My Dad’s Funeral
02 Apr 2011 2 Comments
in My Life Without Me, Uncategorized Tags: Belgrade, Gojko Tesanovic
Today is the 3rd anniversary of my Dad’s funeral who died March 30, 2008. This chapter is from my unpublished book “My Life Without Me”
4. Dad’s Funeral
- All these years he really treated you badly, said my good friend attending my dad’s funeral.
And thus I didn’t give him an open coffin funeral. So many years of his mortal fear, rage and fantasized abandonment of life, and here he was, at his life’s end at last. Would that rage kill me, too? When my mother died, he had turned to me to care for him. In his last decline, he had become my child. Two family traumas for the price of one.
When he died, on March 30, 2008, I lost a father, a husband and a son. Oh, nothing incestuous in our relationship: only culturally perverse. But when the whole nation behaves in one way, feels strongly about it , as a tribe, what’s perverse about it? Even I, who felt weird at first, accepted it quickly. We play the games we are taught to play by our parents, peers, enemies, frenemies. And I love games. More
My Birthday
07 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
in My Life Without Me Tags: Belgrade, Yugoslavia Fatherland
My Life Without Me
To My Late Father and Fatherland
To Gojko and Yugoslavia
1. My Mother
Where was I when it all started? In the hospital, some fifty years ago, but not in the delivery ward, where most children get their umbilical cords cut. No, I was in the cancer ward, where my mother worked. She was a cancer ward pediatrician, and that night, the 7th of March, after a long game of cards with her friends, she went to work on her night shift.
You must understand that my late Mom was a historical communist, one of those who risked her life when she was seventeen for ideals of justice and truth. An activist pediatrician she chose to work at the toughest places, with dying children alone in the ward without their own parents. My mother was all they had, and she loved them more than herself. More
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My Life Without Me (My Father)
02 Sep 2010 4 Comments
in My Life Without Me Tags: Gojko Tesanovic
Today my Father would have turned 87. This is the chapter from my new book, My Life Without Me, dedicated to him, Gojko Tesanovic (1923-2008)
3. My Father
Gojko and Jasmina, 2001 - Photo by Stephanie Damoff
- Never make decisions out of fear, he used to tell me.
I didn’t know how else to decide, so I stopped making any decisions.
- Take care of yourself, don’t give a damn what people demand from you if you don’t like it or want it.
He called me Jale when we were alone and intimate: and he talked to me as a man to man. It was a shame I was not one: I could tell from the way he talked to me. On the other hand, my father was pleased with my stubborn character and independent traits. That seemed manly enough to him.
I always hated my never born brother. I could only imagine him: small, tender, a sissy, getting all the privileges I didn’t have just because he was a man. If I loved my brother, perchance, that would have been even worse for me. It was easier this way, to turn into a man when necessary to pick up all the male wisdom my father was willing to share with me. God forbid that my mother heard any of that: the selfish advice, about economic and emotional independence, options to avoid marriage and children, free sex/secret sex, fast cars and an engineer’s technology instead of girlish pets and flowers. More
My Life Without Me
10 Apr 2008 Leave a Comment
in My Life Without Me Tags: matrimony
ovo je pocetak knjige koju zavrsavam ovih dana…ja je zovem laznom autobiografijom…
Where was I when it all started?
In the hospital, some fifty years ago, but not in the delivery ward, where most children get their umbilical cords cut. No, I was in the cancer ward, where my mother worked. She was a cancer ward paediatrician, and that night, the 7th of March, after a long game of cards with her friends, she went to work on her night shift. More
