When air turns to glue: Remembering my dad, a year on

Philip Fourie, Melanie’s father. May he rest in peace.

Today a year ago was my dad’s last day on earth.

I don’t know how he filled that day, but I know he spent it with my mum. The next morning, he got up to make orange juice for her – his last deed.

Only those who have lost people they loved, understand how your world changes irrevocably the day you hear the news.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a very moving article in the New Yorker titled “Notes on Grief” on her experience after her father died (6 days after my dad).

“Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?” she asks. I know exactly what she means.

Air turning into glue… when even breathing becomes painful. 

In a world that was collectively struggling for breath, we battled to organize a memorial for my dad during level 5 lockdown.  In the end, we had a beautiful morning with just his closest friends on the slopes of Stellenbosch mountains which he loved so much. Circumstances forced simplicity and humbleness – exactly what he would have wanted because my dad was humble. So humble that he always insisted that he made very little – if any– contribution to the world.

And yet through the stories that others told us after his death, it became clear that he had had a deep impact on many – without knowing it.  

The most moving example came through an email a few weeks after his death, from someone I had never met:

“I’m sorry about the loss of your dad,” it read. “I also had to bury my dad and no one knows how you feel. Your dad was my lecturer in Applied Mathematics in 1993 at the University of Stellenbosch and he was in his (subtle) way the best lecturer I ever had.  He once wrote all the names of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands on the black board and we asked us what it was about. In his dry manner, he answered that this was the Hollywood version of the Taylor Series and so made a very difficult bit of mathematics easy for us.

One day, I saw him cycling past the university residence I lived in. He stopped, got off his bicycle and picked up a paper in Piet Retief Street and threw it in a rubbish bin. I still remember it to this day - and I always pick up rubbish. When I work on construction sites, I pick up rubbish and when people give me puzzled looks, I just smile and think: ‘I had a great teacher’.

Your dad has left a lasting impression on me.”

This email had me in tears. I remembered how my dad spent late nights and early mornings preparing lectures and marking papers. Passing on knowledge was his passion – not only to us as his children, but after he retired as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics, he taught mathematics to school children in the townships around Gordon’s Bay.

What moved me most was the reference to the picking up of litter, because this was who my dad was.  With his phenomenal intellect, he studied the world of mathematics, nuclear science, and the natural world, but when he cycled home at night, he would pick up people’s rubbish (as he also did whenever we took a walk on the beach).

How I wish he could have known about that student who watched him through the window of his residence all those years ago. 

This has been a long painful year, during which my mum, my sisters, and I had to learn how to breathe again without my dad’s silent presence. I still find it almost unbearable to go into the family home. I still expect him to come to the front door, or to be in the kitchen washing dishes to the sound of classical music playing in the background. Lunch conversations seem empty without him raising the three or four political questions he had been saving up since he last saw me, and when I leave, my throat contracts because I miss the feeling of his bony body giving me a hug.

Still the air is gradually becoming liquid again.

I had been thinking a lot about how to honour my dad as we commemorate his death a year ago. I decided that I will take a walk on the beach and pick up rubbish… I’m sure that would have pleased him. While I do that I will picture him cycling through the streets of Stellenbosch and remind myself to do the right thing – even when I believe no one is watching.

I miss you, dad.