Two significant and inextricably linked events have been
uppermost in my thoughts today. It’s ten
years since I first set foot in Berlin, arriving on a warm but drizzly
afternoon for a two-night stay in a hotel just off Friedrichstrasse. The next day I called home for news of my dad
who had been in hospital for two weeks and heard from my brother in law that he
had just died. I had known that his
condition was bad and I also realised that he would not be going home from
hospital but I hadn’t expected him to die just then so I thought it would be OK
to make the trip. I suppose this was
down to the fact that he’d been at death’s door two years earlier when he’d
spent seven weeks in hospital with a condition that defied diagnosis (in fact
we never did discover exactly what it was that had almost finished him off that
time). He’d been admitted with mobility
problems and his condition deteriorated to the point that one morning I
received a call from the sister on his ward telling me that he had suffered
heart failure and would likely not survive the day. My mum, sister and I gathered at his bedside
and sat there the entire day and evening.
To everyone’s surprise, he did survive.
We went home that night, only for the same thing to happen the next
day. He not only survived a second time
but recovered enough to return home, although with his health and mobility seriously
compromised.
There were two more hospitalisations before the final one on
1st September 2004. The last
time I saw him was the 13th, a Monday evening. There was a TV opposite his bed showing a
news item about a ‘Fathers for Justice’ campaigner standing on a Buckingham
Palace window ledge dressed as Batman. Dad
asked me to look online for flights to Ireland the following summer. He was Irish and wanted to visit his home
country with the whole family: Mum, my sister, our husbands and my sister's girls who
were six at the time.
It was in the days of dirt cheap Easyjet and Ryanair flights. The previous week we had flown to Budapest
for next to nothing and we’d booked the Berlin flights for something like
£2.99.
Whether he was aware of the impossibility of such a trip
being made, I don’t know. Maybe he
wanted to give himself something to focus on, or was trying in some way to
convince us that he would still be around the following year.
I remember discussing my imminent Berlin trip with him and
him telling me about the controversial American playwright Lillian Hellman who’d
visited the city with fellow writer Dashiell Hammett during the late
1930s. Dad was a big fan of Hammett and
I had taken him a copy of ‘The Thin Man’ when he went into hospital. The fact that it remained at his bedside
untouched should have indicated to me how ill he was.
I’m not going to idealise my dad here. He did have a lot of faults, and I would even
say that his commitment to his roles as husband and father was often seriously deficient.
But he was a complex character. He had
suffered a lot of personal tragedy and was often brooding and angry.
My last memory of him is as a very poorly old man talking
about American writers and making holiday plans from his hospital bed.
In some ways Berlin will always be bound up in my mind with
my dad. With a different mindset I could
have hated the city because of this and never want to return. But return I did. Year after year. Maybe tomorrow night I will remember him in
the manner most appropriate by seeking out an Irish bar and raising a
commemorative glass of Guinness.
It’s what he would have wanted.
I was standing here when I heard the news (more or less exactly where the pedestrian
in the white top is) I think of it as 'Einstein Corner' for obvious reasons.
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