If I were to attempt to describe what losing a parent is like, I would say that it is looking up to see that the sky has been removed. Just like the sky, my father had been ever-present – no matter our distance from each other - from the moment I had opened my eyes to the world. Though I did not recognise it while he was alive, I knew someone existed in the world who loved me. Despite his complexity and almost champion-level ability to fumble all his relationships, he and I somehow managed to bring out the best in each other. We were friends.
In mid-2022, my dad very suddenly and tragically passed away. He was hit by a car as a pedestrian on the road he lived on; the road that I had walked along daily to catch the bus to school as a child. At the time the accident happened, I was all he had left. He was an 82-year-old man living alone, refusing to socialise and losing his memory. I was beginning to take on a carer role in the months prior to his passing and it was a new challenge for me at the time to balance the demands of my work and life with taking sole responsibility for my father - someone who seemed to be giving up on life day by day. Sometimes I resented how he had sabotaged his relationships with other family members, so that it now all fell on me. He would invent reasons for me to visit, even when he knew I had to work. Yet I adored this charming, irreverent character who immediately lit up as soon as I entered. I couldn’t walk away from him. Our unspoken yet certain bond wouldn’t allow it.
The moment he died, I felt I would give anything to see him one more time and to do the tedious tasks I sometimes resented when he was alive. After he passed, the idea that anything was more important than him seemed utterly ludicrous. The TAC provided me with grief counselling and I worked through this new state of being. I was obsessed with the idea that he may not have known I loved him, because I never actually said it. Also, in the final weeks I was with him, I had been focused on sorting out the practical aspects of his disorganised life. The family culture was not one where we said ‘I love you’ or shared our feelings. It wasn’t until he passed that I realised how deeply I loved him. And now that I knew it so utterly and it seemed to take over my whole being, I could not tell him.
While friends and extended family did their best to be there for me, all I wanted was my father back and I felt no one understood how I felt, especially as others in the family had a completely different experience of my father. In this new world - in this aloneness - I started writing. I wrote compulsively. It was all I could do. It was the only way I knew how to keep him alive. It was also an attempt to understand him; to make sense of this anomaly of a man and of my grief, our relationship and how it had shaped me. I didn’t want to forget a thing.
The way I wrote about him was not an ode to a perfect man. On one hand he was thoughtless, uncommunicative and impulsive, and on the other he was delightful, creative, a quiet gardener and the person who built my confidence and love of the arts. He was the man who sent my short stories out to publications when I was a ten-year-old without telling me, and left my favourite chocolate bar outside my bedroom window. Our bond was that of two creatives who shared stories and ideas. He was a father
wanting his daughter to do what he did not have the opportunity (or, at times,
the courage) to do himself.
My poetry collection ‘Taking Apart the Bird Trap’ was the result of this constant writing about my father. A book about grief is a book about love and relationship. To date, it is the greatest expression of love I have ever produced. The writing of it took me into a state of introspection and this led me to make huge changes in my life, including moving away from toxic relationships and applying the lessons my father had taught me – namely, to slow down and be present, spend more time in the natural world and not care an iota of what people thought. Through poetry, I interrogated the varied impacts my father and both my parents had upon my life, my childhood, the patterns I had subconsciously played out, and how I would move in the world now with everything I had learned about myself.
Poetry has always been the thing that got me up in the morning and has been since I was a child, but never had it been there for me as it was in the aftermath of my father’s death. It became a mirror with which to peer through. It became a vehicle to carry me through my grief. Writing the collection transported me to a place where I could possibly feel joy again. By looking deeply into my grief rather than distracting myself from it, this sad accident that happened to an old, disoriented man on a harsh road could be something beyond a senseless tragedy. I allowed the loss to change me. The version of me that lives on from him cares less about accolades and approval, knows that I am the only one who can save me, and understands that the moments we have with each other are all we have and are precious beyond what we currently perceive. The rest is clutter. So, stay that bit longer. Leave not one thing unsaid. And write.
Amanda Anastasi is a Melbourne poet and author of Taking Apart the Bird Trap (Recent Work Press, 2024) and The Inheritors (Black Pepper Publishing, 2021). Her work has been anthologised and published in journals locally and internationally.
