who I would like to be visited by and why – my Dad

I would like to be visited by my Dad. He died before I was one year old.  For years I went with the mantra told me that you don’t miss what you never had, but as I have got older and had various counselling at different times, they always return to the significance of not having a present father growing up and how that has impacted on my life.  The psychological speak  that I remember is that fathers are the first significant male role model in a girl’s life who will love her unconditionally and this does great things for her self-worth.

My mother’s grief at losing her husband young was never verbalised, but it is probably significant that my earliest memory is of pushing my doll’s pram down the road to the cemetery with a trowel inside and my mother cleaning the grave and leaving flowers. My mum had strong opinions about wider family, but as I have got older and met them as adults I realise that they were not really the way she said they were, but it was seen through her own lens of struggling with the bitterness of fate.

Quite recently I went to a funeral and asked an elderly aunt on my father’s side what she remembered of my Dad. She said he had the most striking blue eyes.  I have lots of photos of him, but they are all black and white so that struck me like a thunderbolt.

So I would want to look at him at the age he was when he died and see where we look similar. My Mum always said he would have been so proud of what his three children had achieved with their lives.

I would like him, unsolicited, to say he was proud of me.