Single Father, Better Dad. Mark Tucker

little life left in him. I had been spared watching his life decaying away and they wanted to prepare me for what was waiting for me in the next room. They wanted me to be ready for what I was about to experience.

      But who can prepare you for this? I walked into the room and there he was. My dad, the protector of our family, the man who had been my father for all of my life, humbled by this hideous, unrelenting cancer. I wasn’t prepared for this at all. How could I have been prepared to see the man who had been so strong and such an important part of my world, so helpless? How could anyone be prepared for that?

      My dad made a feeble attempt, which I didn’t even notice, to sit up in bed but the effort overwhelmed him. All he could do was turn his head and look at me through half-closed eyes and whisper something I couldn’t hear. And that was it. I held his hand and he drifted back into his final coma.

      I spent the rest of the day sitting with him, watching him, listening to his breathing. We would wet his lips and his tongue would flick out, desperate for the moisture. But eventually even that little movement stopped. At one point during our vigil my brother and I helped the nurse to clean him up after he soiled himself and, as we turned him, he grabbed our arms tightly and his eyes opened with a look of fear and bewilderment. He had become a baby again, his actions driven only by reflexes, stripped of all his dignity.

      I was tired that night, the jet lag and emotion had kicked in and I needed to sleep. I spent a few minutes with my dad, squeezed his hand, told him that I loved him and that we would be all right without him, and said my last goodnight. I fully expected to wake up the next day to find him gone.

      But having woken early the following morning, I went downstairs and, to my surprise, found that my dad was still with us. Still lying there, still breathing quietly. But during the day his breathing became softer and shallower and his reflex movements fewer and fewer, until eventually his body gave up. My dad died peacefully, his family around his bedside, on a wonderful, calm summer’s evening, the sun just starting to dip below the horizon while casting a gentle light over the big oak tree in his garden. It was a beautiful time and a beautiful place to die. As he slipped away I was hit by a towering wave of grief. My feelings of sorrow and loss for my dad were compounded by the even greater sorrow and fear over what was to become of my own family when I got back to Australia. This was much too much to grieve over. How much pain can one heart take?

      It would be a week before the funeral. A week when reality seemed to stop and our lives were put on hold. My dad was dead but not yet buried and my marriage was terminally ill but not yet dead. I stayed with my mum and we waited. We waited for the ceremony that would tell us that the time had come for us to move on with our lives. For my mum, brother and sister that would mean learning to live without my dad. For me it would mean so much more. My dad would be buried and my marriage would soon be dead.

      The funeral was painful and, when it was over, I didn’t want to go home. I felt as though I could suspend reality by staying longer in the UK. But, of course, that was impossible, and two days later I was off and heading back to Australia. It was a long, lonely trip home—and this time I wanted it to take forever.

      Now that my father had passed away, the day of reckoning for my own family had arrived. My wife insisted that the children had to be told—she needed to move on. I wasn’t sure whether, when the moment came, she would be able to go through with it and hoped this might be the one thing that would keep us together. Surely she wouldn’t be able to hurt the children, wouldn’t be able to turn their lives on their heads and we would survive as a family—wouldn’t we? I was wrong again. A happy family life is no competition for a love affair.

      The plan was for us to tell them together but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know whether I was being a coward or shirking my responsibilities, but I didn’t want to be there at the death of my family. I had just been through a traumatic family death and I was in no state to cope with another one. My wife called the girls down from upstairs and I went out into the garden while she prepared to bring our family life to a close.

      I sat there looking back at the house and looking back on all the wonderful times we had enjoyed as a family. We were a great family—we worked well together, we laughed, the children were happy and we had fun—surely it wasn’t all going to come to an end? Again, I wondered whether my wife would have the strength to go through with it. In these final moments, would she be able to tell our girls the words that every child dreads, the words that my eldest had told me she was pleased she would never hear because we were such a strong family? When I could stand the tension no longer I came back into the house, hoping that there may have been a change of heart. But there was nothing but silence, broken only by the sobbing of my family—my wife and my fourteen- and twelve-year-old daughters.

      It was all over.

      Bollocks. Big, bastard, hairy, baboon-sized bollocks.

      3

       And then there were three

      So it was done, our time together as a family had come to a close and there was no going back. We got down to the mechanics. How would the split work and when, my wife politely enquired, would I be moving out? Me move out? What?

      “It’s traditional in these situations that the father moves out so the mother can look after the children,” she pontificated.

      She sounded like a lawyer or a judge, so matter of fact, hardnosed and sure of herself.

      “Really,” I replied. “I thought it was traditional for a husband and wife to stay married—for richer for poorer, for better for worse and all that good stuff.”

      God, I could be annoying—but I was pissed off that she was being so heartless. And why should I be the one to look for somewhere new to live? She wanted to leave me. Why did that mean I had to be the one doing the moving out?

      “It’s typical of you to take such a traditional view of marriage,” she replied.

      I was confused. I wasn’t sure what was traditional anymore. Was it traditional to stay together or to break up? Did the fact that so many marriages fail mean this was now an expectation—that splitting up was the new normal?

      Anyway, no time for philosophy, I needed to take guard quickly because Brett Lee was on his mark and getting ready to deliver another bouncer. And it was a ripper. My wife had decided that I would move out of our house from Monday to Friday, but move back in again at the weekends. This would have the benefit of allowing her to look after the children during the week, her ‘traditional’ role, while also allowing her the freedom to “explore her relationship” with her soul mate at the weekends—a less ‘traditional’ role in my view. Or put another way, I would be free from household distractions during the week to enable me to concentrate on work and earning the money to keep the wheels turning, my ‘traditional’ role, while she would be free to spend the weekends as she pleased—out on the town, going away or rooting like a rabbit with her soul mate. I imagined that this arrangement would condemn me to hard weekends of running the children around and lonely midweek evenings of TV.

      Incredibly, my wife had even found an apartment for me to rent just around the corner from our house. “You will be very happy in it and not too far away,” she told me. She always knew what was best for me. And how comforting that she was prepared to be so considerate and supportive in my hour of need.

      I was horrified. How much of this had she, or worse, they planned? Would her soul mate also be moving in with her when I moved out during the week, so they could be together? Would he be perusing my CD collection—“Ah, Ready ‘n’ Willing, the classic Whitesnake album of the late 70s. Your old man has got taste”. What if he forgot his clean undies? Would he think about borrowing a pair of mine? (Obviously they would be far too big for him). Would he sit in bed reading the newspaper in the morning, having a cup of tea, while wearing my dressing gown? Or would he bring his own dressing gown, and leave it hanging behind the bathroom door over the weekend—a permanent reminder of his presence—so that it was ready for him the following week? Would I come home to find a photo of his kids on my bedside table? More appallingly, would he try and take over my role as father—would he make friends with my girls,