In `Father’s Day’, Rose is taken to the moment of her father’s accident and she sits with him as he dies.. He didn’t know who she was. She was just a girl off the street who sat with him while he died after a hit and run! That was fiction on Tv in 2005. My father died in 1990 after a hit and run on him as he crossed the road after work!. And I’ve been standing with him `magically’ ever since, sending energy and healing and strength to that moment .. to him and to the boy-me-then!
I know the people of Uk are marking today as Father’s day and many will rush off to make a call to their father or go see him. I don’t think I knew about Father’s day when mine was alive.. am not sure he did either. Early years in Uk.. and we had no such equivalent in Sri Lanka.. So it’s something I am personally not bothered about.. but I do feel a sort of collective peer pressure to `feel something’ about it and have to rise above that `expectation’.
Mine was a good father but – struggled with his own problems of alcoholism, and I’ve sadly seen the monster-side of him when he was drunk.
But in my adult years, as I grow through so man of my own challenges, I have had moments of clarity and started to understand what my father may have endured.. but was never able to express or get support and love for.
That makes his life a tragedy..
And I love the man still, cry about him even now 35yrs after his passing.. and send much healing.. for that moment in 1990.
My father published his Children’s novel `Runway (boy)’ in December 1968. It became a stocked book in school libraries in Sri Lanka in those days. And weirdly I wasn’t born for another year or so at the point in time. Chances are if that story was so full in his mind, then some of it is in me when i was made!
Stories are weird ones.. Sometimes for authors, they are just fantasy whimsical ideas, and more often, they are autobiographical or wish-fulfilments, or fear-resolutions! As a writer myself, I’ve done all 3, and so I think I now know a little of the mindset of my father.
Fathers! What can we say.. some good.. some kind.. some glorious.. some bad.. some broken.. some sink and some rise before their final fall. But all were children of the Gods.
All I can say, without sounding patronising (what a strange word to use on Father’s day) is that we are their legacies, their energies and their dreams and nightmares. And us transforming our own lives in the hear and now.. in some way heals them, as our very energy pulses through time, space, mind and magic.. to where ever it needs to go! To the Fathers alive and those who passed.
-Mani Navasothy
ps. `Yesterday’s Fathers’ is the title of a short story I wrote as part of a collection I did (Degenerate Solutions) 1992.
QuantumPhoenix 