After my father’s death, a simple act reminded me of his devotion

My father once suggested he had not achieved much in his life.

I was struck dumb, could not get out what I immediately felt, could not explain how very wrong he was, could not tell him how much I loved him.

The author as a young boy with his mother and father.Credit: Courtesy of Michael Pascoe

That was in 1979. We were Australian blokes. Weren’t much good at that sort of thing. All I could manage was some sort of mumbled, “Dad, that’s not right.”

It still tears me up to think of it. I tried to make amends in a letter some time after, tried to tell him how proud I was of him, how he and Mum had set such a high parenthood bar that I would struggle to reach it. And I promised I would write a book about him.

Many years later, Dad long dead, I set out to keep that promise. A mere decade after that, the book is finished.

It turns out to be perhaps more about fatherhood than my father, along with mortality and mateship and a road trip and the land. Y’know – just life and death.

But driving it all, subconsciously or otherwise, has been my father – a strong, tough, loving and gentle man who was not much good at communicating with his six children.

Many blokes aren’t. It seems a lot of us were out the back behind the shed when the EQ was given out. Or maybe we communicate differently. I wouldn’t claim our “different” is particularly effective, but we still try.

I had a potential insight some years ago, when one of my sons arrived from overseas for a visit and another was up from Canberra for the weekend. It felt good to have the boys – men – back for a while, the house immediately feeling warmer, more alive.

We were talking and I realised they had washing that needed doing. I dug it out of their bags, left their mother talking to them, put it on to wash.

I am the son of a man who mostly did the family washing – something that was unusual back in his day – and I am happy to do it myself. There’s something about it that links with my dad that I can’t rationally explain.

While I was hanging out the boys’ things, it struck me that I was enjoying doing it because I was doing it for them; that it was something I could still do for them, these men. There was love in hanging out some shirts and underpants.

And I wondered if my father – not the best verbal communicator with me – had felt something like that, too. A man who communicated by doing things, rather than talking.

I realise doing the washing is just a variation on what many a family cook has said: that the preparation of a meal for those you care for is an act of love.

An old school friend, his reminiscing sharpened by terminal cancer, recalled that his father, a farmer, would serve the family tea and toast in bed every morning, starting with his wife and then each child in order of age. Through older eyes, my friend remembered that simple routine as a daily “extraordinary act of love”.

I can’t recall who the comedian was, but I remember part of his routine about phoning home and his father answering the land line: “How’s work? How’s your car? I’ll put your mother on.”

The young audience laughed in recognition – and so did I. Not much talk, certainly never the expression of love now possible with my own children, yet I never doubted my father’s love and care for me.

It has left its subtle imprint. A little pop psychology: I’ve judged manhood all my life by my father. To be him, to survive his childhood, to grow, to be strong, to be brave, to father, to work, to swim through the dark forces of police work and corrupt colleagues and yet remain a gentle man, to serve, to not complain, to remain.

Without knowing, I’ve marked my weaknesses and those of others against his benchmark. My idealised father, who mostly kept his own counsel.

“It was something I could still do for them, these men. There was love in hanging out some shirts and underpants.”

I suspect much of our concept of manhood is imprinted, for better or worse, by the first man in our lives – normally our father. As fathers, that is a somewhat frightening responsibility if you become aware of it.

Not that such imprinting determines our fate. My parents’ drive to raise a close family was a reaction against their own deficient childhoods, wanting for their children what they had been denied. I know men determined to be good fathers because they never, or barely, knew theirs.

Yet for all the discussion of fatherhood, most of it slips by us, just happens as we go about doing what we do and is lost to memory. All the years of unspoken love and interaction as we go about living.

In the end, the result of that is our legacy. Pericles: “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”

Woven on washing lines, in tea and toast, in asking about a car, by being there.

Michael Pascoe’s book, The Summertime of Our Dreams (Ultimo Press), is out now.

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