To truly honor a life, one cannot look only at the light. A portrait built entirely of joyful afternoons, camping trips, and the cheerful whistle of miniature steam trains leaves out the heavy, unseen machinery that hummed beneath the surface. To know my father fully—and to love him as an adult looking across the span of thirty years—I have to look directly at his battles.
Dad was, by nature and by heritage, a profoundly private and emotionally reserved man.
He was raised by parents who were stoic and undemonstrative to an extreme. Love, praise, and verbal affirmation simply did not exist in their vocabulary, nor was there any physical tenderness. His own father had lived through a childhood of bitter privation—stuffing newspaper into worn-out shoes to survive—and carrying that early trauma forward into adulthood, had developed an obsessive stinginess around money. Even late in life, when he had accumulated substantial wealth through disciplined investing, he insisted on turning off the flat’s geyser, forcing himself and Gran to wash up in freezing water to spare a few pennies on electricity.
Dad grew up inside that cold, rigid framework. Unlike me, he had no larger-than-life Gramps to show him a different way—no effusive, expressive grandfather to model uninhibited warmth or to tell him he was doing well.
As a consequence, Dad kept his emotional world locked behind heavy, reinforced doors. He never spoke of his interior struggles. He did not say the words "I love you," nor did he readily initiate touch. He was gripped by a quiet social anxiety that made gatherings of any scale an ordeal. Even at the Goodwood club braais in Melkbosstrand, surrounded by fellow railway enthusiasts whose company he valued, Dad would linger on the edge of the circle—silent, withdrawn, and visibly uncomfortable. As a boy, looking across at him against the laughter of the crowd, I remember feeling a sharp, aching pang of sympathy for how uneasy he seemed in his own skin.
That disposition made his professional life an exhausting, daily uphill climb. Dad was a remarkably skilled dentist—his patients benefited from meticulous, lasting craftsmanship that mirrored his work on the lathes—but he despised the profession with every fiber of his being. Dentistry demands small talk, chairside cheerfulness, and effortless banter. For an introvert trapped in a high-stress, intimate clinical space, every appointment was a slow drain on his nervous system. His true heart had always belonged to engineering, but with a young family to support and finances tight throughout my childhood, he bore the yoke with grim, quiet duty. In his later years, looking down into mouths day after day left him with chronic, gnawing neck pain that deepened his melancholy.
His mind was easily taken captive by worry. He was prone to bouts of melancholy pessimistic about the state of the world and the future of South Africa, and relentlessly self-critical. At Julian’s twenty-first birthday, after giving an eloquent, heartfelt speech, he spent the rest of the evening beating himself up in private, convinced it had fallen short.
Under real physical or psychological strain, that anxiety would spill over into panic and obsessive loops. Mike recalled how Dad once froze in terror when they had to wade neck-deep across an estuary on the Otter Trail. Years later, after our canoe flipped in the Orange River rapids, the panic convinced him he had suffered a stroke, trapping his mind for days in the haunting, repetitive refrain: "I can’t picture your mother’s face."
Yet because of the era he lived in, Dad had no map out of that darkness.
My sister Jo and I inherited that anxious, depressive wiring, but we came of age in a world that offered psychiatric medicine, compassionate therapists, mindfulness, and spiritual practice without shame. For Dad, mental health was an unspoken taboo. He viewed therapy as a confession of ultimate weakness, pointing to an aunt who had seen a psychiatrist for years as a cautionary tale of personal collapse. He had no language for his agony, no toolkit to quiet his racing thoughts, and no permission to ask for help.
The heavy pressures of his life eventually converged into an unbearable storm.
First came the gut-wrenching anxiety of moving his aging parents into frail care, tortured by the fear that the rest of the family would judge his choice of home. Then, after his parents passed away, the inheritance that should have bought his freedom—allowing him to finally step away from the dental drill and dedicate his days to his steam trains—turned into an open wound. His father’s sister, Auntie Louie, launched a lawsuit against the estate, alleging an old injustice in a long-forgotten business venture.
Astronomical legal fees piled up. The terrifying specter of financial ruin hung over him for years. Dad was desperate to settle and find peace, but extended family insisted on fighting the case out in court. It ground him down to the marrow. True to form, he shouldered that immense, crushing burden in near-total silence, shielding Jo and me from the weight of it. We only ever knew the depth of the crisis through Mum.
He endured that legal nightmare with unimaginable stoicism, but the toll on his nervous system was irreversible.
When the case was finally resolved, there was no space to breathe. He was told he required major intestinal surgery. The delay dragged out over endless weeks, during which his anxious mind fixed upon a single, terrifying obsession: that he would wake up disfigured, dependent on a stoma bag. He retreated deeper into a bleak, impenetrable shell.
The surgery came and went, and by every physical measure, the doctors declared it an unqualified success.
Yet the internal engine had run out of steam.
A few days after returning home, on the afternoon of 29 September 1995—one day before his fifty-sixth birthday, when I was just twenty-five years old—Dad walked into his beloved backyard workshop for the final time.
Surrounded by his lathes, his cutting tools, and the locomotives he had spent thousands of hours shaping with his own two hands, he took his life with a single gunshot.
On a scrap of paper left behind, he wrote his final words: "I’m so terribly sorry." Private, polite, and closed to the very end.
The days that followed blur into a haze of shock and disbelief. Jocelyn Rusconi driving to Willow Road to deliver the news to Ally and me while Mum handled the emergency services; walking into the workshop at Midway to sit beside Dad’s body on the concrete, staring at the pool of dark blood beside his head while his face remained eerily intact and calm; taking the rubbish bags down to the driveway gates days later and discovering his private magazines and video, neatly placed there so Mum wouldn't be burdened with finding them among his things. Even in his darkest extremity, his organized, considerate mind had sought to spare the woman he loved.
The funeral offered no real relief. The price of suicide is cruel: it has a way of drowning out the vibrant music of an entire life under a heavy, suffocating pall of sorrow. The service was conducted by a priest who had never known Dad, delivering an impersonal eulogy to a silent church. I spent the morning holding myself rigidly together, determined to be the stoic anchor my mother and sister needed. But as we stepped into the sunlight, I saw Jenny Mallet, my standard two teacher—a woman of immense warmth who had anchored me when I was nine years old. When she wrapped her arms around me, the dam gave way. I clung to her and sobbed uncontrollably in the courtyard.
It took me decades to truly grieve him. In the immediate aftermath, I retreated into motion, pouring myself into long work hours and studying relentlessly for four critical examinations later that year.
Mum harbored a profound, understandable anger toward Dad for many years after his death. But I never felt anger. Having walked through my own dark corridors of depression and anxiety as a teenager, I understood the excruciating, suffocating agony of a mind that has turned entirely against itself. What haunted me instead was the silence: the terrifying realization that Dad had been trapped in that private hell right beside us, and that we had possessed no way of knowing how close he was to the edge.
Later, when I finally sat with a therapist, he asked me to sit down and write a letter to Dad. The exercise felt pointless at first—how do you write to an empty chair?—yet when the pen touched the paper, the tears came in a torrential release. I poured out my greatest, most aching regret: that despite being an expressive, feeling person, I had never once told my father that I loved him. I had never spoken the words of appreciation that his quiet soul had so desperately needed to hear.
That grief is sharpened by everything he missed.
I think of him not being there to walk my sister down the aisle, watching Gramps step into his place instead. I think of the two magnificent grandchildren he never met, Sam and Matt, and the camping trips along the coast that Matt never got to take with his grandfather. I think of the trains he never had the chance to mill, the journeys we never took, the road trips we never made, and the shared passions—photography, cinema, home DIY—that I would give anything to share with him across a table today.
On the 29th of September 2026, the calendar brought me to a strange, sacred threshold: I reached the exact age my father was on the day he died.
Standing on the far side of that milestone has brought on a deep, beautiful reckoning. It has allowed me to weep the tears I couldn't shed at twenty-five, to grieve not just the way he left, but the heavy, unvoiced load he carried for so long.
Yet through all the sorrow, the overriding feeling that remains is not tragedy. It is immense, overflowing gratitude.
For all his inner demons, Dad never once lashed out. He never raised a hand, never lost himself in a rage, and never made his children the dumping ground for his anxiety. He remained, to the core of his being, a gentle, decent, and deeply generous man. Behind the gray clouds that drifted across his mind, those striking green eyes always found their way back to a mischievous twinkle, ready to laugh until he coughed, ready to stoke the boiler of a train that would bring sheer delight to a crowd of children.
He fought a long, quiet, lonely battle with incredible grace, giving us the absolute best of himself while absorbing the worst of the world in silence.
I know the weight you carried now, Dad. I see it all, and I understand. And thirty years on, with my own green eyes clear and full of love, I say the words I couldn't say then:
Thank you. I love you so very, very much.
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