LAST DAYS WITH MY FATHER
Last Days With My Father
This sketch, which I called “Last Days with My Father”, has since been lost to time. It was probably left behind during one of our moves. I have no idea where it is today.
But I wanted to share its “backstory” and how it came about.
While I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area—around the summer of 1988—I was having my daily quiet time with God when I had a very strong impression that I needed go back to England to see my father. Not my mother, just my dad—which, in itself, was rather strange!
I went to the director of Harbour House, the Christian inner-city program where I was working full time, and asked if I could take two weeks leave to go back to see my father. She, with great wisdom, said, “If you feel that strongly about it you should go for a month”. I flew back to England. Dad and I prepared for our trip then set sail from Christchurch over to Cherbourg, France.
My father on his boat in Christchurch harbour, where we set off from.
We spent the next month sailing along the coast of France. It was just me and him, sleeping onboard the boat in harbours with names like Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue and La Havre. We shopped in markets, cooked breakfast on the boat and went out for lunch in little local restaurants. We stayed two or three nights in one place, then sailed on. It was a magical time.
On the way back to England, we stopped in Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands) for a few nights. It was during this time that I took my pastels and went out for a walk. I ended up in a quiet alley and sat down to sketch. Somehow the alley captured my feeling of sadness at the time. Without realising why, I added the faint shadow, as if someone had been there shortly before but had just walked away and was no longer visible.
We sailed back to England and I returned to California.
A few months later we got the news that my father had “gone in for tests”. My wife Joan said, it’s just a test, he’ll probably be fine, but somehow I knew he wouldn’t be. I told her that I didn’t think he would make it. A few weeks later he died. The whole time we had been sailing the cancer had been in his body. My father didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t, but God did, and I will always remember those four weeks He gave us together.
