My dad’s health is declining due to extreme kidney failure. 

Considering I have two fresh and nubile kidneys, I extended to my dad the offer of one of mine - and even volunteered my brother’s - just in case the distance from the US to Australia was a factor or kidney’s need to go from man to man or woman to woman.

Dad politely declined, explaining that as an old bastard with weak lungs, his body can’t handle anaesthesia. Then he said, “If it comes down to having dialysis, I told the doctor and I’m telling you now, I want to be able to just… go.”

I paused, waiting for him to shout ‘psych’ or decide that very moment would be his debut of reciting Wayne’s World quotes and say ‘not!’, but he didn’t. “And listen, I put something in the mail for you. You’ll get it in a week.”

I was thinking it might have been family photos. Once he sent floppy disks from 1994 that were marked with my name and school assignments. (I mean, seriously, when he cleans out junk and thinks I want it, he mails it. Last year in Australia he gave me a bag of used 35mm camera film, just assuming I would want to develop the film and re-live the spectacularly bad hair moments that were part of my teenage rebellion.) Honestly though, I was hoping for a check with a REALLY LARGE amount of money from some top-secret savings account, and Dad was waiting patiently until I matured… or turned thirty. 

No photos, no junk, no check. It was none of those things.

I left the post office the other day and didn’t even make it to the car before I crudely ripped the tape from the package. Peeking in, I simultaneously laughed and cried, shaking my head because he - the man who writes letters in third person - sent the one thing that is worthless to everyone but him and me.

You see, I always wanted to know more about my mother’s family, but asking questions about your dead mother tends to make your grandmother or aunt or cousin sad, and there’s nothing worse than being a kid and merely wanting to know if your dead mum liked beetroot without grown-ups bursting into tears. 

But my dad’s family was different, because there was this red binder  - only ever brought out if my dad was strangely in a good mood - and his beloved binder listed every detail of the family history, from births where the presenting midwife was drunk, to the crudely-detailed death of my great-grandfather who was gored to death by a bull. Anything and everything was listed, and I hope this little comparison shows you how prized the binder was to my dad: he lost my mother’s ashes when we moved in 1982, but by golly, the red binder survived the arduous two-hour trek to western Sydney. Binder equals Big Deal.

The binder wasn’t just family stories and newspaper clippings, though. Tucked in a corner pocket was a giant piece of paper listing the lineage of my paternal family. It was my personal Book of Kells, Declaration of Independence, and Magna Carta: it was history and an explanation to a group where I belonged, and as a motherless child, I often didn’t have that sense of security.

But not with this aged piece of yellow, brittle parchment.  Whenever my dad allowed me, I would ever-so-carefully unfold the paper, lay on the floor and … just stare. 

And now he’s given it to me.