From the Horses Mouth
On the 30 of October 2010 I received a phone call from my mother while I was at work. My father, Charles Jeffery Gurney, had suffered a fatal heart attack. A week later I stood under the hot sun in a garden in front of more than a hundred people and stumblingly read out a small speech I had written. These were the words I wanted to say, the words I needed to say. I’m going to put the speech, in its flawed entirety, below. I’m going through a tough time right now and it probably won’t get any easier any time soon but I promise you that I will make every effort to put up blog posts whenever I can.
Dad
I can honestly say that I never believed that one day I would be standing here saying goodbye to my dad.
Unsurprisingly it’s one of the hardest things I could never imagine. How can I really say anything that will capture even a fraction of the loss I feel right now and will probably feel for the rest of my life? So I think instead I’d like to just share with you a few things about my dad.
In Form Two we were asked to write about one of our heroes. I remember sitting in the class room looking up at the whiteboard trying to decide if I would write about Nelson Mandela or Terry Pratchett when a little thought popped into the back of my head, “What about Dad?”. So that’s who I wrote about, because to me he was just as influential and just as heroic as those people. Three years later, in 2006, the old man proved me right when he flew all the way to the UK simply to surprise me for my Eighteenth Birthday. I wouldn’t have been any the wiser if he decided that it was too expensive or that he couldn’t take the time off but my Dad made the trip, because that’s who he was.
Dad was a generous man who once explained to me that charitable giving was best done anonymously, because then you knew you did it for the right reasons and not for the recognition. Dad also had the mischief. He would look for the best ways to stir people up, whether it was dreaming up the Gnome Liberation Front to harass people at Cabs or convincing Auntie Karen, as he called her, that Zimbabwe didn’t have the moon.
So when it comes to saying goodbye the word gets caught in my throat. I’ve lost my father, my teacher and my friend. Today I mourn him. Tomorrow and every other day I will celebrate his life.
I love you Dad.
1 comments:
Well written Jono. Your dad seemed like an amazing person, and I guess that's where you get it from.
Hang in there ;)
-Shab
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