I’m not normally very good with dates. The odd few – my birthday, Christmas Day, that kind of thing – stay in my mind, but generally I need an alert from social media or a reminder from my long-suffering partner. 28th February, not so, because 13 years ago today my dad died.
Losing anyone brings home one’s mortality, particularly when it’s a parent. My dad was the last of my parents to shuffle off their mortal coil, my mum having done so nearly a quarter of a century ago, and while I am not the kind of person to place flowers on graves or visit significant places, like Battery Point in Portishead where we scattered his ashes, I can find myself if not consumed than affected by melancholy.
Anthony Johansen was an amazing man who I had to admire from a distance, since for the bulk of my life and around half of his, I lived in Bristol and he in Canada. From the young boy who lied about his age in order to bravely serve on the Liberty Ships in World War Two, to the man who ended up working in the office of the then Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau.
I try, not always successfully, to not dwell too much in our past because it leads me nowhere. The distance between Bristol and Canada when I was growing up was far greater than it is today, the only real means of communication being ‘Par Avion‘, so for most of the time one of us might as well have lived on the moon. ‘You don’t miss what you don’t have’ is the nonsensical cliché that is wheeled out from time to time but I soon found out what I had missed. My mum did what she could, but what with her being a stranger in a strange land, a Dutch woman who came here to marry a man, the relationship broke down and I was raised by a loving woman who had little or no idea of how Britain worked and how to propel me to meet whatever potential I might have had, if any. That said, I would never wish for an unhappy couple to stay together for the sake of the child(ren).
Mine, I always felt, was a dismal, wasted school life, a lifetime in a dead end job; a life where I just made things up as I went along. Who knows if things could have been better, but today I look back and sigh, concluding that they couldn’t have been any worse.
Across the Atlantic divide, my dad strived heroically to maintain contact with someone, me, who often looked away. If I ignored his letters, he’d just write again and keep writing until I finally replied. He’d come back to his roots every few years, never walking away from the places and people he loved. Looking back, I was such an ungrateful bastard.
I last saw him in 2009 when I flew to Ottawa for his 80th birthday. It was glorious. We were father and son like never before. I even took him to a gig, John Fogerty, at the local arena. As I prepared to fly home, he was playing George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass vinyl record, just as he did when I stayed with him when he lived in New Brunswick in 1975. I never for one moment thought this would be our last time together but in late 2010 he became ill. On 28th February 2011, I got the call he had died.
I am grateful for the time we spent together and I am, slowly but surely, writing a more extended memoir about my largely unmemorable life and there will be plenty about him.
I am not the first person to be brought up by a lone parent but by the same token I so wish I wasn’t. I feel I missed so much and that whatever happens I’ll never be the person I could have been.
My dad used to say that you should never worry about things you can’t change and of course he was right. But I am not my dad and I do dream about the way things could have been and regret the things that didn’t happen.
Anthony died 13 years ago today and if I live to reach his age, I have 13 years left, which would be better than matching my mum’s in which case it could be nine. Given how faster time seems to pass as you get older, this isn’t much time at all.
I may break my weekday alcohol abstention and raise a single malt to Anthony Johansen later tonight. Or more likely, I’ll re-read the story of his life, compiled by his widow and my stepmother Joy. Either way, he was an incredible man who lived his life to the full. You can’t really ask for more than that.
