‘I felt her loss because it was like my own’

I may not have reached the age where my friends are dying, but I’m definitely at the point where their parents are, and that’s a melancholy era all of its own, writes Margaret Wenham.

In his wonderful, often hilarious and sometimes sad memoir The Moon’s a Balloon — one of my most favourite books in the world — British gent turned Hollywood star David Niven recalled a later-in-life conversation with the witty, composing, playwriting, singing, acting genius Noel Coward.

“It’s terrible,” said Niven to Coward over lunch one day. “I’ve arrived at the stage when all my friends are dying.”

To which, Coward replied dryly, “Personally, I’m delighted if mine last through luncheon.”

I must have been in my mid teens when I first read Niven’s delicious biography (and then devoured his next, Bring on The Empty Horses … I’ve read both multiple times) and undoubtedly I would have laughed in appreciation of Coward’s slick quip. I’d have done so, with the callowness of youth, for its witty perfection and for that alone.

But it’s not by accident this exchange between Niven and Coward has, in recent months, been swimming in and out of my consciousness.

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Margaret Wenham (top) with her dad John Hetherington and her sister Helena.

And this isn’t because I’ve reached the age where my friends are dying, though, grimly, that can’t be in the too distant future (sorry cobbers). It’s because I’ve reached the age where my contemporaries’ — including friends and fondly regarded colleagues — parents are dying … if they haven’t already passed away.

I thought of it again just the other week when one of my oldest — in terms of how long we’ve known each other — friends messaged me to say her father had died that morning.

I don’t see much of this friend these days. Situations and circumstances have conspired to create, regrettably, distance between us. Yet we keep in touch — even if it is mostly to say we “really must catch up for coffee or lunch” and then never do. And I think that’s because of the longevity of our association and the fact we really were best friends for decades — living across the road from each other from when we were nine and on through our teens, then into our 20s and 30s and 40s, when leaving home, marriages and children and divorces ensued.

I think the friendship still has, despite the drift, strong meaning for both of us because it was forged in our very young years when there was much innocent, unfettered by responsibility and the later angst of adolescence and then upheavals and pressures of adult life, fun to be had.

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I felt the loss of my friend’s dad because it reminded me so much of the loss of my own. Picture: iStock

And we did have fun. She introduced me to Desmond Dekker’s The Israelites and her big sister indoctrinated both of us with David Bowie.

If I didn’t subject her to saturation levels of Led Zeppelin, it was definitely the case with Monty Python. We spent hundreds of hours rolling about listening to Python records … and Benny Hill (yes, there it is) … and, later, Robin Williams and Billy Connelly and the Secret Policeman’s Ball and …

When the grown-ups thought we’d gone to bed, I’d sneak out of my house and stealthily make my way to hers. A few feet up and with stifled oaths and groans, I’d climb through her bedroom window. Then, everything was conducted in whispers and muffled giggles.

On the weekends, we’d disappear in to the bush behind her house to pick mulberries and run our homemade, ramshackle billy carts down the rough tracks at breakneck speed.

We tenderly handled her guinea pigs in their little hutch (though it was my fox terrier who got loose one night and slaughtered them).

We shared with excruciating minutia exciting details of our first kisses (and, later, more!) with boys.

And, while there was lots of laughter along the years, there were times we wept with and for each other when fate dealt one of us a cruel hand.

And so, when she messaged me about her father, I felt her loss … like it was sort of my loss too. I think because our long friendship and history is so vivid in my mind, it forms part of who I am.

She said she felt a strange hollowness from her father’s death — and an unsettling sense nothing can be the same again. And I got to thinking about how my father’s death impacted me.

I don’t mind telling you that when my sister rang to tell me, even though we’d been steeling ourselves for Dad to die, grief hit me as though it were a truck.

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I was in north Queensland — a thousand miles away from Mum and Dad, or any family and well-worn friends, with three little children in tow — and I was alone with my sorrow.

That first night I put Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby on the record player, drank too much wine and, late into the night, waltzed and foxtrotted around the room alone, pretending I was in Dad’s arms, as I — and my sister — had often been since we’d grown too big to stand on his feet and be danced around that way by him.

I wept loud and long that night and for days.

Weeks, even months later, when a thought of Dad unexpectedly entered my mind it would be followed by a wave of anguish. More than once I found myself sobbing at check-outs, apologising as I mopped up the tears.

So, thinking about my and my friend’s Dad, I’ve realised when you do lose a parent, particularly a much loved one, well of course things can’t be the same again because you have indeed lost a part of yourself — after all, it is they who, through forging us, are indelibly stamped on our psyches, our souls.

My Dad died 21 years ago — my parents were older than my contemporaries’ — and the sharp grief I felt has long settled into a gentle melancholy, as it likely will for my friend, for all my friends, for all of u.

My mother, for the time being at least — for she is 95 — lives on.

These days, I am fully aware of time being as precious as it is relentless.

Margaret Wenham is the Courier-Mail opinion editor.