VOGUE VOICE
All great love stories are a matter of fate. Danielle Gay reflects on how losing her father led to her finding love.
Istill remember the moment vividly: stepping off the train on a cloudy March afternoon to find my older brother waiting on the platform and knowing in my heart that something was very wrong. Dad had been unwell and visiting doctors to get to the bottom of an unabating cough. He was a stubborn man so, naturally, he spent a year wheezing before it worsened to the point where not even he could ignore it. I felt like I was moving through quicksand when my brother explained: Dad had metastatic cancer. The next day, my father, who was my best friend, was admitted to hospital. I didn’t know it then, but he would never leave.
As things progressed, our lives became a blur of hospital visits. I think Dad knew he was going to die much sooner than he let on. It was the doctors who told us the cancer was terminal, when they realised Dad had conveniently forgotten to pass on the message.
Among the things my father wanted to do before he died was reconnect with his best friend, a man named Francis, whom he had met in 1972, when they were both 20 years old. They moved from Lismore, where they’d met, to Sydney, sharing a unit in Coogee they nicknamed “The Dungeon” because, by all reports, it was tiny and on the ground level. But they loved it, mostly because it afforded them the opportunity to go surfing every morning. I’ve since learned the only reason they moved out, in their late 20s, was due to another matter of fate, when a woman moved into the apartment above and stole Francis’s surfing buddy away. That woman was my mother.
I could tell Francis had once meant a lot to my father, because his face lit up when he mentioned him. I tried the phone numbers Dad still had from just before they’d lost touch, but Francis had either moved or changed his phone number. “Why don’t you try looking his son up on Facebook?” Dad asked. I typed out a polite but short message, asking a stranger named Max if he happened to have a father named Francis. The response came a day later. “You’ve done well to pick the right Max Quinn,” it read. “My father is indeed Francis Quinn and he’s mentioned Les before and that they’d lost contact. Unfortunately, Dad’s computer literacy doesn’t extend to Facebook. If you’d like to, send me through a phone number and I’ll get him to give you a call!”
I thought Max, who I had actually already met when I was three years old, was funny and eminently likeable, and his profile picture was cute, but mostly I was grateful that he swiftly helped bring Francis and my dad together one last time. My dad died on May 18, 2009, less than two months after I was first told he had cancer.
For a while after that, Max and I kept in contact. When he moved to Sydney from Ballina we had long lunches in the city, chatting about nothing in particular, my cheeks burning from laughter. Back then, we were dating other people but I considered him a close friend. He would ask about how I was dealing with the death of my father and pass on his own dad’s best wishes. As time marched on, Max moved to Melbourne, and it felt natural when we slowly drifted apart. But each Christmas and on the anniversary of my father’s death, I would think of him.
Years later, I was scrolling through Facebook when I saw a post from Max, looking for a flatmate for a planned move back to Sydney. I messaged him immediately. He’d been back in Sydney for mere days when we scheduled in a drink. Walking to the bar with a friend, I explained the way we met and she turned to me and said: “You know this is a date, right?” I had butterflies. Max later shared that one of his colleagues had said the same thing. If there was ever any doubt that it was a date, it all faded away when Max leaned across and kissed me. Later that week, he called his father, telling him how well we were getting along. It ached – I desperately wished my father was around to call too. Max shared that Francis’s simple response was: “Well, of course you’d get along well, she’s Les’s daughter.”
Like all good love stories, we met by fate. After all, it’s not lost on me that we would never have met again, as adults, had my father not died. My dad gave me the ultimate gift, of a loving, kind and generous partner who makes me want to be the very best version of myself. It’s also humbling to think, should I be lucky enough to be Max’s wife one day, that I will be marrying someone who knew my father, and someone Dad would have been thrilled to hand me over to.
And, the joy is twofold, because it’s so comforting to hear new stories about my dad, thanks to Francis. Part of grief is learning the finite nature of death. There won’t be any more memories created with my dad. But meeting Max and his family has, in a way, changed that. Among my favourite stories Francis has already recalled was the time Dad and he pretended they were sound technicians for their roommate’s band, just to “go to some of their gigs and look important”. Another is the one where Francis was tasked with waking my dad up for surfing every morning, which my dad did not take kindly to. “About the only time we ever had cross words,” he recalls. My dad was stubborn, even then, it seems. Francis describes his time with my father as a special time in his life and I know Dad would say the same thing. Certainly, I think of them at 20, not knowing they would go on to have children who would not only foster the same bond they had but also fall in love.
When my father died, I knew it was the end of the story of my very first love. I just didn’t know it would be the beginning of another.
It’s so comforting to hear new stories about my dad