Letter to my father

By Bernard Marin

In his own version of Kafka's Letter to Father, Bernard Marin reflects on fatherhood: his own experience as the son of a distant and angry father, and as a loving father himself. Recalling his father's gambling, his anger, his indifference, Bernard is surprised to discover happiness in the time he spent with his father at their nurs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard Publications
• Release date: Mar 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648555346

Bernard Marin

Bernard Marin AM was born in 1950 and graduated from the Prahran College of Advanced Education in Melbourne in 1970. He established his accounting practice in 1981 and currently works with the staff and partners of the practice as a consultant. Bernard lives in Melbourne with his wife, Wendy.He has published the following books: My Father, My Father, Good as Gold, Stories of Profit and Loss, Stories and Remembering and Forgetting, Letter to my Father, We had a Dream and People Who Have Changed the World.

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First published in 2020

by Harvard Publications

432 St Kilda Road

Melbourne 3004

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher.

Copyright © Bernard Marin 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN 978 0 6485553 3 9

Design by Skeleton Gamblers Creative

In memory of my father

Stanislaw Marin

Dear Dad

In the year I turned forty-eight I began to suffer from severe headaches. At the same age, you had suffered a heart attack and a stroke, and your father had died in Europe at the age of forty-eight.

My family doctor diagnosed migraines and referred me to a psychiatrist, who soon determined that I had never grieved for you. I was shocked. But then how do you mourn the loss of somebody you never really knew?

Today, twenty years later and thirty-three years after your death, I am sitting at my desk looking out the window and reflecting on our troubled relationship. Franz Kafka’s Letter to Father lies open before me, and I am suddenly prompted to write to you.

As hailstones strike the window and lightning flashes, I am reminded for some reason of the cigarette lighter I gave you as a present when I was sixteen or so. The metal lighter was enclosed in a fine network of filaments, like vines twisting around a tree. I had saved for months to buy it, all the money I’d earned from washing cars and doing other odd jobs.

‘It’s beautiful,’ you said.

‘I figured it’s something you could really use,’ I replied, gratified to have pleased you.

I looked forward to seeing you flicking off the lid to light up your endless Craven A cigarettes, feeling that I now had some small part in your life.

A few days later I was talking to my brother Paul when he took out a cigarette and held out the lighter to light one for me, too. I sat there, quite still, looking at the lighter. I could feel myself turning pale.

‘Where did you get that lighter?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I lost my other lighter, so Dad gave me this one,’ Paul said. ‘I guess he didn’t want it.’

‘He’s a bastard,’ I said.

Paul shrugged and lit his cigarette. ‘Don’t get so worked up,’ he said, blowing out a mouthful of smoke. ‘You’ll give yourself a seizure.’

Thinking about that lighter now, more than fifty years later, I feel the same stab of pain and anger towards you, with your callous silence, your emotional incapacity. It was just one of the