Message to My Girl by Jared Noel

Author:Jared Noel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

More and more of life

It was in the context of gestating new life that I pursued more of my own life.

My daughter is literally the reason I am still alive …

And I will be forever grateful to her, and to those who enabled this to happen.

We now move forward into a new phase of life, one that will no doubt include sleepless nights, but filled with tears of joy and an overwhelming sense of pride in who our daughter has already become.

‘Elise Alexandra Grace’, The Boredom Blog, January 25, 2014

Two weeks ago we celebrated Father’s Day. And Elise gave me presents.

I got some lollies, a model aeroplane and a few cards. What else? A ring, which is spinning around my finger. I now have a ring from each of my girls. And a book: My Dad’s the Coolest. Because her dad is the coolest.

I found it tough buying presents for Hannah on Mother’s Day. It must have been tougher to know what to buy for me. What do you buy the dad who is on his deathbed? Something sentimental, perhaps. Or something consumable.

Elise.

I simply do not have the words to convey the significance of that day. It was emotional, of course. There is hardly anything more sentimental than celebrating a significant day for the one and only time—and Father’s Day at that. I was not meant to make it to Elise’s birth, let alone to Father’s Day, a whole eight months later. But its significance goes beyond the sentimental, in my mind anyway. It goes back before Elise was born, to some of the most hope-filled days her mum and I have experienced in this long and difficult journey. It goes back to a dream, if I am honest, and a walk around Cornwall Park, where we allowed ourselves just a moment to consider … what if? It was not a fanciful dream, or so we thought at the time. We had every reason at that moment to think that the unthinkable was within our reach. Every reason. It is an impossible situation, knowing in the back of your mind that you should keep the hope in balance, but feeling it rise ever more powerfully in your chest as you picture … no, taste, a life of not one, but two, three, five, ten more years. And if ten years, why not 50?

Then, almost two years to the day later, Elise was here, the most tangible manifestation of hope there could be—a living person, our child, born out of love, out of life, out of a dream.

For eight months, I have watched her grow. Enjoyed the way she has learnt to control her fingers, the intelligence in her eyes, her laughter, the way she communicates, her love of stories. I was away in hospital, then the hospice, for a short period, and in that time she grew so much. We had it so good for a while. Six months of relative normality was not bad, considering the shape I was in and the medication I had taken over the years.

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