ERIC HASLER 1951-1999

A memory written in 2012.

A hit and run driver killed my first husband in February 1999.  More than twenty years before that date he had deserted me and his two children and moved on to marry another nice woman, father two more nice children and desert them too.  So I really didn't have much to grieve about.

Except that, almost inexplicably, I miss him.  As each day passes I miss him and sometimes I cry for him.  Really it’s that I cry for me and for the loss of shared memories because now that Eric is dead I am the only one who knows without a doubt that things happened the way they did.

He was there for the birth of my only son Karl and for the birth of my daughter Claire.  I can still see the wonder in his face as he looked at his newborn children and the love in his eyes as he looked at me.  I often use the tiny stainless steel pot that he bought me to complete a wedding gift set, the one he said would be ideal for baby’s veges. The first Christmas that we spent together was the one where I was in danger of losing our son.  My father was ill in hospital on Christmas Day and Eric carried me up the hill to Dad’s ward so that I didn’t have to walk.  I remember the locket he bought me for our 2^nd Christmas together which has engraved on it “from Eric and Karl”.  I remember his despair when my father died and his tenderness as he cradled his babies.  I recall his desperation as he realised that he couldn’t be a husband and father; that he just didn’t know how.

I saw him only once in the last twenty years of his life and I was shocked at his thinness and his obvious alcoholism.  My daughter Claire wanted to see him and we discovered he lived just half an hour away from me. We had nothing in common then just as we had nothing in common on our wedding day.  The day after his death I packed his meagre possessions and put them in the boot of my car for my daughter to sort through.  There was a photo of my children and a hairbrush set that my parents had given him for a 21^st present amongst the rubbish that had been his life.

The day before his only daughter’s wedding, Claire and I scattered his ashes at the back of the Levin cemetery.  He rose up around us like a cloud and my daughter cried while I breathed him into me.  He was still part of me.  Then I went and showered him away and spat him out of my mouth, down the drain at my feet went the dust of him and I prepared myself for our daughter’s wedding.  As usual he wasn’t there for her.

But he is still there for me, in my thoughts, in my mind.  Sometimes I talk to him.  “Our daughter was such a beautiful bride” or “Well Eric you’re a grandfather again” or “Eric our son represented New Zealand, you would have been so proud” or “Eric you bastard, you’ve deserted your family again”.  I’ll never understand how a man can turn his back on his children.

© 2018 Deborah Watson