When I was asked to write about some life-changing events of mine for a school project in Grade 3, I racked my brain and included milestones like my first birthday and our permanent relocation from the flats in Essendon to our own residence in Hillside.
When I went to show mum my timeline, I anticipated gloating in her praise of how my hard work had created a masterpiece. Instead, shepaused. The first thing she uttered was “are you ashamed to talk about your father?”
My father had been a victim of a Berry Aneurysm that no one, including him, knew he had. And just a week shy of his 50th birthday, my dad fell into a painless and peaceful eternal serenity while on his knees, hand washing his work uniform (he claimed his own two hands were more efficient than the washing machine) one Saturday afternoon.
At the time, I was eight years old and in Grade 3. Typically, people remember the time they got chewing gum cut out of their hair or their favourite teddy bear as their most vivid childhood memory. But the death of a loved one has the potential to be etched into the depths of our memory until the end of time.
I was no longer that naïve child whose trickiest decision was choosing what to have for the week’s lunch order. At the young age of 8, my father’s death catapulted me into my own maturity where I was fronted with one of the toughest decisions of my life – to discuss my father’s death in public or not? And the path I chose would eventually control most of my childhood.
I distinctly remember the feeling of not wanting to talk about it and I remember silently praying that whenever I encountered some new faces, no one would bring up the topic of fathers. I hated the idea of people sympathising with me and thinking I was inferior to them – simply because I was living in a single-parent household.
I remember the apologies that turned into the most unpleasant situations when I mustered up all the courage in me to finally confess my dark secret to a friend. As you can guess, this acted as a negative reinforcer that led me to crawl a little deeper in to the comfort zone of my shell with every awkward conversation surrounding my deceased father.
However, as with most things, this was a phase of my life that thankfully surpassed with age.
Today, I am proud to say that growing up, I had one of the happiest childhoods anybody could ever have. And that has continued to my adulthood thanks to my amazing mother. Though I suffered a terrible loss during my early years, my mother raised three daughters in a country that was foreign to her, all by herself. She provided her daughters with the
love and care of both parents so that my sisters and I seldom felt the loss of our dad.
In retrospect, how much these thoughts preoccupied me does seem silly. But at that young age, I feared that people would assume my family was financially unstable or that my life was less satisfying than theirs. Talking to my cousins whose mother passed away from ovarian cancer a few years ago, I realised that I was not alone.
“I didn’t want to talk about my mum in school because I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me”, they said.
I’ve since brought this topic up with my mum and conceded that perhaps I was ashamed of talking about my father back then. Ultimately, I guess I was afraid of all the judging.
But now at 19, I am proud to say that I have grown to embrace all aspects of my father – including his death – as a piece of my life that has made me stronger, and open-minded about the world. With time, I have learnt that you are only ever an outsider if you allow yourself to be. And luckily for me, I passed that uncomfortable stage a while ago.
This piece was first published on the 15th of April, 2014 for RMIT Catalyst’s website.
Hashela Kumarawansa 