“From ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Ron says as he pours my father’s ashes into the sea of white froth and blue liquid, now stained with a hint of grey soot that was once my father.
Ron was a tall man who used to be the pastor at my local church, now just a dried-out husk of the man he used to be. One single tear sits on the corner of his eye, trembling. I ask myself, why would anyone cry over my father? The mountain of a man who would drink till he passed out and abuse everyone around him whilst he did it. Why would he cry for a man who beat his own wife daily till she was black and blue? I think he was crying for another reason, not because he liked my father; no one did. But because he feared what we all fear, loneliness.
Once the church kicked him out he had nothing, no wife, no kids, nothing. Except my father. My father was never nice to him, but he was all Ron had, a partner with which he could fall into an abysmal pit of rage and drunkenness.
“Praise the Lord,” Terry, my oldest brother whispered to me.
“Amen,” I whisper back, as a sense of relief floods my body.
“You two shut your mouths,” my wife Claire whispers.
As if summoned by the malevolent spirit of my father, a thick black cloud rolls in spitting large pieces of hail that freeze the back of my neck. We all quickly run to the cars.
Back at my Mum and Dad’s house we’re sorting through piles of objects which bring back only memories of pain and abuse.
“He really let this place go once Mum died,” says Terry.
“Wasn’t much to start with,” I exclaim.
I look down and see the maroon cover of an old encyclopaedia poking out from a pile of bottles and unwashed clothes. It’s the same book Dad used to hit me with when he would come home and I hadn’t referred to him as Sir. I remember the way he’d stand over me, his grey beard stained yellow from the cigarettes he’d constantly be dragging at. The way his swollen face and bulbous red nose would quiver and twitch as if he couldn’t wait to beat me, abuse me, hurt me. I remember the tone of voice he’d use.
“Where’s your Mum?” he’d say, a hint of delight and anticipation in his voice.
“I don’t know,” I’d whisper. “Probably in her room.”
“When you talk to me you call me Sir!” He’d be completely red, his cheeks matching his nose and he’d grab whatever was nearest and start hitting me with it till blood would stain whatever he was using.
Getting beat wasn’t the worst bit; it was having to watch my older brother or my Mum, watching this man who said he loved us when sober, turn into an animal, direct all his self-hate onto us in the only way he knew how.
My brother and I both stare at the book in my hands, its cover not stained with blood but our own misery and pain at the hands of this man who raised us.
“I don’t want any of this stuff,” Terry says as he shakenly sifts through the piles and piles of memories.
“Neither do I,” I tell him.
“Let’s get rid of it all,” he says quietly.
“Alright.”
Even though I know the old devil can’t hurt me any more I’m still scared, so scared; all the memories that haunt me and my brother will never be gone.
Once it’s all gone, all of it, everything that the monster who raised me has touched, then I can rest, then I can focus on using everything he taught me as a lesson. A lesson that the only way to show love isn’t through violence; a lesson to not let the past eat away at my psyche.
