Loss through a father’s eyes

By CASEY NEILL
“I THOUGHT I was going to die. I thought I wouldn’t survive it.”
But Cockatoo resident Bruce Park did survive the shock and grief of losing his son Nathan in a workplace accident eight years ago.
Not only did he survive, today (Tuesday) he officially launched his book The Birthday Card: Snapshots of a Father’s Grief to help others experiencing loss.
“I want it to be of some hope to people at a point of loss,” he said.
“When I sent it to the publisher I thought it might be useful to someone else.
“I sent it off more out of a sense of the right thing to do.”
Mr Park’s first reaction to word that a publisher wanted to produce his collection of short stories as an eBook was “you’re not just being kind to me, are you?”
A hard copy is on the cards if the downloadable version proves popular.
But putting something so personal out into the world has been tough for Mr Park.
“As it’s been getting closer I’ve been quite nervous,” he said.
“I had a bit of a panic about it.”
He’s worried some people won’t understand his thoughts and about how they’ll react to the book’s rawness.
The 53-year-old is a “words person” and started putting pen to paper as an “attempt to sort out some of the thoughts” and come to terms with his loss.
Nathan left behind his wife Rebecca and son Samuel, now 8, when he died in 2004.
“It turned my world upside down,” Mr Park said.
He started to fall apart but he knew he had to pull himself together – for his wife Jenny, daughter Jyselle and son Jerome, for Rebecca and Samuel, and for Nathan.
The turning point came two years after Nathan’s death when Mr Park was cleaning out his study and found the card Nathan had given him for his birthday just a few days before he died. The final time he saw his son alive.
It was a story Mr Park had told Nathan when he was a child, about clocks and taking things “one tick at a time”. He urged his dad to remember the story when times were tough.
“The words he’d written in there were quite profound,” Mr Park said.
From there his own words tumbled out into The Birthday Card. It trawls through his emotions, theological issues, and issues of forgiveness and justice.
One story is about a random encounter with another man who’d lost his son in a workplace accident.
“You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife,” he said.
“When we looked into each other’s eyes we could see each other’s grief.”
Mr Park explores how this man dealt with his loss through isolation.
“Which I don’t think is the right way to go about it,” he said.
But he doesn’t want people to think that he’s “sorted it all out”.
“I am not out of the woods,” he said.
“It’s an authentic book I hope people can relate to for their benefit.
“I’m very much hoping that people will find it of some help.”
The Birthday Card is available as an eBook from today (10 July) through Koorong, Amazon, Apple iBookstore, and Kobo.