Family ties

What is family? Is your father the man you grow up with who nurtures you and loves you and teaches you to walk and talk and tie your shoes? Or is your father the stranger who donated half your genes and then disappeared? These are questions I'm planning to explore - and perhaps answer - in this story...

Devon Marsden is nineteen. Her mother Deirdre has just died. Devon wants to find the father she has never met. All she has is an old picture and a last name. The search takes her across the Atlantic and to the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland, where she arrives at the door of a secluded mansion. The man who answers has black hair, blue eyes and a lilting accent. He's the handsome, wealthy, intelligent, arrogant (and Irish) Declan Moriarty, and he has no idea who she is. The conversation goes to the effect of the following:

Devon: Don't you remember? Her name was Deirdre Marsden. It was twenty years ago.
Declan: Please. Do you have any idea how many women I slept with twenty years ago? What month?
Devon: I was born in October, so...January.
Declan: Hmm. When in October?
Devon: Twenty-second.
Declan: So...mid-January. (pause) Got a picture?

When he sees her picture, however, he agrees that he probably is in fact her father. She explains that her mother's dead and that he's her only surviving relative.

Declan isn't what she's been expecting, and Devon soon realizes that he's nothing like any of the possibilities she's imagined. He's not a criminal or a drunk or a wife-beater, not sleazy or a lowlife. He's also not a warm, caring man with a wife and a bucket of kids.

Declan is an enigma. He drinks only whiskey, rolls his own cigarettes (with licorice-flavoured paper) and used to be so careless with women that he now lives in the relative isolation of the mansion and has been under a sort of self-imposed celibacy for the past year. Devon is also probably not his only child. His moral compass is decidedly askew. He's suave, charming, almost dangerously charismatic, and she doesn't see him as a father. She understands why her mother fell for him - and she begins to do the same.

Declan understands that there is a difference between an addiction and a problem. Tobacco, alcohol, coffee, the harmonica, painting - they're all addictions of varying degrees, but they're not problems because his desire for them doesn't negatively affect the quality of his life. Women, however, have always been a problem...hence the reason he lives where and how he does. He's messed up the lives of so many women that he came to the island to be away from it all, and now he's messing up his daughter's life as well. Devon tries to keep her distance, Declan contemplates suicide...

This is not a happy story. But it's not going to have a traditional ending - they're not going to realize it was just distorted familial affection and have a normal father-daughter relationship happily ever after. Oh no. It's all or nothing for these two.

"Declan."
"What?"
"Never mind."
"Your tongue must have bite marks from all the things you never say."

Eulogy

I’m here to tell you a story. Not about my father, but about a woman. The world took no notice when she died, not like it has now that he’s gone. She died in a hospital not far from here, four years ago, on a cold day in April.

In case you’re wondering what relevance this has to my father, let me explain. I had to tell her story today. I promised him. And even if I hadn’t, I would have had to tell it anyway, because of something my father always used to say to her.

“The only stories in my life worth telling are the ones that begin with you.”

My father didn’t die yesterday. He didn’t die of the lung cancer that had been eating him alive without his knowledge or permission. He died four years ago on that day in April when the woman that meant everything to him closed her eyes forever.

That woman was my mother.

She had an unusual name. That’s actually how they met. He was taking auditions for a role in a movie that was his first attempt at directing. It was a movie that would win him three Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe. Anyway, he was reading through the list of names, and she was next. Everyone else had been called by their full name, first and last, but he wasn’t sure whether he could pronounce hers. So he said, “Miss Scott.”

She stood up. She was tall and dark-haired and had brown eyes. Brown was always my father’s favourite eye colour. But there was something else about her. A quiet strength, maybe. It was something none of us were never able to isolate and identify. She was like that. You could never categorize her, never put her in a box or just tick the qualities that she possessed. She always had something more, something extra, something indefinable and beautiful that seemed beyond our comprehension.

And then she said her name. Leilani. My father would later say it was the most beautiful name he had ever heard, even after he found out that it was Hawaiian for ‘heavenly flowers’, which was a little too sentimental for anyone’s taste. He would also say that that was the moment he knew she was the one.

My mother didn’t get the part, although not for lack of interest from my father. His producers overruled him, said they wanted someone with star power. When she left the auditions that day, he didn’t know whether he would ever see her again. But my father had never been the kind of man to wait on Fate to work her magic. He decided to be proactive. He called her up the next day, asked her if she wanted to have coffee with him at a small café on 14th Street. She said yes.

When he walked in, she was already there. They talked for hours, about music and philosophy, about art and religion, about politics and money. The owner of the café finally had to boot them out at nine o’clock in the night, half an hour past closing. He walked her home. According to both my parents, they never ran out of things to say to each other. And as far as I know, they didn’t run out of things to say even after fifteen years of marriage.

They started dating in the fall of 1986. She was nineteen years old, a struggling actress and writer who was putting herself through college on a barista’s salary. He was forty-three, an accomplished actor with several critically acclaimed roles under his belt. Nobody had the faintest inkling that it would work. Nobody dreamed that she would marry him, have children for him and stay with him until she died. Nobody dreamed that he would be true to her even after her death from complications of pneumonia in 2004.

My father married my mother in the spring of 1987. There was no doubt in his mind as to whether he was doing the right thing. She was everything to him, and it was as simple as that. They loved each other. In fact, they redefined love. Love was the ultimate surrender. It was giving yourself wholly and completely to someone else without fear or reservation, and having that person accept you without question. And that’s what my parents did.

I was born in the winter of 1988, in the same hospital where my mother would later die. They named me together, they brought me home together, they raised me and nurtured me and loved me together. And when my brother Daniel was born two years later, they were more than happy to repeat the process.

My mother was a beautiful woman. It’s easy to see why someone would have loved her. But it was more than that. My father says she had a wisdom in her eyes that was beyond her years, that she saw the world in a way nobody else did, that she saw things not as they were but as they could be. Beauty where there was ugliness.

She changed him. Being with her made him feel immortal. He felt like he could write sonnets to a leaf blowing in the wind, or epics on a dewdrop frozen on a single blade of grass. Everything around him inspired him.

When I was twelve, my father decided that he wanted to write, direct and star in a movie. He’d never written a screenplay before, but he also never walked away from a challenge. And so for hours and hours he and my mother sat together at the computer. I was still a child then, but I saw the way they looked at each other and I hoped that, one day, someone would look at me with that much love in their eyes.

The screenplay took six months to finish. I remember the day, the exact moment. It was January 17th, 2003, and I was ploughing headlong through the second Harry Potter novel. My brother, next to me on the floor in our reading corner of the living room, was on the first. We were both wondering if our father would ever finish this screenplay. When you’re a child, six months seems like an awful long time to be working on one thing.

When he opened the door, though, I knew this was it. I knew it was finally finished. The joy on his face was incredible to watch; the cool, calm collectedness of my father had all but vanished. My mother stood next to him, one arm around his neck.

“Yes,” she said in answer to the unspoken question in our faces. “He’s finished.”

I’ll never forget the way she said ‘he’s finished’. Not ‘we’, even though she spent almost as many hours on it as he did, and surely had been his muse. He.

They didn’t let us read it. They did one better than that. They performed it, a little impromptu play of sorts, right there in our living room. The easy chemistry between them was beautiful. And she was a good actor. Better than good. She was great.

The movie, however, was never made, because later that year my sister Serena was born, something that nobody had expected, least of all my parents. My father was fifty-six, and now he had a newborn daughter. So the screenplay took a backseat as they set to work bringing up this new arrival with the same care and attention which they had shown to my brother and I.

In February of 2004, my mother contracted a chest infection. It got so bad she had to go to the hospital. They gave her antibiotics, antivirals, steroids. Nothing seemed to work. The doctors knew what was wrong with her, they just didn’t know how to make it right.

It was hard, watching as our beautiful, vibrant mother faded away before our eyes. My brother’s grades slipped, and I dropped out of school entirely so I could spend time with her in the hospital. My father had suddenly found himself with a dying wife, two troubled children and a baby that he was going to have to raise alone. My mother would not be there to share Serena’s first steps or her first word. It was an unthinkable situation.

We were all around her when she breathed her last breath. It was the 3rd of April, 2004, and it was cold outside. But that did not stop my father from a solitary walk through the hospital grounds without a coat. Perhaps part of him wanted to get pneumonia as well, and to die, because life would not be worth living if she were not there.

As it turns out, he didn’t get pneumonia, and he didn’t die. He realized that while my mother was gone, she had left him three children. So he sent me back to school. He tutored my brother until Daniel was getting straight A’s again. And he raised Serena singlehandedly. My father had always been a good man. But I think that after my mother died, he became a truly great man. He always put us before himself. He was never short-tempered or curt, but infinitely patient and understanding. We had been blessed with not one but two perfect parents, and now that my mother was gone, we still had my father.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer in the spring of 2007. It was too late for treatment, and he didn’t try to postpone the inevitable. What he did do was turn the story of their love into a book. He wrote it, and from his deathbed he oversaw the editing, the format and the overall presentation of the memoir. He had specific ideas and nobody dared cross him. This was a thing in which he would not yield.

Unfortunately, my father could not be with us today as the book is launched worldwide. He had other commitments. If only death could have waited one more day...

But death does not wait. It did not wait on my mother, nor my father. And at any rate, he would not have wanted to be here. I have been entrusted with the care of my brother and my sister, and while it sounds like a heavy burden, it is not too much to ask. For I learned how to be a mother from the best. Wherever my father is, he knows that I can handle this. He knows I understand why he didn’t undergo agonizing chemotherapy, the loss of his hair, the bleeding gums, the infections.

The truth of it is that he wanted to be with my mother. No man wants to die, but my father didn’t fight death. Because he knew with absolute certainty - as I do - that wherever he is, my mother is also. There isn’t anything else for it. My parents’ love defies death. My father didn’t promise to be with my mother until the end of her life, but to the end of his. My mother didn’t say she’d love my father until he died, but until she did.

Dad, I understand. We all do. Give Mom our love. Tell her how handsome Daniel looked on my arm at the prom, how beautiful Serena’s growing up to be. And tell her how I love her. How I’ll never forget her.

I love you. Both of you.