I should be feeling happy today. It’s the last day of winter, after all, the season of the year depressives can hate so much. Tomorrow will be spring. I should be celebrating the coming of a brighter day and maybe later on I shall. However, 28 February has a different meaning for me. It was the date, in 2011, when my father died.
I am not one for being mournful on particular dates and anniversaries. For one thing, I rarely remember them. I know my mother died in 1999, although I don’t know the actual date. I have no idea of the years in which my grandparents died, or my only uncle. In my subconscious, perhaps I never thought knowing the dates mattered. In a way it has worked. I have never dreaded a certain date coming around, although I have never forgotten where I came from and how I got here in the first place.
Anthony Johansen lived in Ottawa, Canada. The last time I saw him was in May 2009 when I flew cross the Atlantic to help celebrate his 80th birthday. In his latter years, we had finally become close, like a father and son should be. He had left the UK in the 1960s and we’d had what was often a fraught and difficult relationship, in which I had often rejected his fatherly attentions. My reasons, some nonsensical, can be explained elsewhere on another day. I wish things had been different. I know I might have turned out very different with a fatherly presence and my life, surely, would have been more structured and ordered and ultimately much better. I blame myself. It was my bad.
From many years of distance, I later regarded my dad as a hero. He lied about his age to sail on the Liberty ships across the U-boat infested North Atlantic in World War Two, aged 15. He worked his way to the very top in the Merchant Navy, becoming a Master Mariner. Upon emigrating to Canada, he gained a degree in commerce and worked his way up to the prime minister’s office. I realised, before it was too late, that he was not just any old hero, he was my hero.
I wish I had seen him again before he died, after he became ill late in 2010. I have felt guilty for many years that I did not borrow the money in order to visit him in the Ottawa hospital in which he finally died. Too much was going through my head, of which I shall write elsewhere. I’m afraid I got it wrong though. .
I shall never forget the call in the middle of the night from my brother Noel to tell me dad had died. And I shall never forget travelling to Ottawa for his funeral/life celebration, a journey which saw me hopelessly overcome with grief at Heathrow Airport when the gravity of the situation finally hit me. Life has never been the same. It never will be.
At some point today, I shall play George Harrison’s album All Things Must Pass, a copy of which my dad was playing the day I flew back to the UK after his birthday celebrations.
We shall never meet again but today is a day for me to remember and raise a glass to Anthony Johansen. My dad, my hero.
