Grief and my father

When my mother died from lung cancer, my father was simply devastated. In a way that was incomprehensible at times to me as his daughter - he seemed to be even more affected than when my brother, his son, died. He didn’t want to continue to live after she passed, and in my judgemental, hurt mind, I was thinking, but what about us, the rest of your children? But I see now that it’s something I can’t understand unless I go through it myself, and that grief is a terrible beast that is unique to each person. I saw that in my own mourning for my mother.

I wanted to share one way that my father has been dealing with his grief over the loss of his life partner.

In the garden of our family home, he recycled about ten car tyres to make different art projects, mostly around memorialising my mother and our family history.

This is a photo of the tyre my dad made of my mother. They both went swimming everyday at the Sydney Olympic pool, so those are her goggles and swimming cap. The boat she is paddling in is a reference to a poster he made when she was first diagnosed, a drawing of her in a boat paddling, with the family on the bank of the river telling her ‘You can do it’. It was a relatively short period of her fighting the cancer - six months from diagnosis to her passing.

This tyre is in reference to the ‘boat people’ who fled Vietnam in 1975. My family were not one of these people, but my Dad feels close to this history for several reasons.

These tyres have the Australian flag and the First Nations flag painted on them. The bottom tyre is a clock, and painted on top of it which you can’t see in the photo is the date of my parent’s marriage and the date of my mother’s passing, as well as the number ‘42’ because that is how many years they were together in this life.

These tyres commemorate the Sydney Olympics in 2000. My dad paid for tickets for all of us in the family to attend the opening ceremony, at about $1,000 each. He said it was a once in a lifetime chance, and we even have photos of us holding the Olympic torch as it made its way to the stadium.

A close-up of the Sydney Opera House tyre, the attention to detail and how he managed to recreate this is incredible.

A snapshot of his garden, where he now spends most of his time.

!