Fathers are key: Two women testify

Fathers are important for the psychological and emotional balance of children. Their absence in many families is the part of the dis-ease that so many young people experience. Two instances where fathers have died, leaving a "lingering emptiness", bring out clearly just how essential their role is in shaping their children's life.

 In the weeks after her father's death Megan Blandford felt the need to "reflect and regather". She writes:

In the winter my dad died from cancer, focusing on work became incredibly difficult.

I took a few weeks to slow down, think, and follow a craving to get back to basics. I spring cleaned my house, went for long bushwalks, caught up on my own health checks, and took over the dinner table with a thousand-piece puzzle. After school hours, I read stories with my kids — huddling together and immersing ourselves in fantasy worlds filled with magic and problems that can be solved — and took them out for chai lattés. (Kids these days.)

That time made me reflect a lot on my purpose, and how to spend the next chunk of my time on earth. 

Megan Blandford, pictured with her father, is finding it hard to recover from her loss.

Blandford, an Australian, was proud of her work as a freelance writer: 

Yet, suddenly, I just couldn't bring myself to write one more word about things that don't mean anything.

I lost my purpose, and asked myself a number of questions about it.

What could I do that would give me back that sense of achievement? How could I put more good out into the world? And why did none of it seem to mean a thing?

Time has passed, providing salve to the feeling of being without purpose in life, but the experience of such a deep loss has been revealing:

I'd seen this impact on some friends who had lost a parent. They'd go a bit off the rails, questioning everything and feeling — very outwardly — like they'd somehow lost themselves. It seemed like more than grief, as though they were adrift and needed to search for a new anchor.

As a writer, Blandford is able to find the words to explain what is going on in her life but she is surprised that even three years later she remains unsettled:

I underestimated that I would have sought Dad's advice on this career questioning that I was suddenly experiencing. I would never have followed his advice (I was never any good at doing as I was told), but I would have asked for his thoughts.

I underestimated the little things that would hit me with such a force of grief. The memory of the last time I had Christmas with my dad, when we'd ended up arguing; we were meant to have happier Christmases together after that. That the first time I'd walk into my parents' house without hearing Dad's voice call out, "Hi, Poppet!" would take my breath away.

I certainly didn't expect that, a couple of winters later, I would still be floating and searching for a new anchor.

Ruth Niemiec, who years later stood at her father's grave and said, 'I miss you'

For Ruth Niemiec, her father's life was taken in a road accident when she was nine years old. Writing as as an adult in Australia she notes how his death has had a profound effect on her:

My father's life was cut short, and it was unexpected, I didn't have time to say goodbye. It made the mourning prolonged and difficult.

For a few years, I remembered the sound of his laughter, his voice, how tall he was and his mannerisms. Twenty-four years on, I remember only his eyes and they are fading from my memory too. Dad wore his keys clipped onto a belt loop, left side. He wore brown leather shoes and was fond of light-yellow polo shirts. I know that from photographs. 

Joan Didion wrote in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that she thought her husband would come back after he had died. At nine years old, I felt my father would come back too.

I distinctly remember sitting in the passenger seat beside my mother just a few weeks after his passing, convinced that he would come and see us soon.

The impact of the loss of any parent when the child is young can be far-reaching, and this was certainly the case for Niemiec: 

Losing a parent is never easy. It changes you completely, no matter what age you are when it happens. So many unanswered questions, so many "I love you's" whispered to the memory of their face. A lingering emptiness.

What made my confusing childhood grief deeper and more mystifying was that before he died, I hadn't seen him for a year. Mum and Dad were separated, and he had remarried.

When I was eight he took me to Gumbaya Park [Melbourne], and we spent the whole day together. It was the last time I saw him in person and the last time I was in a vehicle with him travelling down the freeway.  

In order to feel in a space where she could get on with her life Niemiec had to travel to Poland:

Dad was buried in Poland. That was his wish. His ashes were placed beside his father's at the cemetery in the village he grew up in.

It took over 15 years for me to be done with school and university and save enough money to afford a ticket to Poland. It took that long to get a chance to stand at my father's grave and say "I miss you". 

I wanted Dad to know I was there. And that I knew the beauty of the fog in the valley in Tuchów, with the first morning light beaming through it. I walked the worn streets he, too, had walked before leaving for Australia. I spoke the language he spoke to people he had known.

Being in Poland made me feel close to him and I left feeling an enormous sense of closure.

Those two personal accounts of the role fathers can play in the emotional life of children, both when young or as an adult, illustrate how important it is for society to be proactive in protecting the family as a unit of mother and father.

Therefore, it's worth repeating a snippet of the research findings about the importance of fathers. The following information is from the Child and Family Research Partnership at the University of Texas:

Children who grow up with involved fathers are: 39% more likely to earn mostly A’s in school, 45% less likely to repeat a grade, 60% less likely to be suspended or expelled from school, twice as likely to go to college and find stable employment after high school, 75% less likely to have a teen birth, and 80% less likely to spend time in jail.

💢 See the info poster here. 

💢 From a pediatricians' viewpoint, go here.

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