Some things you only learn with the hindsight of loss and the significant passage of time.
One of them for me is that photographs of family and friends who have died fail to stir my memories of them in quite the same way as encounters with their written words.
This is bittersweet and poignant to contemplate today, as I write, on what would have been my dad’s 102nd birthday (he always loved his birthday!). I have plenty of photographs of him around the house which I’ve looked at these past few days. They’re of me and him – when I was a kid and he was much younger than I am now. Of him as a sprightly grandad and then as an old man close to the end.
But he was never much on writing. While a great reader, he was as spare with pen and ink as he was with the spoken word, though we were never in doubt about the emotional depth of his affections for us.
It was our mum who was forever writing us little notes, cards and letters. They could be for special occasions, like birthdays. It was she, not Dad, who always wrote the birthday and Christmas cards for both of them, signing on his behalf too – Dad or Grandpa. She wrote to us often out of the blue to express her parental pride at some minor (or perceived) achievement of ours or to celebrate the very existence of her grandkids.
Within sight of my desk is a little red envelope addressed to my youngest daughter at an interstate address where we haven’t lived for many years. It has a standard 55 cent stamp (a stamp today apparently costs $1.50) featuring a subantarctic fur seal and pup. The envelope isn’t postmarked; I remember, now, that it came inside another larger envelope with a birthday card for me. The reason she sent the little red envelope was simply so my daughter – always a lover of all creatures great and small – could admire the seal and her stripling.
It’s a long way of saying that her handwriting on this little envelope – her physical connection to the paper – evokes her presence in my study, long after her death, far more acutely than the old wedding photograph of her and Dad on the wall nearby.
I’ve got dozens of cards and letters to us and the kids from Mum. They’ll flutter out of books they were sent to accompany – books, again, that she’d gifted me and signed for herself and Dad.
I’ve also got a suitcase full of her letters, written back home to Australia from Europe in the 1950s. While I keep putting it off and off, I’ll read them all one day. This is bound to be emotionally lumpy, introducing me to a woman who lived long before me and who I could never know. But they may yet help me answer some of the perplexing questions I still harbour about her.
Oddly, perhaps, these remnants give me a sense of her physical presence in a house here in Sydney that she didn’t enter. Her moniker and words seem dusted all about the place to me. Dad, conversely, feels far more absent. A more distant, feathery memory because fewer remnants of his life, and none of his written words, are as tangible.
A dear friend and mentor died a year ago this weekend. This week coincidentally – and perhaps or perhaps not, curiously – I happened across the last text he’d sent me:
Stay brave – keep punching upwards.
This was typically generous. But it was old mate, not me, who was ever the pugilist. Afraid of no one and nothing.
I laughed. I felt a shiver. And an urge to race off to the pub where we’d often meet when he was in town.
The next day I chanced on a text from the mother of one of our son’s school friends – a fiercely intelligent, warm, beautiful and generous woman loved by all the kids. She died long ago.
I’ll get the boys tonight.
I half expected her to pull up out the front, our sweaty teenage boy, now a man in his mid-20s, in the back seat with her kid. She’d be in for a quick glass of wine and a chat for sure.
Sometimes words just seem to ignite the memories more than a picture ever can.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
