A year without my father

My father died on this day last year; almost four years to the day after the death of my mother (1 November 2015). He died before the pandemic was a bowl of badly-cooked bat-soup; it is comforting that he had a decent funeral and wake - not one hampered by travel bans and restrictions on numbers of mourners. He died before last December's General Election, so he died still hoping that somehow Brexit could be reversed. He'd certainly have voted against Johnson had he lived another six weeks. The world he departed is far bleaker than the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s.

I miss my father. He appears in my dreams more than any other person; we often travel together on the bus (a red London double-decker headed to Powiśle). After my mother died, my contact with my father intensified greatly. I called him nearly every evening and spent around a week a month with him in London. In our conversations, I learnt a lot about his life that I'd not known about before - prewar Poland, the occupation, the Uprising, postwar London, our own upbringing from his perspective. Often men will regret that they hadn't communicated enough with their fathers before they died - here, I cannot complain. The four years between my mother's death and my father's death gave both of us ample time to talk. 

Below: Ian Dury tackles this subject in My Old Man. Here he is (he died in 2000) on the cover of New Boots and Panties (1977) with his son, Baxter.

Seven years went out the window
We met as one to one
Died before we'd done much talking
Relations had begun
All the while we thought about each other
All the best, mate, from your son

Where is my father's soul - his consciousness - now? I'd like to think that somewhere a young child will be growing up with anomalous feelings of familiarity with prewar Warsaw and postwar London, be the child born in Cape Town, Quebec, Guangdong or Copenhagen. Who knows - in ten or 12 years time, that child might be drawn to this very website to read about a Bohdan Dembinski who took part in the Warsaw Uprising - and not really know why those words and pictures really resonate.

This time last year:
Death of my father

This time three years ago
Recent Jeziorki update

This time four years ago:
Autumn in Jeziorki

This time five years ago:
A driving ban for developers and architects

This time six years ago:
Do you keep coming back, or do you seek the new?

This time seven years ago:
In praise of Retro design

This time eight years ago:
First snowfall in Warsaw 

This time nine years ago:
Of cycles, economic and human 

This time ten years ago:
Why didn't I read this before? Grapes of Wrath

This time 11 years ago:
Małopolska from the train

This time 12 years ago:
Grading ul. Poloneza