Thinking of my dad at Christmas

My dad died 7 March 2001, two months short of his 85th birthday. He died in a nursing home, a total physical and mental wreck. An active life and his many building projects had left him crippled from the waist down. Like his father, who also died in his 85th year, he was in an advanced stage of dementia. His speech was not garbled, his words being clear, his diction unaltered, but what he said was not coherent. Memories and images of the past came to him while he stared about him in an unseeing manner.

The last time I visited him was in the January before he died. Living and working in Melbourne I could not get to Sydney as often as I wanted. It was in the evening and I was alone with him, giving Mum and my Sydney brother and sisters a break from the watch. I sat with him speaking irregularly. He did not say much mostly looking absently in front of him. But at the end of my visit he said two things that were comprehensible.

First, he said something that related to the Christian idea of the body being the temple of the Holy Spirit. He used the word 'sacrosanct'. It was a couple of short broken sentences, but his meaning was clear. I was more than a little puzzled at the unexpected comment and its clarity. When not long after I said, 'I am going now, Dad,' he replied, 'Okay, I will see you when I get home.'

Those two passages of coherence at the end of my last visit with my father are fixed in my mind, not so much because he spoke and I understood, but because I cannot help feeling there was meaning over and above the words. Of course, I understand the exhortation to value purity of mind and body. This was something that belongs to the earliest moments of my Catholic consciousness, whose meaning is now all the more stark because of the widespread abuse of the body. It was something more than that.

I relate the final visit with my broken father for two reasons, both of which are closely related. First, while many people would have viewed the end of his life as a humiliating loss of dignity and present that as a justification for the legalised killing of the elderly, my father was prepared for and accepting of whatever the process of dying would bring him. The process of dying was a passage to the afterlife. He considered the pain and the possible humiliation a preparatory purification. He was only concerned that he received the sacrament of the dying according to the Old Latin rite. I know all this because more than anyone else except my mother he spoke with me about matters of the faith. He received the last rites in accordance with his wishes. The priest told me he died a beautiful death: 'He just faded gently away.'

The other reason is that my dad was for most of his life an active man - a feverishly active man - always on the go and planning for the future of his family. His family was his life. He was a man of strong principle, the most principled man I have known. His principles, the foundation of which was his Catholic faith, were not a stiff set of standards that he preached sanctimoniously and unbendingly. He was never reluctant to air his political and social views, which were sometimes endearingly naive because, though intelligent in a practical way, he was not an educated man. And he was often pushy in getting us to follow the route in life he had mapped out for us - the grievous fault of caring too much. But all that is something else.

No, his principles were conveyed and taught by example. It was an extremely active example. His faith was not the ability to reel off passage after passage of Scripture, nor a comprehensive understanding of papal encyclicals. The Catholic faith and the teachings of Bible were reflected in his generous considerate caring behaviour. He was in a way innocent and naive in his moral and religious beliefs which did not at all reflect ignorance, rather a purity of feeling and thought.

His active character, his principles and his care for his family always made Christmas a highpoint of the year for us. The observance of the religious occasion - the birth of the Prince of Peace - was never onerous. To the contrary, the joyfulness and eagerness with which he and Mum led us in the observance of the event made it seem like the heavenly host were above our house singing, 'Hosanna in the Highest and on earth peace to men of goodwill.' Christmas dinner with grandparents and aunts and uncles carried on joyfully from morning Mass.

It is with much love in my heart that I remember my dad at Christmas.

Christmas 1958 - Dad and his boys: Christopher, Michael and me on the end with my tie hanging out

A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL THOSE READING MY SCRIBBLINGS

HMAS Sydney and Dad

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com