If things were different.

I’m on a quest to understand how my life experiences so far and my childless grief interplay with each other. Having immersed myself into the childless community now for sometime, I feel a deeper need to know both for myself and to hopefully, with recording my observations, assist others in navigating a childless life.  Talking with other men who like me have difficulty finding both the vocabulary and ways to express what its like to be childless sees me being more analytical of how I’m feeling at different points in time. Today is one of those points in time.  As I type this I hear the low drone of historic military aircraft returning from a fly by of one of the many marches being held in Australia today.

It's ANZAC Day here, the time of year  where we commemorate the fallen and give thanks to those who have served in our armed forces.  It has its origins in WWI when the ANZAC’s, Australian New Zealand Army Corp, were landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on the 25th April 1915 to a fierce resistance from the Ottoman Army seeing the loss of 8709 Australians and 2721 New Zealanders.  The nation stops for the day, there are dawn services at all memorials around the country and marches where all the old diggers get to ride in vintage military vehicles to the cheers of the crowd and for some this is  the highlight of their year.

I like to share the photograph of my maternal grandad, George Deaker, as well as his place of rest via my social media on this day.  Sadly, I never knew him, he was killed in the last months of WWII in Italy, I still feel a sense of loss that I never got to sit with him and be captivated with his stories of serving in so many countries. I often wonder what type of man he was and would have been if things were different.  I’m sure that cheeky nature I have has come from him and mixed with a london accent I’m sure he would have had that London rough around the edges charm.  I often think if things had been different what influence would he have had over me. 

That curiosity doesn’t end with Grandad George. In fact when I analyse my extended family dynamics, which I often do as it's part of my personality type, apparently I have a deep need to understand how things interconnect, there's that curiosity again! I realise I have missed out in a big way.

I only knew one of my grandparents, my mum's mum Gladys and I only knew her for a very short time, I was 9 when she passed away, she was 56 a year younger than I am now! I can still remember the day, we had a school outing to Chelmsford to watch ‘Joseph and his Technicolour Dream Coat’ and as I got home that evening mum told me the news, of course I had no concept of what that meant at the time. 

My sister and I often reminisce about nan getting her purse always bulging with coppers and dealing us out a small handful so we could buy sweets. I do remember her brother George Chapman, although my great uncle we all knew him as uncle George.  I remember sitting up till late one night talking about race car drivers with him, these times were rare for he had his own issues to deal with, we can say now it was PTSD from WWII. He was a medic and we have his diary which shows him moving around Europe after the war to what we assume would have been the concentration camps, we believe the atrocities he would have seen led him to develop that PTSD. He was a very loyal Arsenal fan and I remember he had a huge pile of programs in his bedroom, I was way too young to go with him.  Sadly, his affliction would see him often disappear for days on end and so he wasn’t very present in my life. If things were different,  I wonder what influence he would have had on me, would I have been a die hard Arsenal fan as well?

My dads parents were hardly ever talked about, I can remember seeing nanny Scotland as we called her, twice, her husband had died a couple of years before I was born. When dad did talk about his parents, it was never in a good light, there were never happy memories shared to keep their memories alive and it would seem there was very little enthusiasm from nanny Scotland to be present in our lives as well.

There were very few memories of my parents having friends come around, we didn’t have dinner parties, there was never a best friend that would take me under his or her wing.

In fact there was never anyone for me to idolise in that innocent way that kids do.

As my parents now come to the closing of their lives and we reflect on this through the eyes of now mature adults we can see that dad was hardly present due to working hard and his own lack of parental role models manifested as a type of selfishness and mum it would seem was depressed for a lot of hers and although she was an attentive mum, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm to encourage us on to bigger and better things.

As I continue my quest  to understand my grief, I believe this all has relevance for me.  I have missed out on a vast amount of love and support that most would receive from the various relationships in their lives and I’ve missed out on nearly every opportunity to model myself on someone I admired, war has obviously played a big part in this.

Now it has become obvious that I wanted to have all those relationships I missed out on.  I wanted to be there for our children when they needed help or advice.  I dearly wanted to be that grandad that mesmerised his grandchildren with his tales.  I’ve watched my mum copy the behaviour of her mum and pull out her purse to give the kids a little something, although now its notes and not coppers.  And if things were different I too wanted to open my wallet and share what I have with our grandchildren.  I wanted to make sure that my behaviour left such an impression on their lives that through them, our memories would be kept alive for a couple of generations at least.

And so this is why ANZAC Day hits me so hard, it is another experience of disenfranchised grief reminding me of all the things I will never be as I reflect how a war 80 yrs ago has influenced my life.

But there is a bright side emerging from this all, for a lot of my life I have felt lost, directionless questioning everything I would do or think of doing, never knowing if it was the right thing to do.  I believe this is a result of the lack of influence I’ve had in my foundation years by others. 

What I can now also see is that I was a blank canvas unblemished by others attitudes and beliefs.  Yes there was some trial and error in my younger years as I navigated and developed. Credit needs to be given to my wife Vickie for being the rudder, gently steering me to who I am today as we come close to four decades together.  And as sad as all this appears and as much as I would have loved things to be different, I am in a weird way grateful for that blank canvas, as my mum would say, ‘You turned out alright didn’t you!’.