Endless pride and love
THIS column gives me the opportunity to talk about Jim Molan. Not as a senator, nor a soldier, but as a dad. Growing up, I don’t think any of us had any idea how lucky we were. It was only as we all got older that we started to realise, not just that we had a dad who adored us, but someone we — in return — idolised. We were inspired by him, he was our hero.
Mum is adamant she’s never done a night feed with any of us.
We were all lactose intolerant, so it meant poor dad was just as capable of giving us a bottle as she was, and he did, without fail.
No doubt sharing a joke or two in those early hours. Dad loved to laugh and all of us have seen every episode of Blackadder and Monty Python more times than we’d care to remember. The bit where Baldrick explains the recipe for ‘Rat O Van’ — rat run over by a van in case you’re wondering — was his favourite scene.
British comedies aside, it’s hard to think of anything else that gave dad as much joy as his children. He was incredibly proud of all of us.
His eldest, Sarah, or Sars, is a wonderful school teacher. Dad was blown away by her ability to overcome seemingly unbearable personal heartache — her own cancer diagnosis and the loss of a child. Beautiful Emily. Sars says dad gave her the four words that helped her survive — “this too shall pass”, he told her. We’re relying on that now Jimmy.
My little sister, Felicity, is a lawyer, a very good one, admitted to the New York Bar in the US. Dad loved to joke about an American President or two who couldn’t achieve the same feat. He was blown away by her intellect, but, and you’ll notice a theme here, he was more impressed by the way she took to being a mother. He loved watching his children as parents.
Mick, dad’s only son and youngest. His pride and joy, the one who, as you heard, inherited his love of flying. A pilot. My little brother keeps telling us all that dad shared a private moment with him just before he passed, revealing that he was, in fact, his favourite child. I suspect Mick is lying, but I reckon there’s a small part of the rest of us that wouldn’t be at all that surprised either.
Now to me. It’s fair to say I gave my siblings a real head start in the pride stakes. There was a period of my life that required plenty of patience from dad. He once dumped the entire contents of my bedroom into the Enoggera Army Barracks rubbish bins, because I’d refused to clean up.
He was a man of his word, always follow through, and there was that time when he had to hot foot it home from a military exercise to pull me out of a nightclub because I’d stolen his official work car and gone underage clubbing.
But I hope, in dad’s eyes, that I made up for some of that a little later in life.
We shared a love of the media, a real passion for politics and national security.
We would talk for hours about the goings on here in Australia and the world.
We didn’t always agree but there was no one else’s opinion I respected more.
Now no one up here is pretending for a second that dad was perfect. He still needed his laptop to look up our birthdays, there was that time he took Felicity’s dog for a walk and came home with an entirely different animal — wrong colour, wrong breed — and absolutely none the wiser.
We still can’t figure out how that happened.
There was the time he took us up in his Cessna 6 seater airplane and the passenger door swung open on take off. And, of course, he did on the odd occasion give me relationship advice and those among us who don’t mind a tabloid or two, you’ll be well aware how effective that’s been.
But he was perfect in our eyes, and always will be. We should have had him for much longer and we’ll never make sense of why we don’t, but we won the lotto of life with mum and dad.
And it’s so clichéd but the pain we feel now, the crippling, unbearable grief, as the late Queen Elizabeth said, is “the price you pay for love’’. We shall pay that price every single day for the rest of our lives and I know, without any doubt, that as hard as it will be, it will be worth it, a
billion times over. I genuinely don’t know how we all survive this but we will because dad taught us that we can endure anything.
And as he’d tell you himself … he was seldom wrong!
He taught us by example that all challenges in life should be faced head on, to never compromise on what we believe in, to back ourselves always, to fight and stand up for what’s right and, almost above all, to care deeply for each other and for this country.