Fellow-feeling For a Dead Dad

I once read in a document ‘Poem For Dead Parents’ by my father that he had felt in his life that he was somehow ‘not real’ and I believe I have inherited the essence of this sense from him. ‘Not real’ is an unexpected surprise at other people ‘taking you seriously’. Taking notice of the words you say or even acknowledging your presence on earth as in being in some way significant.

I can see it in photographs him in which he smiles mock-boldly and shyly, self-aware and as if the photograph will turn out blank without his image. Or at the valedictory ceremony after he’d initiated the advocacy centre in Kilmarnock where he beams like a child because the audience laughs at his joke.

And yet alongside this ‘non-existence’ was ‘a good conceit of himself’ to use the Scots impression: smartly dressed in a casual way and quite elegantly groomed, clean-shaven or with clipped moustache or Trotsky-bearded (I have forever been ‘scruffy’. I think he owned more self-esteem in this area. He grew out of the smart Glegsa forties and fifties of ‘the dancin’’ and ‘lumbers’, I from the more slovenly seventies and the beginnings of personal alcohol abuse). My Da, in his incarnation as a factory worker, wore a shirt and tie to work and never ever took time off sick (his mantra as a shop stewards convener was ‘don’t let the bastards get anything on you’ although he did this very thing several times by leading his men out on wildcat strikes until they and their bosses finally said ‘fuck you, Boab Wylie’).

Every single thing in life has an equal and opposite and this is true of a person’s psychological make-up. Where there is disastrously low self-esteem there is also a preening ego hungry for praise and approbation: where one feels ‘of no consequence’ the other is adamant for glory.

So it was for my father! These two extremes fed off each other like a two-headed beast devouring itself. Even when my father appeared relaxed and smiling and gentle as a breeze in April you sensed there was a great tension underneath like a volcano about to erupt. On his deathbed, all the toes on his bare feet were at a rigid right-angle pointing towards his head. Raging, raging and tense against the dying of the light.

To feel of little or no worth yet to live so eloquently and expressively and in a more worthwhile and productive way than most (witness his abundant poetry and his ground-breaking social work) is indeed a conundrum. Though maybe not as strange as you’d think.