A Phone Call

I recall a reading at my school assembly. The reading described a man who had undergone catastrophic short term memory loss. Told of events, he would be unable to recall them minutes later. In the fragment recounted to us he was told of the death of a much-loved uncle. He was shocked and cried, mourning his uncle. A short time later he was again told of the same event and, with all the sharpness of the original event, he experienced again the shock and grief. I thought at the time, think now, that this is the worst affliction I could envisage. Difficult even to imagine or to truly grasp. To be forever trapped in the moment, unable to escape it, or even to stand beyond it and to understand your own experience.

On Sunday the telephone rings, it is about 9.00 pm and I have finished work, following a family meal I am tidying my books, Judy is downstairs playing the piano. I pick it up. I know who is calling. Except I don't. It is not my father, of course. It should be, because this is when he rings to talk ... rang. And then it hits me again: the shock, the grief, and the absence, as if I too lacked a frontal lobe.

Many people, I guess, go to their fathers for counsel. It is part of what, at least to me, being a father means, and I am a father too. But for me there is an added element, my father was an engineer, an academic and, in his time a Dean of Engineering. So, I have lost a mentor and a scientific collaborator, and I want to mark these losses (As an aside, he used to joke, rather typically, that we should not use the word 'mentee', preferring instead 'telemachus', the pupil of Mentor, I have inherited the joke, along with his stock of professional anecdotes that I use, mostly unattributed, it is what he would have wanted).

So, professional successes seem a little less lustrous without the shared pleasure in achievement. The pitfalls of management seem a little less predictable and the slopes little more precipitous without good advice. Strategy seems a little more unfathomable without reference to his experience. Decisions seem harder without the principles, effortlessly and lucidly articulated. And that's it. You do the best you can. You move on. Until the phone rings, of course.