This is a tough subject for me, and one I feel I need to confront. My girlfriend has spent a great deal of time talking to me about it, but maybe typing about it here will help me. I'll also paste this into a blog on my userpage for further comments.
I don't want to speak ill of my father. When I was growing up he was my best friend, my role model, and the one person in this world I most wanted to be like. We spent hours watching sport together, chatting together about everything and anything. I thought he was the best Dad in the world. He supported me through school, helped me when I was struggling with something, or upset about something, and was the driving force behind where I am today. Some would say he pushed me, I would say he was proud of me and wanted me to go as far as I could, and I want to think I have made him proud.
As the years went by he spent less and less time at home. I knew he was driven by his work, he was immensely proud of the work he did (a cancer researcher, who in his latter years was head of biology at UCL, and now has 5 separate drugs in clinical trials for various cancer types), and he travelled a great deal for that work. I didn't question it.
When I was 16 (7 years ago now) I discovered he was having an affair. I don't know if he wanted me to find out, he gave me his email password so that I could use his account, back in the days I didn't use the internet and had no email address. I stumbled across an email addressed to him from a woman I didn't recognise, and curious about the title I opened it.
We never talked about it, and I even convinced myself that he was in the right. My Mum can be hard to live with at times, and I thought maybe he deserved a chance with someone else. I was always much closer to my Dad than my Mum, and I simply couldn't bring myself to blame him. I didn't get chance to resent him for not being at home as I left for university at 18, to Bath, the same place he and my Mum had studied. I didn't know if my Mum knew, or my younger sister, and we simply never spoke of it.
On the 23rd of May this year my Dad died of a heart attack, with no warning, at the age of 49. He was in good shape, didn't smoke, hardly drank, and had a reasonable diet. The pathology report said it was simply bad luck, though possibly stress had been a factor. There was also a genetic link that may also affect me.
After 6 years of hiding his secrets I had a chat with my Mum. The affair had been going on for 10 years, and she had known about it from the start. The other woman was his secretary, and they had been living together for some time. My Mum had hidden it from us for that entire time, not knowing that I knew (and my sister had also found out independently 3 years ago). Every day, once we had gone to school, she would sit at home and cry her eyes out. The only thing stopping her from throwing him out was us, and I guess the hope that he would someday come around and come back to us.
He had lied to us, to the other woman, and to work for that entire time, sometimes for no reason at all. He even told my Mum that he had told us about his affair, which he never did, and made her even more distraught. My fathers family is deeply religious (something my Mum's side very much isn't), and his Dad (my grandfather) would never have spoken to him again had he known. When my grandfather passed away last year my father tried to arrange a meeting with his other woman and my Nan. She threw him out. For the last year of his life my Dad had been telling my Nan that he wanted to move back to Devon to look after her, his other woman that he wanted to move to Devon with her, and my Mum that he wanted to move there with her, apparently reconciling his differences, or so my Mum thought. I don't know if he was just confused, or whether he had grown so used to lying that he didn't know when to stop.
I loved my Dad, and it hurts me deeply to think that I didn't really know him at all. I never would have thought he could lie to us, or hurt us the way he did. He had a whole other personality that I never knew existed. The man I knew was the best father in the world, and I want to remember him like that. I regret not confronting him about everything, and I regret not talking to my Mum- we are now closer than we have ever been thanks to all of this, and I can only imagine the pain she has been through all these years protecting myself and my sister.
He was my role model. I don't want to be like him anymore.
