So, on the 14th of February, I received the news that my father had passed away.
Now, before I start, please be aware that although he was my father, we were not close. He left our family when my brother and I were very young, and while we did go and stay with him and his new wife for a few weekends here and there, he made intermittent attempts to stay in contact, and the last time I saw him in person was when I went over to Bristol and did some security work for his company, I think it was in 1997 or 1998, when I was around 20 years old. Bear in mind that I’m now 45 years old. There was no contact between us for a long time, but eventually we did get in contact again, about ten years ago just before Jake was born, thanks to the wonders of modern communication technology (Facebook). I tried to reconcile our relationship but he repeatedly hurt me by continuing to lie and be deceitful, so I decided to cut contact with him, and the last time I sent him any kind of communication was 2021. I say that he continued to lie and be deceitful, because that is what he did for most of the time I knew him, that was his main characteristic, that was the trait I associated most with him – he was a pathological liar.
I’ll spare most of the lies he told, but the one that made me decide to cut off contact with him was the one where he put on Facebook that he’d got married to a dentist from Kazakhstan. When I shared the news with David, he asked our father about his new bride and he just blatantly denied being married. I knew he didn’t actually get married. Randomly publishing a “Got Married” life event on Facebook to some woman he’s never mentioned before, let alone mentioned being in a relationship with, just didn’t ring true. And I decided that it was going to be the last lie he would ever tell me. I’d had enough. I thought he had changed. But it cast doubt on everything he had said to me up until that point. I was trying to get answers about what happened in the past and I was starting to come around to his perspective, but this final lie made it clear to me about who he was as a person. To tell my brother in their WhatsApp conversation that he was not married, then tell me in our WhatsApp conversation two minutes that he was married… Well, it made me realise how casually he could lie, and how blatantly oblivious he was to the consequences of his lies. Did he think David and I didn’t talk to each other? He believed the reality surrounding his lies so much that I’m convinced he could have passed a lie detector test telling us that the sky is green.
I think I covered most of how I feel about him in this post from 2018 – “https://iaindstewart.net/blog/2018/09/21/what-does-it-for-me/“. I felt like he would rather go and raise those other two children rather than me and my brother. That was a massive rejection, and shaped me in ways that only since doing my counselling training I am coming to terms with. I wanted nothing more than to spend time with him and do things with him, but he would let us down repeatedly. We’d wait by the window for him to come and pick us up when it was his turn to have us for the weekend, only for the agreed time that he’d pick us up to slowly tick past. Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two, by that point we’d accept what had happened and we’d just walk up to Nan’s and have lunch. Spend an afternoon up there, slowly forgetting the disappointment, then we’d come home and watch Catchphrase and You Bet!, and have ham and grated cheese sandwiches, with mini chicken kievs and alphabites on the side. Then go to bed, and have a secret cry over the rejection and disappointment. Then he’d come up with some lame reason as to why he couldn’t make it.
And that’s why the main thing he has taught me in life is how not to be a father. I will do anything in my power to not turn out like him. I will not lie. I will not break my promises. I will be there for Jake, my son.
Look, as harsh as this sounds, I’m not sad. I do not feel grief for that man. I feel no sense of duty or responsibility to have anything to do with his cremation, funeral, memorial, or anything like that. I don’t expect many people to genuinely understand this, as they may, through transference, imprint their relationship with their father on top of my relationship with my father, and because they would feel sad if their father died, or did feel sad when he did die, assume that I am sad or should be sad because my father has died. But I’m not sad. It’s a relief. I never have to worry about him randomly turning up on my doorstep one day. Twenty years ago I would’ve loved for that to happen. I never have to worry about him getting in contact with Jake and feeding him lies. I don’t need to see the notifications pop up on my phone of our WhatsApp “conversation”, which since 2021 had become distinctly one-sided, and consisted of him sending me endless shitty Tik-Toks that I never watched.
I don’t feel sad. The thing I do feel? It’s a sense of closure. And I welcome it.
