Father's Day

This is me. My portrait, made by my daughter at school, for one Father’s Day many years ago. It is, more or less, true to life – no hair at the top, very dark eyes. My Father’s Day today was rather uneventful. I actually had to go to work in the morning. Like so many other so-called ‘special days’, we really had nothing to celebrate. Which is just as well.

Today I just feel like saying that I have the best daughter in the world. She is indeed the best, the nicest, the cleverest and the most beautiful daughter in this whole world, and her name is Clea Soledad. She is 6 and 9 months old.

But she is gone. Like so many other children on 29 September 2009, she was taken away from us by the ocean, while all of us were walking on a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was, she is, she will always be, the best daughter in the world.

I miss you, Babita.

¡Andando!

About a month ago I had a car accident. Another driver called Anwar Kamal S. sped through the GIVE WAY sign at a roundabout and hit my Mazda 2 sideways. Luckily, I was not hurt. The car was written off, though. The accident temporarily revived some fleeting memories of feeling (seeing) my own body pushed, pulled and dragged by a force way beyond my control more than four years ago, in very different circumstances.

Over the next few days many different thoughts crossed my mind. I thought about Jason Carney and his best friend Alina, both of whom lost their lives after being broadsided by a drunk driver twelve years ago. I never knew Jason or Alina, but I feel sorry for them, for their senseless, absurd deaths, for the unbearable pain their parents were inflicted. I also thought the same could have happened to me – except it was at a roundabout (you have slow down even if just a little!) and in my case the driver (I firmly believe) was not drunk. Muslims (the vast majority of them at least) do not drink.

As days went by, I also thought about how the little car had been an integral part of our lives, Clea’s life included. Not that I feel any special attachment for the car itself, but rather for those indelible memories I cherish more and more as I get older.

The Mazda was the car in which Clea and I drove together to Sydney Airport one unforgettable night in September 2008. It was also the car where Clea and I shared those morning conversations every parent loves to have on the way to school. I reminisced about her first year of schooling, when her brothers went with their mother to a Childcare Centre in a different part of town, while Clea would jump in the car with her school bag, so full of vitality, so keen to learn.

It was the car whose engine I often had to turn on five minutes before leaving because the frost would make it impossible to drive off to school straightaway. I thought about Clea’s reply whenever I locked the home door and said ‘¡Andando!’ (literally, ‘walking’, but it’s one very idiomatic way of saying ‘Let’s get going!’). Although she already knew what it meant, Clea invariably said: ‘Andando no, ¡en coche!’

I have also been thinking that, regrettably, somewhere, there will be parents who will return home after the summer holidays without their child. Nothing can prepare us for the loss of our child. It is utterly unthinkable to consider that our child may predecease us. Nothing can bring them back. All we can do is to face up bravely to a new day every day. And that does feel too much sometimes.

¡Andando!

Torrijas

It is her favourite breakfast. Days-old bread soaked in warm milk, lightly coated in beaten eggs, then fried in olive oil until golden and finally sprinkled with sugar (and too much sugar would never be enough, of course!). Also known as French toast, I have always called it torrijas, and I still recall my parents frying torrijas of a cold winter morning, sometimes accompanied by thick hot chocolate.

These days I simply use French sticks (which I allow to ‘age’) from the supermarket, but the best are always the ones made with Pane di Casa, thicker Italian-style loaves you can cut into any shape that takes your fancy.

We had perfected some sort of family comedy routine. When the plate was full, I would sit at the table and stare at them, at Clea and her two younger brothers, and very seriously declare my breakfast was ready, so what were they going to eat for brekkie? She would immediately reply in an indignant tone: ‘¡Son para todos!’ They’re for everyone, they’re to be shared!

I still make torrijas as often as possible. Her brothers have elsewhere declared it one of the best foods in the world. I still will sit at the table, place the big plate in front of me and announce that my breakfast is ready, and what is everyone else going to eat?

I still hear Clea in my head, crying out that the torrijas are for everyone, indignant at the sheer injustice of her father promising to eat all of them by himself.

How can such a sweetly perfected family comedy routine vanish? Why?

I’d pour tonnes of sugar over them if that could lure her back, and I’d feel no guilt or shame for giving my child all the sugar she wanted. Just this once.

Tenses

A few weeks ago I read a blogpost titled ‘Forever 19 or What if?’ by Rebecca Carney, in her blog Grief:A Woman’s Perspective. Like with everything Rebecca writes, her words resonated in me, they made me think. This one post, however, made me think especially long and hard about language, not just the words in her post but rather about how our daily grammar has changed.

You see, I can't help being a linguist. A philologist. I have taught English and Spanish as second languages for many years. I have also been a translator and an interpreter for many years. I take notice of language and grammar. I perceive changes when they occur.

The conditional perfect is defined as “a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect”. One typical example of the conditional perfect in English is ‘I would have done things differently’. Thus, the conditional perfect is “used to refer to a hypothetical, usually counterfactual, event or circumstance placed in the past, contingent on some other circumstance (again normally counterfactual, and also usually placed in the past)”. All of those quotes are from Wikipedia.

For most people, the verbal tenses of their daily lives are both the present and the future. The rhythms of the everyday dictate their lives: the things they do or are doing at a certain time of the day, but also the things they plan to do or wish to do in the short and the medium term.

But for the parents of a dead child, their present and their future have been truncated. Their lives are anchored in the past, in a past that has become a ‘forever’. Forever 19. Forever a young man full of promise, like Jason Carney. Forever 6 years and 9 months. Forever a schoolgirl enjoying her first real holiday on the tropical sands of a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, like Clea. Forever.

The conditional perfect is the verbal tense that defines the daily life of the grieving parent. We no longer think about our child in the future tense. We think about them – a lot, constantly, continually – but we do not think about what they will be doing in months or in years. We think about them and use the past tense as we reminisce about their interrupted lives. We think about them and use the conditional perfect as we muse over who they would have been, about what could have been, what should have been, what might have been.

For the parents of a deceased child, “What if?” is a ubiquitous question in our lives. And the answer is always in the conditional perfect, never in the future, forever in the past.

Lily and Huff

Perhaps I have imagined this: during the (occasionally unendurably) long hours I spend home alone I have recently walked into Clea’s bedroom; I have sat there and have grabbed some of her books from the bookshelf.

Maybe I have started reading out this story, Lily Ladybird, once more, the way I used to read it out to her when she was a toddler, she sitting on my knees after her bath, smelling clean and fresh and so, so very full of life. Maybe I have read it again translating the story into Spanish, the way I used to read it to her, even though the book is written in English.

It is just possible that I have been unable to finish it, but I remember it well. It tells the story of a good little ladybird who lived in an enchanted garden. One day she lands on an old branch that happens to be the nose of very horrible witch, who gets very cranky with Lily and casts a spell on her. “No longer will you be good and kind and helpful!” says the witch with an ominously wicked, croaky, throaty voice, and then lets out the most horrible laughter a daddy pretending to be a witch can put on.

Lily’s nose gets all twisted and crooked, and she starts behaving really badly. Her poor mum cries. Her friends stay away from her… Where was her father, by the way? He never gets a mention in the story… But Lily makes new friends: a hideous spider, Dolly, and a very slimy toad, Tony. And then one night they steal a magic wand from a fairy, and start mucking around… and suddenly, the spider turns into a carrot, and the toad turns into a bunny! That'll teach them a lesson! So the fairy sees that Lily is actually good-natured but she’s under the malignant spell of the witch, and so she turns her back into her good old self.

Perhaps I have had to put Lily Ladybird down. It is just possible that I could not go beyond the wicked bout of laughter Clea loved to hear. That childhood excitement of being suddenly given a little fright…

Maybe I have then taken in my hands this other very old book, called Huff the Hedgehog. It actually belongs to Clea’s mum. Her name is still handwritten on the cover. A very very old Christmas present.  Huff is a very hungry hedgehog, who goes around looking for food. He repeats his little rhymed self-introduction to every animal he comes across. I remember that when Clea first asked me to read this book, I had of course to come up with a rhymed version in Spanish. I did, and I suspect it was probably nearly as good as the original:

“Soy Huff el puercoespín,

todavía no he cenado,

si no como pronto,

voy a quedarme muy delgado."

Every time Huff finds something edible, a farm animal comes up and tells him that it’s their food Huff is taking. He walks away every time, hungry and disconsolate, knowing that if he does not get his dinner, he'll “get thinner and thinner”. And eventually he meets a lovely blonde girl who gives him a bowl of bread and milk. Huff loves it.

Maybe someone was listening, maybe not. Perhaps tears welled up and then they were falling down my cheeks, and desperation again filled my mind. It is just possible that I had to close the books and put them away.

I think maybe Huff and Lily felt lonely, perhaps even a little sad, when I tried to read their stories.

Beachgoers

We’ve once again headed back to a beach for a long weekend, to the beautiful shores of the Pacific Ocean that killed our daughter, our sister. I have always loved the sea: I grew up by the Mediterranean Sea, which is a much gentler sea than the absurdly called Pacific. Peaceful, it isn't!

Those two days by the beach I was watching Clea’s brothers play in the water, how much they enjoy the beach. The first morning we were at the South Coast town where we stayed, they both were so impatient and excited they ran together across the dunes to check out the surf. They are not afraid of the ocean, even though they are well aware that it was this very ocean that took their sister away from their lives, even though they know that this was the ocean that nearly killed them, that could have killed the whole family that Samoan morning in late September 2009.

It took us a whole year to be near a beach again after the tsunami. I remember someone offered their beach house to us a couple of months later, during the summer, only to nod sympathetically when I declined and replied that going to the beach was not my idea of a relaxing holiday. And of course it wasn't just then.

It was Lalomanu Beach in Samoa that we chose to return to, a year later, as we soon realised that it was essential for these two Aussie kids, Clea’s brothers, not to be scared of the ocean for the rest of their lives. What better place than Lalomanu, then? It was of course a very painful thing to do, yet it was necessary. It was the right thing to do.

Clea’s brothers now enjoy the sea. They are not scared of the waves; they were riding the fairly small waves there were on the beach last weekend. They were riding the same boogie board their sister Clea had been trying to stand on in very calm waters, just a few months before the ocean came over the land and drowned her. Clea just loved going to the beach. Now Clea’s brothers scream in sheer delight every time they catch a wave and come rushing towards the shore. They look up and seek my acknowledgement, my approval, my encouraging eyes.

I give them the thumbs-up, and they go back in for more excitement, for more waves, for bigger ones. Some good we have done.

Last week the rope of the boogie board finally broke and could not be mended. But I wanted to keep the Velcro wrist band that was once around Clea’s tanned wrist. The rope can be replaced, and her boogie board can continue to be ridden by her brothers and even myself for a few more years.

Being in the ocean brings mixed feelings. I am not religious at all. I do not think we have a soul, the way Christian religion describes it. I do not think there is another life after we die. Yet I stare at the ocean and I like to think that in that vastness, in that indomitable expanse of blue water, there is perhaps a tiny drop, perhaps a very small dot of something that once was Clea, and whenever we enter the sea, we are somehow closer to our daughter, to our sister.

It may seem to make little sense, perhaps it is contradictory, but it is meaningful to me.

A scream that gets drowned in a void

A rare insight into parental grief from a fiction writer.

“No one ever thinks of what a violation of the natural order one's child's death means until they have a child themselves. For a parent, there is no greater experience of disorder than their child's death. Suddenly the hours break down, night suppresses day, blood crystallises into wounding needles. Theirs is a scream that gets drowned in a void, a grief whose venom is like no other. Their world shatters, like a mirror on which their image had been reflecting. […]

I ventured into the notion of my daughters' death as if into a nightmare which ultimately was but an exorcism. “If I imagine it, it won't happen, because fiction never ever mixes up with life”, I would tell myself by way of relief. But the nightmare lasted a few years, the years I needed so as to assimilate the fact that, if death happened, it would be an unavoidable reality. I cannot say that I prayed, although I was very close to doing so. The gesture with which I rejected such a recourse was, I think, what brought me back to serenity. No one is the keeper of their future, or at least, no one can say they are until they overtake it and are able to hide that future within their own life, like a part of their own selves. That is why I thought that, if at some point in time I suffered the misfortune of losing one of my daughters, my problem would not be to lose her, but rather worse, to accept my life without her. However, I didn't feel that way about Clara, my wife. Clara's death, just like my own would have to be for her, was a natural event, within the natural order of things, like leaves falling from deciduous trees every autumn. Loneliness, loss, grief…, these would then be the consequences of compliance with one of the laws of life. But a child's death leaves the parent suspended between two voids, a before and an after, and loneliness, grief and loss become an unnatural horror where all hope and all incentive are consumed in themselves, without any support at all, without any consolation.”

Jose Maria Guelbenzu, El amor verdadero [True Love], p.549-50. My own translation.

Penyagolosa

Penyagolosa

For many years the idea of my own death and what would happen to my body thereafter did not worry me too much. I had never really contemplated my own death as an event that was near. ‘Dead’ was not a word that I used on a daily basis. All that changed on 29 September 2009, and ‘dead’ is part of the vocabulary that reality has assigned to my life, every day, when I wake up.

And it’s not that I had not witnessed death before. As it happens to most people, my grandfathers went first (I hardly recall my paternal grandfather, he died when I was a small child – I do remember my maternal grandfather fondly, he was a loving man who was always surrounded by children; he worked as a clown for a few years after the Spanish Civil War, during which he lost his only son, Rafael, just a few months old, to disease and malnutrition).

A few years later, and over an ever-worsening process that took several months, I saw my paternal grandmother die a slow, terrible death because of diabetes and poor blood circulation. My other grandmother died suddenly in late 1995.

My own father died when I was 25. He died of a heart attack on a hot August morning, and the ambulance that was sent did not have the equipment that might have saved his life. But I only found out ten days later. I was abroad and no one was able to locate me. Yes, I was young and stupid. Haven’t we all been young and stupid at some point in our lives?

As per his wishes, my father was cremated. My mother suggested that I might want to bury his ashes. I agreed, of course. I buried them under the Norfolk pine tree we had always mistaken for a fir-tree; the Norfolk pine tree now towers majestically above my mother’s house. After digging a hole and pouring the ashes in there, I put a rock on top.

I had always held on to a somehow idyllic plan for my own funeral. I had always thought I would die before anyone else in my family. I would be survived by my wife and three children. My wishes were (still are) that my body would be cremated.

My (somewhat romantic) dream was that, eventually, my daughter Clea would make the trip to Spain and fulfil my wishes by climbing Penyagolosa Mountain [the picture above was taken in summer 1992] and scatter my ashes, that what once was me out to the wind, not necessarily from the top, but at least from a good vantage point, somewhere with breathtaking vistas. Just somewhere beautiful in a place that once meant a lot to me.

I do not want my ashes to go to Valencia now. The bond that once joined me to those lands is very fragile, to the extent that apart from family and very few friends, I have no business there any more. But even if my sons offered to carry out the task when the time comes (and it will), I would say no. No, I would rather have my ashes scattered in the land of the Ngunnawal, on the petal-coated lawn beneath which my Clea is buried.

Still, I do hope that my boys will travel to Spain, and that they have a great time, or even move there for good if they wish to do that when they are older. They’ll be able to do that if they wish. They could even climb Penyagolosa, and admire the views. It’ll be their choice. But there will be no need for them to take my ashes over there, to a place with whose people I no longer feel a truly meaningful attachment. Another part of me died over the months and years after 29 September 2009, and it cannot be resuscitated.

Call that a radical shift? Yes. Is it justified? You betcha!

29 September 2009: The children

The children’s names, their age.

Those of us who were there under the water but were lucky to survive, will never forget them. Never.

Eliza Taamilo 2

Sio Taufua 11 months

Dmitry Kikhtiev 1

Clea Salavert Wykes 6

Teancum Schwalger 2

Abish Schwalger 1

Joseph Purcell 4

Pili Poo 4

Maupenei Tofilau 1

Nonumaifele Tofilau 3

Siliva Eteuati 1

Amataga Tiotio 11

Vaisigano Lauvai 3

Rosa Lafaua 3

Filisi Tavita 11 months

Hatonaina Lauvai 2

Siaea Areta 1

Sima Sepelini 3

Manino Faaaliga 2

Aloalo Sao 6

Ana Iulai 5

JayJay Ulugia 2

Pefata Sau 2

Aneti Lueafitu 2

Togafalea Alesana 3

Kapeneta Viiga 3

Alema Tofu 3

Precious Malaga 5

Rachel Leuelu 5

Marilyn Ulugia 3

Quezon Lesa 3

Junior Livigisitone 2

David Sootaga 7 months

Tapuloa Taimane 4

Satelite 1

Losivale Faapoi 10

Lutia Faapoi 2

Gwenlyn Taufua 4

Aleki Taumoe 1

Aliceann Meredith 4

Malo Mikaele 3

Siu Pritchard 2

Ardmore Meredith 3

Gardenia Meredith 1

Shanna Lanu 2

Moanalei Long 9

Jayson Siu 6

Nifo Siu 10

Tuese Peilua 1

Anesone Gali 3

Leuti Sio 8

Maliumai Anetone 5

Etimani Taufua 9 months

Sili Taufua 11 months

Frazer Faaleaga 2 months

Tiloni Sio Pati 3

Seea Peilua 3

Feagai Fatuesi 2

Pelesasa Etimani 4

Ronaldo Aleni 5

Falevalu Segifili 9

Malo Vai 4

Willie Leio Taamu 5

Aleki Vai 1

Savelio Taeao 3

Jamie Viliamu 3

Alfie Cunliffe 2