Remembering Dad

This handsome young man is my Dad, probably in the late 1940s. I love this photo because it reminds me of the tall, strong man that he was in his prime. When we were little, my sisters and I would climb onto his broad, deeply tanned shoulders and dive into the water at Rainbow Bay. He loved to sing, especially show tunes, and would walk in to wake me up singing 'Oh what a beautiful morning', while I stuck my head under the pillow. He had a dry, ironic sense of humour. When I showed him the wildly up-to-the-minute knitted bikini I'd bought when I was about sixteen, he said, 'And did they give you a match box to store it in?' The poor man: three teenage daughters!


As we grew older, he told us to let him know when we were going to get married and he'd 'leave the ladder out'. But nothing made him prouder than walking each of us down the aisle, and making a speech at our weddings.

As he grew older, we saw the softer side of him. I would tell him, 'I love you' and he would say, 'And I love you'. He would greet my daughter with 'Hello, beautiful' and marvel at how tall she had grown, and how much height he had lost. The strapping six footer became bent with arthritis, but he rarely complained about his pain.

Dad had a brilliant mind- in many ways he was the smartest person I ever met. Sadly, Alzheimer's Disease gradually took him away from us, but it never changed his personality. He was a gentleman, in the truest sense of the word, and remained so until the end, even when he no longer made sense most of the time. I would look deep into his eyes and say, 'I love you Dad,' and he would reply 'I love you.' I think it was the last thing we said to one another, a couple of weeks before he passed away.

Today it is a year since we lost Dad, and of course all of the 'firsts' are hard. But I constantly marvel at how lucky we were to have him as our role model, our mentor and most especially, our father. Yes, he is gone physically, but his presence in our lives continues, and that will never change.