Sarfraz Manzoor

this is in the Family section of the Guardian today:

“‘The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner, “it’s not even past.”

I think about those words each time I look at an old photograph of my father; he died 13 years ago this summer and yet while the photographs record an increasingly distant childhood, his death cannot yet be consigned to the past. Mohammed Manzoor, my father, died aged 62 from a sudden heart attack. He died three days before my 24th birthday, a time when I was neither a young boy nor a fully formed adult. Freud claimed that there was no greater need in childhood than a father’s protection, and while my father was alive I took that protection for granted. In my eyes, he was not deemed worthy of being considered an individual in his own right, but only as someone whom I could use to help define my own identity. He was a first-generation immigrant who had arrived in Britain from Pakistan in the early 60s and spent 11 years here before being able to bring the rest of his family to join him. My father was not given to introspection or reflection and I, naturally assuming he was immortal, indulged in that most teenage of luxuries: rebellion. Too guilt-ridden to be truly sinful, my rebellions were mainly existential. I defined myself in opposition to him and all that he believed; the values he cherished, the identity he championed and the lifestyle he promoted I treated with pitying scorn.

Then one Sunday evening, on the last day of May 1995, everything changed for ever. I was living in Manchester when I received a telephone call. My father had been reading his newspaper in bed when he had begun to feel unwell, burping and sweating. My mother had suggested a warm glass of milk but the burping had become more frequent and uncomfortable. An ambulance was called but by the time it arrived my father had collapsed in the kitchen. With tears in his eyes, his last words to my mother were in English: “I’m going, I’m going.” Then he lost consciousness. I arrived at the hospital in the early hours and saw my father as I had never seen him before. All his life he had been so proud, so resilient, so indestructible; now he lay on a hospital bed, with machines aiding his breathing, his eyes shut and tubes invading his nose and veins. For the next week we remained at the bedside but he never regained consciousness. He died on June 6 and the following day, in accordance with Muslim tradition, we buried him.

The Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen, who lost both her parents in childhood, wrote that “the world became eternally divided into a before and after”. In recent years, I have become increasingly fascinated by that before and after; that divide between those who know what it is like to have lost a parent and those with the good fortune to have parents who are still alive. In the immediate aftermath of my father’s death I felt angry; I felt that it was too soon for him to have left me and that I still needed him. I still feel cheated that I lost my father so young, but I also know there are others who had even less time with their fathers.

The room in St Christopher’s hospice in south-east London is filled with stuffed animals and toys. The hospice has been providing bereavement counselling for 40 years and its Candle project extends this support to children. I am here to meet Dwayne and Tom, two teenagers who both lost their fathers five years ago. Dwayne lives in Deptford, south-east London, and is 16. Tom is 14, and lives in Sydenham, a few miles away. Tom is quiet and rarely meets my gaze. Dwayne is self-assured and articulate, and smiles easily and often during our conversation. His father died from a heart attack following an argument with Dwayne’s older brother. After his father’s death, Dwayne’s education suffered; he started slacking at school and began getting into trouble. Tom’s father died from brain cancer. “I used to have nightmares but I don’t dream any more,” he says quietly. “I haven’t for four years.” Like Dwayne, Tom found that his school grades were affected by his father’s death and he admits to finding it hard to meet new people. “I never become really good friends with people,” he says, “because people don’t always stay friends, and losing a friend is a bad thing. I don’t want to lose anyone again.” Dwayne’s father had a history of heart trouble, exacerbated by a poor diet. “After he died I stopped snacking,” Dwayne says, “stopped all those midnight feasts, stopped smoking and now I’m at the gym all the time.” He tells me his ambition is to be a physical instructor and the lesson he learned from losing his father was to “value life more because you never know when life is going to end”.

In his book Father Loss, Neil Chethik interviewed 70 men who had lost their fathers young. “The loss of a father is uniquely shattering to the son because that is how he models his own sense of manhood,” he told me. “Fathers help their boys become men and many boys who lose their fathers early complain that they never feel grown up and that they are forced to look elsewhere for father figures and approval.”

Dwayne told me that after his dad died the desire for male company led him to spend time with gangs in his area. “I didn’t have any male role models,” he says. “Boys needs men around to rebound off and learn from - I’m on my own but I am trying my best.”

James Major, 25, lives in Cheltenham and works as a ski guide and holiday rep. His father was an airline pilot who died 10 years ago from brain cancer. James tells me that his father’s death forced him to grow up and re-examine what was important in his life. “I used to think happiness was about financial and material achievement,” he says, “but now it is all about enjoying life and making the most of what you have.” Since his father’s death, James says that rather than running away from danger he has “a strong desire to have brushes with death”. The fact that his father was fit, healthy and only 47, has convinced his son that since one cannot predict when death will come, the secret of life is to make the most of it. “I think close calls with danger make you learn who you are,” he says, “so I love bungee jumping, white-water rafting and parachute jumps, and I ski a lot. If my mother knew what I got up to she’d probably have a heart attack.”

James admits that he did not cry when he learned of his father’s death; he was at boarding school at the time. “It wasn’t the done thing. Nor did I cry at his funeral. At the time, I remember feeling guilty - watching my sisters and mother crying only made me more self-conscious about my lack of tears.”

When I mentioned this to Chethik he revealed that half the men he interviewed for his book had not cried but that did not mean they were not grieving. “Men grieve differently to women,” he explains. “They may connect with the memory of their father by reading a book he loved or listening to music he liked. Rather than crying, men prefer to act to establish a connection to deal with the loss.”

That, I realised, was how I have grieved for my father: by re-watching the old Indian films I remember seeing with him as a child, by listening to the devotional sounds of the qawwali music he loved, and by writing a book that I thought was about me but which ultimately ended up as a tribute to him.

Jean-Paul Sartre described the early death of his father as his greatest piece of good fortune. “It sent my mother back to her chains and gave me my freedom,” he claimed. “Had my father lived, he would have lain on me at full length and that would have crushed me. As luck had it, he died young.” Few would refer to the death of their parents as good luck, but for a son, losing his father can be a form of liberation. Jacob Burak is the founder of a venture firm who interviews entrepreneurs for a living. “Among the successful people that I have interviewed, the one theme that continually appeared was that they all had problems with their fathers,” he told me. “Fathers represent a glass ceiling and so, according to Freud, to break that ceiling you have, in effect, to kill your father.”

It is not only in business that fatherless sons are over-represented. Danny Fingeroth is the author of Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society, and in his book he cites the cases of Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Robin as examples of comic-book heroes who lost their fathers at a young age. “Losing one or both parents is about the most horrible thing that could be imagined,” he told me, “so enacting this nightmare in comics form enables children to live out vicariously this horrible fantasy without having to actually experience it.” Fingeroth lost his own father while he was a teenager. “He died when we were still engaged in the conflicts between fathers and sons typical of that stage of development and before they could be resolved,” he says.

Dave Barber is 50 and lost his father 27 years ago. “My father loved brass-band music,” he recalls, “and one of the things in my job now is that I work on a brass-band programme for Radio 2, and he used to listen to that same programme so it would have given him such a kick to have known his son was working on the show.”

During the interviews he conducted for his book, Father Loss, Neil Chethik told me that “the phrase which comes up again and again was that boys who had lost their fathers missed hearing him saying, ‘I am proud of you.’ There is something unique about a father’s approval.” Dave agrees: “One of the most painful things about not having had my father in my life all these years, is that I haven’t had the chance to make him proud.”

In his book Fatherless Sons, Jonathan Diamond notes that “boys identify strongly with their fathers. However, while most boys separate from their fathers during adolescence to create an individual identity, and then spend the later years trying to return as an autonomous adult, the fatherless son moves forward alone.” That feeling of being alone in the world is still with me, and I recognised it in the other boys and men with whom I talked. In the absence of their fathers, the sons reported that their relationship with their mothers strengthened. Fourteen-year-old Tom says: “My mum won’t let me out again, I have to tell her everywhere I go - she texts me all the time to ask where I am and if I am OK.”

James says he has become much closer to his mother. “I can talk to her about anything,” he says, “and on Father’s Day I give her a card because since dad died she has been my mum and dad.”

I, too, have become closer to my mother, and one happy consequence of losing my father has been a renewed sense of boundless admiration for the sacrifices my mother made that provided the foundations for my current life.

I was on the cusp of adulthood when my father died and even today, 13 years later, I feel his death left unfinished business. I had not yet achieved anything in my life when he died and I still needed him to help me make that last step into manhood and maturity. Any success I have had in later life has been hollow: the person whose approval I most wanted is unable to give it. I have also been denied the opportunity of my father seeing me as his equal and having an adult relationship with him. While he was alive I am not sure I ever truly knew my father. In the years since his death, I tell myself that I am now closer to understanding him and yet the truth is that today my father is only a mass of memories, more myth than man.

In the early days after my father died, I felt as if the safety net had been pulled from below my feet and I realised I was walking life’s tightrope alone. That profound sense of aloneness still remains inside me but now I can hardly recall anything else. He has been gone so long that I do not miss him as much as I did, but instead I wonder how he would have changed and what he might have thought about the man I have become. I still feel like I am on that tightrope, alone and without a net, trying not to look down. These days I need my father less, but I want him more.