Tag: father

Arrangements, part dos

Anyone who’s experienced the death of someone close to them will know that there is often a lot to do.  No exceptions here, plus the added pressure of limited time.  However, I’m not entirely unhappy about the time thing… makes me get things done.

Cementaria Parque de Arica

Center stage, as ever!

So, following the funeral I went yesterday to the cemetary to finish off the paper work.  The tomb is owned in perpetuity by me, although a typical arrangement, that may seem strange in Europe, is to simply rent a tomb for a number of years.  Once that time is up the coffin is disinterred and transferred to a shared grave.  I also had to sort out maintenance again, in perpetuity.  It’s not a lot each year, but with no easy way of paying fifteen pounds to an account in Chile every now and then I had no option.

I actually saw this happening on my second visit.  You could see a clearly subdued couple watching as the coffin was lifted from a tomb, cleaned up, sealed in plastic, then loaded onto a hearse.  It was a sad sight.

And it’s all made slightly bizarre by the music that’s piped into the cemetary.  If you have a funeral it does seem to be suitably sombre, but at all other times they appear to often play cheerful music for the workers to enjoy.

Piping out the tunes

It’s tricky feeling sombre and respectful when you can hear an Abba song.

Still, at father’s tomb it wasn’t so audible.

I took some photos, walked around, paid my respects, and headed back to town for a meeting with the reverend David Hucker who carried out the bilingual service.  He’s clearly a nice man, and initially refused my attempt to pay for the service.  It had to be turned into a donation to his church before he’d accept.  Given the service included a singer, I was amazed.  The kindness of people here doesn’t cease to amaze me.  We chatted about why he and his wife came here, my own background and so on.  All very pleasant.

Headstones

I felt like I’d taken enough of Joaquin’s time so I decided I’d make the effort to arrange the headstone entirely on my own.  With limited Spanish and nothing more than a vague idea of where a stonemason may be, I set off.

Now, this is where you have to admire the Chilean desire for efficiency.  The hospital is at one end of a road approximately 1km long.  At the other, lies the municipal cemetary (not the one Chris is in).  Along this road are numerous funeral directors and various parked hearses, ranging from custom made examples to tired looking old American station wagons.  Given this is one of the more important routes to the hospital, I can’t help wonder if it helps reassure incoming patients.  Still, it’s efficient.

After some aimless wandering I spotted a suitable stone mason, went inside, and did my best.  On Monday morning I’m either getting exactly what I wanted, or a very rough approximation with some crazy typeface.  Let’s see.  Again, Chilean flexibility and a can-do attitude helped.  I explained I wasn’t likely to be around for much longer and that I couldn’t wait the usual week.  He made it happen.

The House

It was very dark when I took this picture of the house Chris lived in.

The next job of the day was to visit the house where my father lived.  He’d rented a room here for over ten years.

I had a real shock when the first item brought in was his suitcase.  It’s the only recognisable item I saw in his belongings – the same cream coloured Samsonite suitcase he’d used throughout much of the eighties.  It was a touch battered, but it even still carried a sticker for a hotel in Sluis in the Netherlands (a small, sleepy town once notorious for having the highest density of sex shops in the world) at which I remember him buying me waffles with cream and strawberries each time we visited on his tours.

From there on in it went a little downhill.  There was no wallet, no photo album, no sign of his early past in South America.  Apart from a couple of postcards from his days in Belgium(!) and his passports going back to the mid-eighties there was nothing.  None of my letters to him were there, nor any photos of me or any of his children.  I still have to visit another place where he apparently kept some stuff, but mostly I believe they were just things he sold on the market where had a small spot.

The old suitcase

So what did I find out about him?

Looking at his passports he travelled an awful lot up until around 2006 when he broke his hip-bone in a fall during a tussle of some sort.  He’d been trading in clothes and, for a while, also appeared to be running some sort of homeopathy service.  He was buying significant quantities of remedies from a german supplier in South America whose exact location I’ll be working out shortly.  He had three books in his belongings, two of which were on homeopathy, with the other being an encyclopaedia.

The rest was mostly junk.  Old lottery tickets, some snacks he sold, a collection of out of date milk cartons, old clothes (though mostly in good condition – looks like he still preferred to be smart!) and a lot of random notes.  No notes, however, spoke of feelings, interestingly.  There was no journal, no address book even.  Just accounts of his work, routes he was taking and so on.

To a twelve year old, this hotel did the best waffles in the world. Ever.

There weren’t any signs of written correspondence with friends anywhere.  I did, however, find a printout with what would appear to have been an e-mail address.  So I now know that at least sometimes he went online.  Maybe he did find me after all but opted to keep quiet?  Who knows.

The house itself was relatively clean, with the downstairs occupied by the landlady and her son, and upstairs by various lodgers.  But my father didn’t really spend much time there – as had been the case when I knew him, he preferred to be out at bars or selling at the market, using his modest room as merely a place to sleep at night and to store a few things.

And that’s really it, so far.  There’s little more evidence.

The Wake

After this it was off to the bars where my father liked to hang out.  He had a few acquaintances and friends there.  People he would drink and play billiards with whilst arguing about sports, politics and any other subject that caught his attention.  It’s fair to say he hadn’t changed much, in many ways.

Myself, Rafael, and a guy whose name is evading me right now. I’m drinking pancho.

So we’d agreed to meet up at the pool hall and have a few drinks and a game of billiards (or pool or whatever it’s called) in his honour.

It was fascinating to sit in the places my father sat, and play the tables he’d have played at.  I didn’t get somber.  In fact it reminded me that his life, whilst poor, wasn’t terrible.  He had friends, and he had things to enjoy.  That’s a big part of what we all need.  So we drank a little, and I learned the favoured drinks of his friends – one called pancho, which is basically beer and Fanta mixed together, and another called hota which is a mix of wine and, believe it or not, Coca-Cola.  Yes, I was surprised by that one too!

Later, as I tried to encourage one particular drunk friend of my father’s to NOT play with my camera, Joaquin told me he’d a call for his mariachi band to play a serenade.  “Would you like to come,” he asked.

How could I refuse?

The bar and stools where he often sat

About two hours later I concluded that Chilenos are, essentially, completely mental.  But in a nice way :o)  They arrive, in their slightly too small costumes, from different directions at the specified address.  And they must keep quiet outside and not be discovered.  Because nobody expects the mariachi.

At the allotted moment they all pile into the house and the singing starts.  The lady whose 50th birthday it was seemed bemused at first, but appeared to enjoy.  Her husband, however, was a strong, surly type who looked like someone who made a living from ripping lorry tyres from their rims with his bare hands.

Still, he didn’t kill any of us so I gues it was OK for him.

And then it was off for a burger.  I was granted my wish of a vegetarian sandwich, which turned out to be a chip sandwich with salad and avocado in it that tasted suspiciously meaty (cooked on the same griddle, no doubt)… but I had to chuckle at many of them ordering nothing more exciting than a cup of tea with their meal.  Which was, of course, served in china, with a saucer.  Don’t see that much in English burger bars at 2am in the morning…

A burger and a nice cup of tea at the end of a night out.

It’s now Saturday here and I’ll admit to a slightly lazy day.  I got up late, wandered around town, had yet another terrible breakfast (they’re better in Peru, I have to say) and generally felt slightly subdued.  The day before had been quite happy, really, and now it was simply about going back to normal.  I have no tasks left until Monday, and attempts to find options such as teaching people how to create websites have failed to elicit much interest.

So I’ll go through the small bag of items I took from my father’s place, take some notes, and generally meander today.  Don’t expect an exciting post tomorrow!  I also have to decide what to do next.  I still have two weeks to use up, but no clear leads in other countries.  I suspect once I’m finished here it might just be time for a bit of a holiday.  I just need to decide – relaxed, or exploratory?  Any thoughts?

The Funeral

And so it came.  In a way it’s weird… I always felt there were only two likely things to happen.

First, I would find my father (or he would find me) and a period of reconciliation may take place.  Closeness, perhaps never, but reconciliation would be fine.

Second, I would never find him, and that would be that.  Finito.

I’d actually come to the conclusion a few years ago that maybe he’d died some time ago.  In some ways it was an easier conclusion… it stopped me feeling guilty for not continuing a search or trying harder.

I don’t think I was ever ready for this.  And this morning I woke up very early at around 5am.  Partly because I went to bed very early, but also because my mind was spinning.  I decided to put some music on.  And this piece came up:

And I took a moment to try and remember what was really good about my father.  I’ve told the story that shows the negative in him.  The curious thing is that our negative moments in life tend to be far fewer in occassion than our positives, yet they often define us.

So I remembered:

  • Football in the garden when I was very young.
  • Him teaching me pinball – and his pride when I started to beat him, and most people, from the age of about five.  I still love pinball and if I ever have the space, I’ll have one!
  • Going to watch Liverpool play at Anfield on several occassions.
  • Learning about different cultures through him, that there was more to the world than the area(s) I was growing up in.
  • When I was 16 I met a girl in Oostende and, late in the evening, him quietly handing me enough money to take her clubbing.  He then made his excuses and dragged away others to give us space.  He continued in this vein all week.  It was just a holiday romance, but hey…

There was more… but those are what sprung to mind.  And I had my first ‘moment’ there in bed at about 6am this morning.

The next came during the funeral.  But first, a little about Chilean funerals…

Culture Shift

Chile doesn’t feel wildly different to Spain, in so many ways.  The climate, the landscape even… at least, when I compare it to Alicante where my family lives.  Culturally it’s similar enough that you expect things to be reasonably similar.  And I suppose they are.  But that’s still quite different to Britain.

First things first, you arrive at the hospital with all your paperwork a little before the funeral directors come to collect the body.  In our case we then had an hour or so of waiting before heading to the cemetary.  I’ve already mentioned that instead of burial plots, niches are used.

And in our case, as there were only two of us at the undertakers we could ride in the hearse, up front.  I was disappointed, in a way, as the hearse was simply a silver Ford Taurus Estate.  With BMW hubcaps.  As a car geek I was disappointed!  But then in the UK we use Fords for hearses as well, so I can’t complain… but I’d still prefer to head off in a Daimler, if anyone’s listening….

In the back was the coffin, wrapped in the skin of Bungle.

I realised that if we had an accident (not entirely unlikely) the coffin was unrestrained.  It would be… messy, to say the least.  Still, we made it to the cemetary where I met the kindly David Hucker from the Anglican Church, his wife, a singer he’d brought along, my father’s landlady, and several of his friends.

Given that funerals tend to be arranged very quickly here, and that he had no family at all here, it was a good turnout.

We then slowly walked behind the car to the tomb, where two rows of plastic garden chairs were laid out.  The Bungle-Coffin was then placed on a support, and the car left.  Nearby a bell tolled.

Rev. Hucker gave a simple ceremony in both English and Spanish with accompaniment and song from the delightful guitarist.  And then the moment I was completely unprepared for.  Everyone who knew my father stood up to say a few words of remembrance.  When it came to my turn, I fell apart.  I didn’t even start talking, just sobbed.

It’s so unlike me.  A few tears, sure.  But sobbing?  Proper, wobbly belly, heaving chest sobbing?  Nope, not since I was a little kid.

Every time I remembered the good parts of my father, I went again.  More than in the morning which was a single burst of tears.

After a few minutes and a few tissues I managed to compose myself to string together a barely articulate sentence.  It would have to do, or I’d just be off again.  I patted the Bungle-Coffin, sat down, and the ceremony was then brought to a close.

Of course, the English bits didn’t make sense, entirely, in the context, but they were familiar, which helped, I think.

Then the next new part – the coffin was then pushed into the tomb, and we got to watch the workers carefully seal it up.  The flowers were then placed in front of the stone, and we took turns to quietly pay our last respects.

My thoughts have also drifted to my brother and half-sister back in Europe.  The five grandchildren my father never even knew about, and the joy he missed out on with all of them.

One day I’ll explain this whole story to my new born son (and any others) and maybe I’ll be back in Arica once more.

And when we come back, I’ll give Joaquin Alvarez, the British Honorary Consul, a call.  He has been amazing, taking a lot of time and trouble to help me with arrangements.  He came to the funeral with us as a friend of my father’s, and has touched me with his kindness and generosity of spirit.  A true giant amongst men.

Arica – Day 1 – Arrangements

Phew… so what a day.  It started off with a cold shower and a blandly unsatisfying breakfast of a cheese sandwich, juice and tea.  But whilst eating a man came up to me and introduced himself as Joaquin Alvarez… the Honorary British Consul in Arica!  It was an unexpected surprise… I thought I was meeting him later in the day.

Sadly it was just a few minutes as he teaches English in the mornings.  But one thing I have to remark upon is that he immediately expressed astonishment at how similar I looked, sounded and behaved like my father.  He had been a friend of my father’s for years, not knowing of any family, and to see a similar, younger version standing in front of him.  It was a shock to him.

Later, we met properly, and we talked.  I’d brought him some union jacks and tea as a thank you for his help so far.  I didn’t expect the help he was about to give.

First the formalities… he showed me the paperwork he had, and my father’s passport.  This was the moment when I’d see what my father looked like recently.  In the picture was a tired man looking older than his 60 years.  But it was definitely him.  I will take a picture and add it to this post later.

Joaquin then took me to the hospital to discuss the matter of the hospital fees.  My father had been in the intensive care unit, and these had added up.  The positions were argued as so:

From the perspective of the hospital, a fee would be necessary in order to secure my father’s body and to help pay their costs.

From the perspective of the consul, many Bolivians and other illegal immigrants die in the hospital and there is never any money to pay for their care.

From the perspective of the social worker, if I was rich enough, and cared enough, to travel halfway round the world then I could surely afford to pay the fees.

The discussion went on.  As you may have seen in my earlier post, I had a particular position I planned on setting out.  In the end, we came to an agreement… I would pay half, and there would be an unofficial agreement that should I have more money in the future I could make a donation to the hospital.

This seemed to satisfy everyone enough to make progress.

The next stage was finding an undertaker, and to choose the coffin.  Now that was odd.  I discovered a few cultural things:

  1. Hearses here are white, and often just large American estate cars.
  2. In the UK a basic coffin is a pine wood thing in what we consider to be a classic coffin shape.  In Chile it’s the same shape as typical US coffins… but covered in fake fur.  I’m still trying to work out how that’s cheaper than a layer of varnish, but it is.
  3. There isn’t necessarily a church service… it’s just straight from hospital to cemetary.
  4. Most funerals tend to take place within 24hrs of death.  Over a month is extremely unusual.
  5. Cremation is rare and therefore a very expensive option.

Once a coffin of suitable size for a six footer (people here are short) had been found we were off to the cemetary. I had to settle for a sort of beige fur, incidentally, so my father looks like he’s being interred in a poorly cut Bungle costume.

Chilean cemetery by rob-sinclair, flickr, cc-sa

And the cemetary was a real eye-opener.  You can’t bury people when your town is built on rock.  So instead, it’s simpler to build what look a little like mini concrete apartment blocks into which the coffins are inserted.  See the picture above right.  The cemetary is also surprisingly brightly coloured.  In due course I will take pictures… it’s a fascinating difference in the way death is treated here.

And you know what amazed me most today? The effort put in by Joaquin, the consul.  He spent six hours with me, going backwards and forwards between the hospital, banks and funeral parlours.  He made a string of phone calls, and helped me way beyond the call of duty.  Truly, a great man.  I’m lucky, really.

Arica – Day 1

For no obvious reason I’ve woken up really early today.  Maybe it’s something to do with the herd of elephants that evidently checked in around 1am.  Or the, ahem, charmingly rustic plumbing that means the noise levels in here pick up markedly as the hotel awakes.

But it’s not a bad hotel, the Hotel Amaru, and cheap for Chile at $25 a night. So I’m not really complaining.

Anyway, today is the day when I get to start the process of discovering what my father was up to before his death. What am I going to learn?  I also have to start negotiations with the hospital over the release of his body.  They want approximately £1200 for his treatment.

Maybe I’ll Walk

Here’s the thing… I’ve come to try and do the right thing, and also to fulfil my need to understand my father better.  It’s largely an emotional response.  But I have no desire to take responsibility for him either.  He failed to act responsibly around his children, after all.  And this where he and I differ.  I have a beautiful 3 month old baby.  I would much prefer the money I’ve got to be spent on him than on a dead person.  The practical, business minded side of me understands clearly the difference in return related to where the money goes…and I like to maximise my returns.  I need to be prepared to be play, in the wonderful words of Paul Ockenden, Dead Dad Poker.

So I will make an offer to the hospital of a donation.  It will then be up to them as to whether or not they accept my terms.  If they won’t, I’ve decided that my best option is to be prepared to walk away.  They’ll even save me more money as I won’t be faced with the cost of a funeral – he will receive a pauper’s funeral paid for by the state.

I won’t feel good about this. Chile is a poorer country than ours and would rather not have to pay for the care of illegal immigrants.  But I don’t make masses of money, in spite of what some people think, and the cost of this trip along with the funeral are not insignificant for me.

So, let’s see what happens. This morning I will meet with the wonderful British Honorary Consulate here, Joaquin Alvarez, and start the process and the learning.

Coincidences and Denial

A few things I’ve learned:

  1. The consulate was an acquaintance of my father’s and they drank at the same bar.
  2. My father denied having any family but told people he had a daughter who was killed at 13 in a road accident. This may simply have been a way for him to avoid a subject painful for him to discuss, or a part truth.
  3. He lived in relative poverty and had not been looking after himself well.
  4. Everybody here believed my father to be Spanish.  It was only when he died that the truth was revealed.
  5. He made some money selling sweets at the market.
  6. He could have found me easily.  I couldn´t know for sure that a search here on Google would find me, but no, my name comes up top, as does his own.  Perhaps he knew of my website and the page I posted about him years ago?  Perhaps, even, he tried contacting me through it and the message got lost in the ether.  Who knows?

So a bit to digest there. Now for me to get up and have my daily battle with South American plumbing. Will I get a hot shower? A cold one? Or a randomly shifting combination of freezing and scalding?

Chris Coveney…the Introduction

I’ve started writing this post in Amsterdam airport…I’m on my way to Arica in Chile where I’ll be (hopefully) burying my father, Chris, who died on the 19th of July. I say hopefully not because this is something I’m looking forward to but because I face a number of legal and monetary issues with the hospital where he died.

So, the backstory….

Chris Coveney in 1986

My father was born in 1944 in Liverpool. He had a childhood disrupted by his father’s death while he and his mother were travelling to join him in post-war Frankfurt.  At the age of 4 (I believe – this needs checking) it seems that this had a somewhat traumatic effect on his life. Whether it would have worked out any differently if his father hadn’t died so young is hard to know.  It seems he never really bonded with his rather quiet and gentle stepfather, John.

John was one of those people that sadly get little praise in life…he didn’t have a rapier wit, good looks or intense charm. His predecessor, it seems, did.  But he did do his best to provide a stable and comfortable environment for my father and grandmother (I later lived with them at different times of my life.)

Yet it seems that my father inherited his father’s flaws (a taste for women, good times and risk taking) without some key strengths (a disciplined and intellectually rigorous upgringing in particular) that would have helped my father excel. He was certainly charming, good looking and intelligent.

Family Life

My father, to the best of my knowledge, had three children… myself first, David, in 1969, Miguel two years later, to his first wife Ruth, and Maria in 1981 to his second wife Ann.

It’s fair to say that neither marriage went well. To paraphrase my mother:

He was a drinker with a vicious temper and a long arm. He couldn’t understand the word no.

There are other things I’ve learned recently which I won’t share…but the picture was of a man who couldn’t take his responsibilities seriously and, when confronted, would lash out at anyone around.

The Consequences

I’m going to skip forward now to 1985… by this point my father had been divorced twice and no longer had custody of any of his children. He’d kept me close for years, but even I tired of his temper, his constantly failing relationships and the occassional humiliation of a beating. It’s a curious thing about being smacked around by your father…the physical pain is nothing. It’s the betrayal of trust that hurts and damages you.  No parent should resort to violence when faced with the annoyances of raising a child. Nor, of course, should a child ever survey a trashed kitchen following violence between their parents. Ever. I could go into the reasons why violence breaks out in domestic settings, but that subject deserves better than I can give right here.

Since 1971 my father had been working his summers as a tour guide in Oostende, Belgium. This suited him fine…a steady stream of giddy girls on holiday, few responsibilities, and plenty of nights out left him, it seems, relatively contented.

South America

By this point my father, always a keen lover of all things Spanish, had started to spend his winters in South America where he could travel around enjoying himself whilst maximising the money he earned in his Belgian summers.

This was actually a fairly calm period… I lived with my grandmother and rarely saw him. Generally I did enjoy his company, but there was always a nervousness over when he might kick off but, in general, he seemed to have mellowed.

Unfortunately, in 1987, everything changed again. I was living with my grandmother and had done reasonably well in my A levels. I’d gained a job at ICI on a trainee developer program. For me, at least the future looked good. However, like all good things in my life there always seemed to be trouble waiting for me.

Loss

Just a couple of weeks into my new job, my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her decline hadn’t been pleasant to experience and before she was diagnosed she’d been struggling with shoulder pain that left her crying until the doctor could come and give her a shot of painkillers. Eventually it became too much for both of us. She was booked into hospital in a few weeks time… but that was too far away. I learned then a painful but valuable lesson.

The doctor could do nothing to have her admitted more quickly. I visited the hospital. No, they could do nothing either…it was a non urgent case of painful arthritis.  Yet it was all too much to bear…I was in tears when a male nurse took me to one side and explained something…

They’re letting you look after her. She’s dependent on you. You want to know how to get her into hospital quickly? Refuse. Just tell the doctor you’ve had too much and you’re moving out.

Basically, I was going to have to play poker with my granny. But I went straight from the hospital to the doctor’s surgery and insisted I saw him. Three hours later, an ambulance arrived.

The next day they discovered the pain was caused by secondary metastasis (I think that’s the correct term, I’m writing this on a plane). She had advanced lung cancer that had spread through her body. She had less than a week left.

There was a dull, hollow ache inside me. I wasn’t close to my mother since I’d not lived with her for 14 years and besides, her and her new family had moved to Spain two years earlier – something that at the time had left me less than impressed.

I had my friends, Linda and Peter especially who were wonderfully understanding. And that weekend, my father’s summer job finished and he was able to arrive.

So he signed over everything. It was down to me to deal with the estate. There wasn’t much there, to be honest, and a lot of debt.

My father had his tickets for South America booked a long time earlier…in this time air travel was still relatively expensive and inflexible. I later learned that airlines usually aren’t so bad in cases of bereavement. I think he could have changed flights.

But he didn’t and just a few days later he was gone.  Two days after that I buried my grandmother.

What’s crazy is that in all this I even managed to redecorate the lounge in time for the funeral, thanks to my friend Linda. It was important that in death everyone saw the best in my grandmother…

Losing Trust in Everyone

Soon after the vultures were circling…I couldn’t take over the mortgage or I’d have to pay off all debts, and I couldn’t get a new mortgage at such a young age and such little credit history…especially on a shared ownership house like this.

You see, what happens with a debt secured on property is that you hand over all rights to the lender. If you fail to keep up repayments the lender can take possession.  The lender will then sell it.  If a profit happens to be made then that’s great for the lender. They keep the money.

In fact, some even have a policy of quick repossessions during a buoyant market.

In retrospect I believe I was badly advised.  But lacking support just trying to hold down a job and simply live right was enough to occupy me.  When I was evicted from the house I lost my faith in society, my parents (sorry Mum…but you later won it back, so that’s ok, trust me) and everyone except my friends.

The council couldn’t help – I was told a single male would be at the bottom of the waiting list for social housing.

I didn’t want my fathers’s help and, by the dubious measure of taking out a loan to pay the deposit on a tiny studio flat, I had a place to live.  While this was happening my father was made redundant from his summer job and announced he was going to stay in South America.

Having discovered financial wizardry I even managed to buy myself a niceish car I couldn’t afford on credit.  Life had been hard, but now, I felt, it was improving.

Two months later I received a letter from my father asking for help – he said he’d been robbed of all his money and needed the money I owed him (I think he believed there was money in his mother’s estate) and could I send £1500 as soon as possible.

I had about £30 in the bank.

The next six months were hell as I sent over dribs and drabs in response to his increasingly strident letters, but I remember one triumphant moment. I’d been caught at work calling the Chilean embassy. I was in trouble until the reasons were explained to a senior manager.  He put me in touch with the right people and before I knew it the Foreign Office offered a loan to help repatriate my father.

I’d done it.  He was going to be ok.  I’d sent as much as possible to him, borrowing money, trying to sell what I could legitimately sell… but it amounted to no more than around £600 over the months.

I went out and bought a £15 phone card to give the good news.

Son… I thought you had a good job? I need the money why don’t you have any?!

I told him it was no problem… I could get him home!  I explained the loan.

What use is that? I’d be in the same situation, but in England…it’s much cheaper to live here

He was angry.  And I remembered all those times he’d been angry before.  The card ran out cutting him off mid-sentence.  It was over. I was never going to speak to him again.  I realised he hadn’t been asking me for help…he’d been asking me for money, that’s all.

Since then I stopped responding to his letters. I’d been struggling with the flat so I sold up and moved into a room.  We lost contact.

Update 29-08-2010: I was reading through his letters yesterday and realised that I’d found the solution of a loan for repatriation earlier than I thought I had.  I’d simply brought it up again during that last phone call and he essentially repeated what I’d said.  I also think I’d continued to send him money for a while, but remained mute.

In 2001 I managed to find out that he’d renewed his passport in Quito in 1997, but that was all I had. In 2006 I was invited to a wedding in Lima, Peru, and took that as an opportunity to try and find him.  I got close…searching the town of Arica in the far north of Chile.  But if he saw the notices he didn’t respond. If he’d even searched Google he’d have found me for years and years.  I even put a page up about him which was good enough for my estranged sister to find me with this year.  In the end I reached the conclusion that he no longer wanted to find me.

And then the knock on the door in the early morning. I don’t know why the police do it that way.  The officer was perfect…knew exactly how to break the news. Quickly, succintly, followed by the detail. He’d died on the 19th of July in a hospital in Arica, Chile.

I’m going to wrap this up now…it’s an awfully long piece to type entirely by phone and my fingers are aching. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it up on arrival to Lima.  More soon… my plan is to document this trip, my feelings and my need to find reconciliation wherever possible.  Sharing helps.

Lima, again.

A smidge under five years ago I created my first blog post as I started preparations for travel to South America.  Today I’m preparing to travel to more or less the same destinations…but for sadder reasons.

Two weeks ago my father died. A week ago a police officer knocked on my door to tell me the news that the man I hadn’t seen in twenty three years died in Arica, Chile.

So that’s that… I will travel to South America in a few weeks in order to carry out a funeral and try and piece together my father’s life story.  Tonight I booked the flights.

More soon….

Christopher Coveney

Chris Coveney, 2006I’m trying to trace a chap called Christopher Coveney, also known as Chris Coveney, Cristobal Coveney, C.T.T.Coveney and in full, Christopher Tregay Trott Coveney.

I’ve put this page up in the knowledge that if anyone’s searching for his name on Google, MSN or Yahoo, there’s a high chance this page will come up top of the list. Chris is my father but I haven’t seen him since 1987, following the death of his mother and my grandmother. The last recorded sighting that I have was in the British Embassy in Quito, in 1997, when he renewed his passport. I know he spent time in Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Edit 12th May 2009: It’s worth noting that given my father’s background in the travel industry that he may have sought work giving guided trips to English or Dutch/Flemish speaking tourists.  If you were ever on holiday in South America and the face looks familiar then do let me know.

The picture on this page is of my father in 1986 and is the most recent photograph I have. Hopefully it can help.

If you have any knowledge of Chris’s whereabouts, please contact me via the Contact page on this site (shown above) with any information you have at all.

Dad, if you visit this site, then please get in touch. I’m about the easiest person in the world to find and contact on the internet if you know my name so hopefully you use the internet and at least you know what I’m up to and that I’m in good health. If you get in touch there will be no recriminations, blaming or guilt-tripping from me and I hope you’ll do the same.

Many thanks to all who help,

Dave.

David and Christopher Coveney, Liverpool, 1986

Addendum: I sent a letter in late 2006 to every embassy in South America, with a letter to my Dad enclosed with the hope that if he went to renew his passport it would reach him.  The tone was conciliatory and lots of contact details were given.  Nothing heard yet, but we can wait and see. (added 12th May 2009)
Addendum 2: Yes, I do look something of a mess in that bottom picture, don’t I?  Quite a contrast to my father who always managed to dress well, even when he was living out of a suitcase. (also added 12th May 2009)
Addendum 3: Just found out this morning that he died last week on the 19th of July 2010 in Arica, Chile. He fell ill and was taken to hospital where he died in the evening. RIP Dad. The curious thing is that I had a hunch about Arica and when I went looking for him in 2006 I spent the most time there. Looks like none of the notes I left found him. I’ll be going back to Arica soon to arrange matters.