming to see the little girl who shares your body going to school for the first time. Such a different little girl but yet still the very same woman.

It takes you through a roller-coaster of emotions to see the high school version of yourself who thought she was so cool. Cool is different from troubled but she didn’t know that. Now you just want to reach out to her and yank her away from that very turbulent time.

It’s cringeworthy when you see yourself in high school with crimped hair or worse when you finally dig out the wedding photos that you have been hiding because you had a perm THE DAY BEFORE your wedding.
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It’s overwhelming when you open a box of wedding photos and find hidden inside the hand written love letters your husband and you exchanged during some of the hardest times. It’s tragic when you recall the events surrounding some of those letters but it’s magical when you realise where you are today and that you’re still together only you love each other even more now.

It’s like a slap in the face when you look at pictures of your parents and realise that you are older now than they were in those photos – even though then they were your very old and wise parents at the time.

It’s confronting when you look at the pictures of your new born baby attached to a ventilator that is breathing for him and think to yourself “I could never handle that” but at the time you did it and you sat at the hospital by his side every day for two months and took more and more photos every day.

It’s like a break in the clouds during a black storm when you see the pictures of that same tiny child leaving hospital and all the clouds evaporate when you look through his life and see huge smiles dominating his every waking moment. Because you’ve photographed most of these moments.

It fills you with warmth and happiness as you flip through holidays and birthdays of the family you have created and you smile from deep within at the memories they bring.

It’s comforting to know that you’re still taking photos. And important to remember never to stop writing letters.