My father went from a healthy man to a dying one within days
Words by Ruki Bartholomeusz
Photographs by Holly Bartholomeusz
Content warning
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I stood looking at my father’s body. Two tall candles burned at the head of the coffin in which he lay, in the funeral parlour.
An adult relative had told me the body was going to be burned but not how cremation worked, so I assumed those candles would burn down and consume the casket. I thought that would be a bit messy. I don’t remember feeling any connection to the body in the coffin. I was four years and five months old.
Our parents were Mummy and Thaththa to us. My father was Sinhalese, the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon back then. My mother was a Burgher. An ethnic minority, Burghers are descendants of European settlers (no doubt tinged with some ‘local’ blood) in a country colonised over centuries by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. We knew our parents were different. My mother was ‘white’, spoke English, and barely managed Sinhalese. My father was equally fluent in both languages, but at his insistence, we spoke only Sinhalese. My mother said she spoke to us in English and we responded in Sinhalese. Once my father died, we quickly became fluent English speakers.
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My earliest memories are of my father. One is at three or four years old, standing facing him on the veranda of our home. I farted and he burst out laughing, no doubt a spontaneous reaction, but my feelings were hurt. I remember him putting me to bed for my afternoon nap and other snippets of memories that mostly feature him. I know he was the central figure in my life up to the time he died. My mother said he rocked me to sleep in his arms every night, up to the time he took ill.
We lived in rented homes and had just moved to a new area on the outskirts of Colombo and were still getting settled when my father suddenly became very ill. I stood at his bedside one morning wondering why he was still in bed. He looked very agitated and uncomfortable. Fear gripped me. Within a couple of days, he went from a normal, healthy man to a dying one. At the time there were no drugs for the disease that soon attacked his brain. Eventually, he was strapped to the hospital bed so he wouldn’t hurt himself or fall off. My mother spent two weeks by his bedside. She watched as corpses were carried out of what must have been a ward for the terminally ill.
When the end was inevitable, I was taken on my only visit to the hospital. I stood on a chair and looked down at my father, who smiled at me and attempted to talk, to ask me something. I find myself crying as I write this, tears streaming, even though I have long viewed this period of my life in a detached manner, as something that happened long ago.
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I remember the day Mummy came home and told us Thaththa had died. I wanted to laugh out loud and felt guilty and confused at my reaction. I didn’t understand death, but I knew something really awful had happened. After the funeral, we settled into our new home, in a new area where we knew no one. A family bereft, waiting for a father who was never coming home.
A few weeks later, at four and a half years old, I started school. Would I have been better off staying home with my mother for a while longer? Probably, but my mother was a practical person with a million things on her plate, not the least of which was supporting a family of seven with no income. My parents each had a child from their first marriages: my father a daughter who was 16 when he died and whose birth mother had died shortly after she was born. My mother was a divorcee with a son who had Down Syndrome. My parents had four children together. The eldest was a son who contracted polio at three months old and was physically disabled. Then three girls, of whom I am the youngest.
At 40, my mother was a widow with six children, two of whom were living with disabilities, four under the age of 9, and no income. There was no welfare system, no pension.
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When I look back on this period of my life I surmise that, as my father was there one day and gone the next, I had to make sure I didn’t let my mother out of my sight in case she too disappeared. For months after I started school, my mother sat outside my classroom, in a waiting area for parents, so I could wander over to the open doorway to check she was still there. One day she had to go somewhere and was fretting about leaving. My teacher insisted she go, and then shut the classroom door. I lay on the floor, kicked my feet in the air and screamed hysterically. My teacher, who was a wise and caring woman, was taking small steps to help me. I must have stopped screaming at some point.
Because I refused to let her out of my sight, my mother had to follow my class to the PE grounds, a short walk from the school. She told me that one time my teacher had us kids in a circle and was throwing a ball for us to catch. She threw in my direction. I ignored it. She threw again, a few times and one time I caught it and she praised me. Another small step.
The first year of school dragged on and my mother decided it was time for me to make the journey to and from school with my two sisters. Without her. The eldest, who was nine years old, walked me to class and waited to make sure I was okay. I tried to put on a brave face but felt lost and abandoned. For a while after, maybe days, maybe weeks, I would cry intermittently and often.
Sitting with tears streaming down my face one day, I remember a classmate asking me whether my father had died, assuming that was why I cried so much. I thought to myself, you don’t know anything because I didn’t understand that that was precisely why I cried so much.
I thought I was just sad. ✿
Image Descriptions: A landscape shot of the beach, from the sandy shoreline of Mirissa, Sri Lanka. The ocean water is aqua and in the background to the right of the frame is a dense, dark green forest. At the top of the frame, the sky is light blue and scattered with fluffy white clouds. In the distance, a group of about twenty people stand in the shallows of the ocean as waves crash around them. A second landscape shot of the mountains taken from a height in Ella, Sri Lanka. On the right, lush dark green forest and on the left, more forest that is partially covered with a cloud or mist. The sky in the background is grey.
