Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

I’m on to my fourth and final “significant” person today. Tomorrow is a rest day, or more exactly a reflection day, since I want to revisit the opening intention of this month’s experiment, and also re-examine the model for reflection that caught my eye.

The final character is my father, Desmond. As I have already mentioned in prior postings, Desmond died when I was still relatively young, so I have to say that I do not know him. In fact, it would be fair to say that he has not played an active part in my life. Not unless you accept that an absence, just as much as a presence,  can make a difference.

It’s an interesting thought that the “non” state of a thing or a person can and does have impact all the time in our lives. The email not sent, the phone call not answered, the secret not told – all these things can become a difference which alters us in some way.

So it is with the person not there. Alongside my siblings, we grew up with our mother (she also brought us up, of course, but I mean that she grew, too).  I think we all turned out OK, mostly well equipped to deal with the world, and I am very lucky to have had such a loving, caring and patient parent who worked hard, remained steady and sacrificed a lot in the process. My hanging the “signficant person” medal round my father’s neck is neither a compliment to him nor a put-down to her.

But then why him? It is because without his being something there (no artefacts and very few memories, even), it somehow became necessary to struggle with the whole idea of him not there. In that tug-of-war there were no pointers, milestones or denouement. During the period of my own development through school, early employment, marriage and fatherhood, mid-career employment, unsettling and then resettling of identity in a new environment with a new spouse, the phantom character of my father has played many parts. I have had periods of anger, of sorrow and of regret, and also of defiance.  I felt sorry for him – he missed out on my growing up and on seeing grandchildren. And I was able to put the phantom to rest and honour him for having made me.

Yet I found (still find) I was eager for scraps of information about him, about his story, and this actually proved to be very rewarding (healing?). Some of that narrative I’ve written about, and in fact taking some of his story and placing it in context with the circumstances of his own upbringing have been useful for me.  Another fragment came the other evening when I had supper with my brother in London. He mentioned that he had himself had a meal with a very old family friend, John, someone who had known my father well in the 1960s when they both had connections with one of London’s top private casinos (my father liked the good life!).  John told my brother of a time when he had met Desmond in a pub in the Edgware Road, a place where both men were regulars and known to the landlord. My father had come along with no cash to pay for the drinks. On realising this, he proceeded to remove his starched, white collar from the shirt he was wearing, write out a personal cheque to the landlord on it, and pass it across the bar to be cashed. “It was typical of the man”, said John.

So, here we are again, speaking of and in narratives to better understand ourselves. And this PhD space, although never superficially about it, turns out to be another aspect of story-telling.

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Reflection

It’s not lost on me that all four of the people I’ve named are male.