I realise now that you can’t stop being a father once you’ve been one. Well, I can’t stop being a father. Despite the fact that my daughter died in 2004. Father’s Day was a bastard of an experience.

It took me a while to face that fact. It was a process, and Mark Zuckerberg’s mad plan to pay-per-view our Ai-zombified dead loved ones wouldn’t have made it any more or less wonderful or terrible.

As far as I can imagine, it will desiccate our memories, it will cast them in mass produced, digital amber. It will distort them with prettification. It won’t be a process of change it will be a one-off transaction.

(And Meta will advertise product to you during the breaks in what passes for conversation)

Zuzu had a severe form of cerebral palsy. She could sit up unaided. She could only eat via a tube. She was unable to talk. My goodness she could smile though. And she had that smell. And she had that touch… and she dribbled uncontrollably. I remember all of that. I remember how we, her mother and I, searched for ways to make her life better. We never searched for ways to love her though. I don’t need to remember that love, it’s still with me.

For a very long time on Father’s Days I would sit looking at a bottle of whiskey, then diving deeply into it while I listened to Sun Ra or Harry Partch or maybe Morton Feldman – anything to break up and into my incessant grieving. To distract me from the loss.

Time passes. It wounds all heels as the old reversal says. It doesn’t stop just for me or you, and thank goodness for that because human beings are meant to move through it. We’re built for it. We age and we grow, then we shrink, then we die. It’s all part of the process. It enables novelty, uniqueness, emotions.

Time and memory move along irrespective of what we want, either numbing your pain or illuminating your joys. If you’re lucky something from both.

Smell, touch, recall

Once to calm both of us down on yet another night of total bedclothes changing after yet another reflux and vomit session, I ranted at the moon about how unfair it all was. I remember that. Zuzu couldn’t understand my sleepless frustration so she cried. I picked her up from the cushions on the floor and she laughed and then I laughed. We laughed out loud together at 3am.

Nowadays I drink green tea and listen to Kohachiro Miyata playing his flute, other pieces by Sun Ra, maybe a snatch of Moondog. I definitely Glockenpop by Spiderbait. She seemed to love that tune, or maybe it was me bouncing up and down. I remember those days with great joy. In our home in Sydney, the windows open for the breeze. In the home she died in.

Zuzu was never too keen on Harry Partch. I have her face in my mind, my symbolic heart (maybe in my soul if I have one) right now. I have her smell – not the smell of her vomit or her tube-feed – but the smell of her just out of the bath, lying on my chest drying off.

If I imagine never having had Zuzu in my life, I wouldn’t be able to miss her so much. The fact that I do miss her so much, the fact that I am still her father, the fact that she was with me in life makes missing her worthwhile. It makes missing her a valid emotion.

My fading, changing memories are human, they reaffirm that experiencing life through her eyes, with her, was a good, human way to live. The memories that refuse to leave, the good and the bad ones are all part of the non-transactional process of life.

So, I suppose that Father’s Day is a day for fathers to remember their children, no matter where they are.

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