My last day
I will never stop telling the world my father’s name — A story of a father and a son
Thomas’s story
Time: 6.00 am. Date: 22nd August 2002. Location: Dalugama, Sri Lanka
Sunlight is filtering through the window. I remain lying on the bed. Wearing one of my sarongs, my son is fast asleep. He is sleeping peacefully, snoring with a slight hiss.
In the corner of the bedroom, on my desk, I can see the letter that reached me from Sydney. It is a treasure from my boy, who left home twenty-five years ago. Now, he is lying next to me as if the intervening quarter of a century had not passed. I look at my son again, in his deep sleep. His mouth is slightly ajar, like when he lived under my care. His long hair is gone. He has a goatee and a bit of grey hair. My boy is a father to four children, three of them teenagers. He now knows what fatherhood is. I close the curtain to limit the sunlight so he could sleep undisturbed. A rooster roars, waking the neighbourhood. But this boy is sleeping peacefully. It is like old times when nobody except me could wake him in the mornings.
I can hear my wife in the kitchen. She must have risen early to make breakfast for our son.
I reach for his letter, reading it for the umpteenth time.
I am arriving on the 16th of August to coincide with your holidays. It would be great because you don’t have to take time off. These entire two weeks are yours to do whatever you wish. I will stay with both of you. I have no other plans except to spend time with you.
He has taken time off his busy work, left behind his young family, and is here to spend time with his parents. Reading the letter, a tear swelled in the corner of my eye. I am fortunate to be his father. I am a lucky man.
I must have done something right as his father. In the last few days, he took bus rides and walked with me without complaining. Disregarding his inconvenience, he adjusted to my lifestyle. I look at him again, at his long legs and feet — he, who, as a kid, hung out wherever I went and followed me. I wish I could go back in time with him.
Denzil’ story
Time: 7.00 am. Date: 22nd August 2002. Location: Dalugama, Sri Lanka
The morning sun is filtering through the curtains. I can hear birds chirping. The ceiling fan was making a buzzing sound. My father is already up. He had unwound the mosquito net above me. I can hear him and my mother in the kitchen. I look around, absorbing the environment around me, my parent’s bedroom. My mother’s dressing table and father’s desk are on my right. Their large wooden almirah is on my left.
I get up and walk into the kitchen, adjusting my sarong and rubbing my eyes. The radio is playing a local news channel. An oil lamp is burning near Jesus’s statue. Mother is putting together breakfast on the dining table. Looking at fresh bread, dhal, string hoppers, and coconut sambal makes me hungry. Father is helping her to arrange the table and plates. I watch them helping each other, working in unison.
We eat our breakfast slowly, chatting. I tell my parents stories of my children and the things they do. They listen attentively, asking questions. The conversation shifts to my youth years. They remind me of crazy things I did then. I shift gears and bring my laptop. I open it and show my parents photos of my four children. They are delighted.
Mother returns to the kitchen to tidy up while Father and I do our usual thing, planning the next 24 hours, like we did every morning during the last six days.
The three of us get ready. Me in my semi-casual attire, my father in a dark suit and my mother in a saree with her jewellery. I help Father with his tie. I remember when he knotted my tie for the first time when I was seven. We are driven in a taxi to the village of Mabima to attend a relative's wedding. Father is in the passenger seat, and Mother and I are in the backseat. We talk all the way through.
I am introduced to relatives at the church, the venue for the wedding mass. Many relatives from my mother’s family gather for the wedding. During the mass, I sneeze. I have no handkerchief to clean myself. Father gently pulls out his handkerchief and offers it to me. I wipe myself, holding onto it in my pocket. At the end of the mass, relatives get together again, with more introductions and chatter. Father takes me to the adjoining cemetery and shows me where my ancestors had been buried decades and centuries ago.
Coming home in the taxi, I think of what my father did with me in the last six days. Visiting relatives, and his friends, visiting my godfather, who is also his best friend from his school years. We walked the neighbourhood on foot for kilometres. He enjoyed these moments of bliss in the company of his son. I accompanied him to his father’s ancestral village in Hendala, a beach suburb where I was introduced to many in the Jayasinghe clan.
I think about how my father came to my rescue on a bus a couple of days ago when I dropped the cross from my necklace. I could not find it in the packed bus, I was unfamiliar with large crowds. I gave up. Father sprang into action, rushing into the crowd, retrieving it and giving it back to me with a delightful smile.
I have lunch with my parents at home, continuing our conversation from where we left breakfast. They tell me stories of relatives we met at the wedding ceremony. Much has happened in our extended families in the last twenty-five years since I left my parents.
My father and I plan our afternoon schedule to attend a neighbour’s funeral. While Father clears the lunch dishes helping Mother, I walk into the bedroom for a quick snooze.
Thomas’ story
Time: 4.00 pm Date: 22nd August 2002. Location: Dalugama, Sri Lanka
My son is up. He dresses in a white shirt and brown pants, preparing for the funeral service. He asks for a comb, and I give mine to him. He comes around and adjusts my shirt. We head off to the church on foot, walking the small distance. Neighbours stop us on our way to remark.
‘Both son and father are going around like two friends’.
I feel ecstatic about what they think of my son and me. Yes, we are now friends.
After the church ceremony, my son and I follow the funeral procession to the cemetery. Neighbours and friends come up to me to chat. They remark about my son and how lucky I am that he is here with me. While the burial service was in the crowded cemetery, I take my son to where my mother, his favourite grandmother, was buried nearly three decades ago. He takes his time in front of his grandmother’s burial site. He talks of his good memories of his grandmother. Then he meets some of his old friends from the village on the burial grounds. I can see him enjoying their old friends’ company.
It is nearly six in the evening when we return home. I watch the news on television with him in our family room. We talk a lot; my wife joins us whenever she walks into the family room from the kitchen, where she is busy preparing dinner.
I take out a bottle of whiskey and pour a drink each. Our evening ritual for the last six days is a drink and a good hearty chat before dinner. We discuss world affairs, politics, social issues, family and children. Half an hour later, we sit together for a simple dinner. Dinner over, my wife clears the dishes. My son is typing on his laptop under a lamp.
It is now nearly nine at night, I head to the local bakery to buy fresh bread for him for tomorrow’s breakfast. I am interrupted by two neighbourhood youths at the bakery.
‘Hello uncle, we see that you buy bread every night’.
‘Yes, my son is here visiting me from Australia. I buy fresh bread for him, his favourite.’
‘You are a lucky father’.
I feel honoured to hear this compliment. Indeed I am.
I return home. my son is waiting for me, lying on the bed. I adjust the mosquito net above him. I rest on the other side of the bed. We plan the activities for the next day, to visit my mother’s ancestral hometown some seventy kilometres away. We plan to take an early morning bus and return home the same day.
It is now ten pm. I fall asleep soon after he falls asleep.
Denzil’s story
Time: midnight. Date: 22nd August 2002. Location: Dalugama, Sri Lanka
I get up, hearing noises. My father is nowhere to be seen. I can hear him coughing. I get up and walk into the kitchen where he is. My mother is already up with him. She is giving him a drink and rubbing his chest. He is holding a chair, standing. He is not well. He has trouble breathing. I do not know how to respond to a family health emergency, having not lived in Sri Lanka as an adult. I feel hopeless and vulnerable. There are no triple zero services or emergency services. I talk to my brave mother, and we agree that we must immediately take him to the hospital.
My father goes to the toilet. He walks in by himself. I help him to wear his sarong, tightening around his waist. He wears a shirt with my help. He does not tell me anything. I am nonplussed. Words do not come out of my mouth. I rush to Linton’s, my next-door neighbour’s home and tell them about my emergency. They come in straight away in their vehicle.
My father walks into the vehicle. Sitting next to me, he rests his head on my shoulders and his body on my lap. My mother stays back because dealing with hospitals and other emergencies is not a woman’s business in my old country, where men rule the roost. Inside the vehicle, my father does not speak, instead choosing to rest on my lap. Before we could travel far, I feel a huge gasp from my father.
I feel his final breath, but I refuse to comprehend and believe what is happening. I want to believe that I am living a bad dream.
Yet, I take my father to the hospital, where the doctors try to revive him, but his heart does not respond. Oh! My God! My world comes crashing down on me in front of my very eyes. The doctor says there is nothing he can do. The emergency service workers take my father on a metal trolly to a cold room. I go into shock and cannot believe what I am witnessing. This man, I cannot let him go. I am ready to trade my life to save him.
How can this be? My father spent the whole day with me. He fetched bread for me only a little while ago. We planned this trip to visit his mother’s home village tomorrow. I had a drink with him today. What will I do tomorrow? I spent the last six days with him, assuming my life with him will go on forever. How can I go home without my father? What will I tell my mother?
I am fucking helpless when they put my father in cold storage on that metal trolley. I do not know a life without my father, me, a father of four children, a man who has worked on three continents and in Fortune 500 companies — a stupid man who believed that the world was at my feet. I never imagined a life without my beloved Father.
The floor dropped under me. I no longer had any anchor. I loved to love my children by copying how my father loved me. It broke me apart. I felt empty inside me, hallow. I had never been so vulnerable in my life like that lonely night.
My sorrows aside, I am brave for my poor mother, my father’s soulmate for life. Also, my younger siblings. I call my brother and sister in Canada, giving them the heartbreaking news. I come home and hug my mother, giving her the terrible news that her beloved Thomas was no more. My mother is brave as always but heartbroken. And I hold my mother and cry. My mother cries silently. And, I am done. Fucking done. My world has ended.
Denzil’s postscript
Date: My father’s 20th death anniversary. Location: Sydney, Australia
This was the biggest shock of my life. I lost my anchor that night on the 22nd of August 2002. It was so unexpected; I was not ready for that dreadful day. I had never thought of a day when my father would be no more. He was my role model, and I had no plans for a day when he was not by my side. Although I lived and raised my family some 8000 kilometres away from him, I was so connected to him in my soul. He was my God. I felt anchorless in this world after he was gone. I was untethered. My connection to the world disappeared in minutes.
A few days later, my father was buried in the same grave as his mother. How ironic it is that he showed me the grave where he would be buried on the day he died.
Some three thousand people and about forty-five Christian clergy came to farewell my beloved father. I knew my father was popular on many levels of society, but the extent of his popularity and connectedness baffled me.
His last week was full of joy, doing the things he liked in the company of his boy, whom he moulded to be the best person a son could be. I was fortunate that I was able to give my father a happy goodbye by spending his last days with him, doing things he liked and having great conversations with him.
I hold dearly onto the handkerchief he gave me on that fateful day. It became his farewell gift. I have preserved his sarong, which I occasionally wear as a tribute to him and his legacy.
And in the end, the only thing I could do for my father in those last harrowing hours was nothing. Nothing. Except to surrender to my powerlessness, let him go, and watch him go. He went down happily to the last awful breath. It was brutal. And it was beautiful. And he was brave. And I will never stop telling the world my father’s name and how much he loved his boy.
Losing my father changed my life forever. When I returned to Sydney after a month of helping my mother to rebuild her life, I hugged my four children as if there was no tomorrow.
The day my father died was also my last day.
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Losing a parent can feel like the end of something important, the loss of an anchor, the loss of the safety and security of one’s first relationship, the loss of family history, the end of particular stories, and the loss of certainty. Even as an adult.
