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And Uncle Heath. He loved her so much, it made my heart sing.

I watched him grieve for me in private, behind closed doors. He spent long nights sitting out on the jetty in the moonlight, watching the water. I sat right beside him, even if he didn’t know it. I watched sunsets with him, and I was there when he was surfing with Vinnie and the boys. I went to the waterfall with him, and I swam with him in the cool water that mirrored the colour of his eyes. It was frowned upon here, spending so much time with the living, but I didn’t let that stop me. We had found a loophole, he and I, and I was going to exploit it for as long as I was able.

After a time, I watched him fall in love again. I liked her, she was good for him, and she loved him. I saw inside her heart, and his. They were a good match. She made him laugh again, and for that I was grateful. I wanted him to be happy. They were blessed with a child – a boy they named Henry – and Heath became the wonderful father I always knew he would be. He had a home, a wife, a family, and he was content. I began spending less time with him, less time watching over him. I was comfortable leaving him now. He didn’t need me anymore.

Time passes differently here. Weeks seem like minutes, days merely moments. It all happened relatively quickly for me, although I had watched them all growing older without me. Before long, it was time to let him go again.

I was comfortable leaving him this time because it wasn’t like the other times.

This time, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I would see him again.

54 Years Later

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations;

it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

- Honore de Balzac

I REMEMBER SITTING ON
the floor in the living room with him on a rainy afternoon, making paper planes. I was only about seven years old, and patience was never my strong suit. But he was my Dad – the great and powerful Heath Danes. If he couldn’t figure out why they weren’t flying right, no one could.

We tried several different wing shapes and tail ideas, going through at least a dozen pieces of paper, before we found the one shape that made the plane fly better than all the others. I launched the latest design across the room, my expectations high. It flew for a few seconds, gliding smoothly, before hitting the wall and nose-diving into the TV. I was so excited, I picked it up and launched it into the air again, positive we had found the one perfect plane, the one that would eclipse all the others.

But it didn’t fly. It wobbled and fell almost immediately.

I was crushed. Dad picked up the plane and sat down on the floor with it, and I sat down beside him.

“It’s broken already,” I said, disappointed.

Dad smoothed the dented nose with his fingers, and tried to straighten it out, but I knew by now that it was spent.

“The trouble with paper planes, Henry,” he said, “Is that they’ve only got one good fly in them. As soon as they hit something, it’s all over.”

He was so right. Then, and now. Like paper planes, we only have one chance at this life, and we have to make the most of it. That was something Dad always seemed well aware of.

I still can’t quite believe he’s dead. When I walk up to the house, I half expect to find him there, pottering in the garden in shorts and bare feet, just like any other day.

But now the garden is empty. When a parent dies, I think there’s a part of you that dies with them. I wonder if it’s the fact that your DNA is linked at that fundamental level, that because of them, you are here. And now, when they leave you, it’s as if a part of your heart and soul has been taken, too. We had our moments, like all fathers and sons do, but I loved him and I know he loved me. I’m glad I got to tell him that, one last time.

He was a proud man, my Dad. He didn’t want to be a burden. In some ways, I’m glad he went quickly. The past two days have been hell, don’t get me wrong, and at times I thought he would fight it, against the odds. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was my hero, but not even the great Heath Danes could cheat death.

There are certain things that remind me of my childhood. Rain beating against the roof of our house. Mum’s homemade chicken noodle soup on a cold winter’s day. Playing cards by the fire when the power went out. The crunch of gravel as Dad’s truck pulled into the driveway after work.

My parents were different in many ways, but theirs was a love story, I know that for sure. They met when they were both in their early thirties, but they fell in love slowly, so Mum told me once. Both tentative, sceptical, both with the baggage of previous relationships under their belts. Over time, they became best friends, and that never changed. They were married on the beach at Wainui. By the time I came along, Mum was thirty-seven. She told me once that they had tried to have another child, but she had trouble conceiving me, and it just wasn’t to be. Now, with kids of my own, I can imagine how heart-breaking that must’ve been for them.

They never made me feel like I wasn’t enough. There was love in our house, always. Mum and Dad were like a couple of teenagers, right up until Mum’s death four years ago. Her illness was short, too. Six weeks from diagnosis to her death, but they were long weeks. Her decline was slow at first, and we all thought there was some kind of mistake. The cancer might be in remission after all. But it wasn’t. It didn’t. She became an old woman, right in front of our eyes.

Dad was a rock through all of it. He was by her side all day, every day. He knew his time with her was limited.

“She’s my best friend, Henry. I want to be with her till the end. I owe her that and I need it for myself. I need as much of her as I can get.”

He made my love for her seem paltry in comparison. I worried for him, how he would cope after she was gone. I saw him cry once, only once. The morning she died. I wasn’t there when it happened. He was. I’ve never seen such heartache as I did that morning. He was lost without her. She had been his anchor, and now she was gone and he was adrift. I was hurting too, but losing a parent is different to losing a life partner. For a long time, he looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself. I always got the feeling he was looking for her, like he felt he had just woken up from a nightmare and none of it was real. Like he expected her to come back to him.

We kept a close eye on him, Georgia and I. We visited often, took the kids around. He supervised my eldest when I was teaching him to surf. Watching my boy practicing pop-ups on Grandad’s old longboard, on my father’s lawn, was one of those family moments that ingrains itself into your heart. Four generations of Danes boys learnt to surf on that board. How many families get to say that?

He missed Mum. He didn’t have to tell me, it was obvious. Georgia started cooking his meals for him when he began to lose weight. We worried that he wasn’t eating properly. He was grateful for the food, but I don’t think it was enough. He needed more than food to sustain him. He needed a purpose. He needed Mum.

I felt useless. All I could do was watch as he turned from my father – proud, strong, capable – into the eighty-two-year-old man he was. I never thought of him as old before that. He was my father, my children’s grandfather, my wife’s father-in-law. A gentleman who always opened the door for a lady. A local legend with a strong dislike of footwear.

Other people would ask after him, about him. I’d say he was fine, doing well. ‘How old is he?’ they’d ask. When I told them, they would nod, smiling sympathetically, as if he was nearing the end of his innings. I didn’t think of him that way. I think I was in denial. You don’t allow yourself to think of the heartache, even though you know, somewhere deep down, that it will come.

He went downhill very quickly. At first, the doctors thought it was some kind of medication imbalance. He had the usual physical failings common of a man of his age. The body wears out, after all. We assumed it would right itself. He was in the right place, we told ourselves. The doctors will sort him out, then we would probably have to think about selling the house and putting him into a rest-home. He wouldn’t like it, we said, but there was no other way around it.

Then, everything changed. The doctors said he wasn’t responding to the treatment. He was getting worse. We should prepare ourselves. In a matter of hours, everything changed.

For the first time since Mum’s death, I was scared. And helpless. It was happening again. I cried. I was angry. I wanted answers. I expected to have more time with him, like we did with Mum. It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. We sat with him all through the day. When the kids finished school, we debated whether or not to bring them to the hospital. Georgia thought it would be good for them to say goodbye.

Dad was slipping in and out of consciousness, sometimes chatty, other times just staring at me as if he wanted to say something. His eyes, blue and so like mine, had always been expressive. I tried to guess what he wanted to say and answer him, reassure him.

Georgia and I talked outside his room. She told me we had to tell him it was okay to let go. She thought he was holding on for me, because I was having trouble accepting it. She was right, of course. I
was
having trouble accepting it. I wanted him to live forever. What kind of son would I be if I didn’t?

My heart felt like it was literally breaking, being ripped apart inside my chest. The one thing I could do for my father now was let him go, even though it went against every instinct I had.

Not long before I proposed, Georgia and I were going through a tough time. Mum and I talked on the porch, over coffee. I talked to Mum about most things. She was always honest and I trusted her opinion. Sometimes it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I could always trust that she was telling it to me straight. I told her I wasn’t sure that Georgia and I were meant to be together anymore. I knew she was fond of Georgia, and I don’t know what I expected her to say. I guess I expected her to tell me another story of when she and Dad first met, how things weren’t easy for them, either. I was wrong.

She told me about Emily, Dad’s first love.

Then she told me a story that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

After Emily said goodbye that night at the hospital, all trace of Maia disappeared. Her car, her clothes – everything. And the following week, as they were all still trying to make sense of what had happened, Emily’s body was found. A remote forestry block up the back of Kawhia had been cleared, and her body discovered in amongst the trees. Her skull had been cracked open. They never found out how she got there. They never found out who did it.

I knew my cousin, Emily Rose, had been named after Auntie Jasmine’s best friend who died, but no one ever mentioned the fact that she was also Dad’s girlfriend. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. It felt like a lie, but was a lie the same as an omission?

When Mum told me about Emily that day, she called her ‘Dad’s first love,’ in such a matter-of-fact, unapologetic way. She said she felt as if she knew her, from the way Dad talked about her. She said she thought Dad and Emily might’ve been soul-mates. I wanted to object, because it felt wrong to talk about Dad loving another woman like that. But Mum wasn’t jealous. She wasn’t in competition with her, she said. She didn’t feel like a consolation prize. I had a small insight that day into why Dad fell in love with her.

I couldn’t get the story out of my head. I never told Dad that I knew, but I saw him in a different light after that. It’s strange, when you try to imagine your parents with different partners. It’s like looking at a photograph that keeps changing every time you blink.

A couple of days later, I went to the cemetery and I found Emily’s grave. It was in the old part of the cemetery, but it was well-tended, with fresh flowers. She was so young when she died. I tried to imagine Dad at that age, and how he must’ve felt when she disappeared, and then when she came back to him, albeit briefly. The heartache must’ve been crushing. It made what Georgia and I were going through seem so bloody miniscule by comparison. I proposed not long after that. I never told her about Emily or what happened. Their story wasn’t mine to tell.