it is written, so it is never forgotten.

So it’s been a while, but i have a very valid excuse… a lot has been happening and so my showers are getting way too long that i don’t have time to write when i come out is just time for bed. lots of good is happening, finally after a really really shitty 2nd 1/2 of 2013, way too much death. but now there are births, changes, lenten sacrifices, new environments on the horizons, old friends becoming new flatmates, new ankle injuries, returning to a dance class – lots of good. i want to give it all it’s due but i can’t until i give my dad the respect he is more than due, so he must be written first and then everything will come after.

i found the most beautiful pics as i went through our family albums.daddy made an album all of mom : he took, developed and made the album, only of the love of his life.

so i sit here, with pretty woman on the tv, spliff in hand, red wine on the side table – in my knickers and Ailey tee shirt and i am going to write, write so i don’t ever forget cause i never ever want to. brace yourself! this one may be long, cause i am just gonna go. fred has been on the brain, i mean beyonce sing a tune in her concert last week & thus i coulda fill back up the space that moses parted in the red sea, i spent the last 45 minutes bawling my eyes out and dancing my heart out – daddy & aaron passed by; moms call me the other day and say “i’ve been thinking about you, and you alone in london, so i just want to check in and see how you feeling and dealing.” she and sis have been thinking about him a lot too but they have each other and i here. but you know what, i have my people and they have been brilliant! listening patiently when i randomly say things about him and remember him vividly and talk incessantly. thank you to you good people, you are still my friends and i love you for that!

my dad left me on boxing day 2013, after 32 and change years of us together, i was born on his 30th birthday which makes us immediately special. i didn’t know how special he was until he passed; i knew he was brilliant, intelligent, logical, musical, caring, compassionate, giving and loving, but i didn’t know he was extraordinary. i am ok… i may even be good, but you never know when you are until you really are. but a lot of people have said “you seem really good, considering” and i think, well what that supposed to mean? how am i supposed to be? and am i doing this wrong? but the answer that comes to  me and i share is… i am good, because it was beautiful. i left home after nearly a month, all the time thinking i am not going back to london, but eventually realising that i could not leave my shoes all alone, that would make me a very bad lover ! … i left home with the most beautiful memory of my father, that extraordinary man. i learnt so much about him, i didn’t know until best friend uncle victor spoke at his funeral that in university in Londontown he was on the cricket, football & field hockey teams and probably the hot boy team, cause apparently he was. he was the resident dj for all the uni parties, and he was the brightest – he was supposed to graduate top of his class but his professors admitted he was black and a foreigner so in londontown it couldn’t be given to him, it had to be someone with less melanin and from the queen’s country. how freaking great is that ! not only did i learn, i laughed, cried and was impressed… i shouldn’t be surprised because those are all the things my dad constantly brought to my life.

uncle vic had the very illuminating college memories

not quite sure how we managed to smile, but the memories we were sharing were all good.

125 seats was not enough ! people was all in the back room where we dressed fred the day before (@ least they had plenty aircon)

when we had to plan this ridiculous event, his funeral, i cannot believe my dad had a funeral! steups ! … the bartels women knew we could not put him in a church cause my father who was not religious but spiritual would have risen and come for us in that church, & the heels i planned to wear was not gonna carry me quick enough outta there if he jump out that box! so we held it in the funeral home’s chapel. 125 seats is more than enough, is what we said, very definite that it would be. until that day came and we should have seen it coming because for the week before all 3 separate landlines in our house never stopped ringing, (the 21 st. lucien gardens phone (i’ve had the same home number my entire life!), daddy personal phone that he got when internet was dial up and he still wanted the phone to ring, and the magic jack that moms have for all her liming with the foreign-based) so i must say a big thank you to our cousins and aunts who all flew in and stayed with us and fielded phone calls. on that damn hot morning of Friday January 3rd, 2014, the Diego Martin Main Road had traffic and it was all because of Fred, because guess what! 125 seats was not enough…. not nearly enough, we had people outside in the hot sun and all they could hear was the great tunes we played for him. he didn’t get any hymns cause once again we wasn’t trying to raise the man. daddy was welcomed with Cat Stevens’ ‘morning has broken’, we vibes to Fela Kuti’s ‘colonial mentality’, we cried to Stevie Wonder’s ‘overjoyed’ and we said goodbye to Shadow’s ‘music’. very fitting for a musical man.

Music, that is what does it to me… music is what brings the moments that i have, i bawled when Stevie Wonder performed with Pharell, Niall Rogers and Daft Punk  @ the 2014 Grammys. there are certain musicians i can’t listen to still; there are words, melodies and musical arrangements that make my soul tear a lil. but i love every moment of it because my daddy is hear with me always and forever, never leaving me.

i digress, sorry ! … the people that turned up and stood in the blazing hot ‘only 10 degrees from the equator caribbean’ sun at 9 in the morning, Thank you! i cannot believe you were all there and that he genuinely did touch you all, and if he didn’t touch you directly because you came for one of the bartels women : he still did because he was so much a part of my mother, my sister and myself that i am sure that you felt you knew him as well. we never expected this to be so difficult but i guess when 5 days before christmas time you find out he has stage 4 cancer, and he goes to the hospital for radiation on day 3, which turns into a tracheotomy for a stent to allow breathing and a gastrostomy tube for feeding, which turns into never having the ops because he was too weak, which turns into daddy passing at 5:05am on boxing day, day 6; i woke up in london at the exact time my dad went to sleep and i will never forget that moment, i didn’t know it when i woke but he came and kissed me goodbye.

the people that spoke of him, the beauty that emanates from their face when they talk of my father. his nurse of 30-something years stated in no uncertain terms that she will never work for another because there is no way that anyone could treat her better than he.

the one most repeated and genuinely said thing by all was – my father treated everyone equally and never made you feel like you were anything less than a good person and he was compassionate to the world. fred had a quiet intellect that he never made you feel less even though you knew that he was way smarter than you.

i could go on and on and on about all the beautiful things i learned. but i know without a doubt that i am one very lucky girl to have had Frederick Lawrence Kojo Bartels as my father. he raised me so well, i am so much like him and i see it more and more everyday when people bring things to my attention. my logical thinking and practical planning for one… Nicholai and Tins watched me cut my fruit and bag them in single serving size for my smoothies to freeze for 3 hours straight, soon after i got the call. simply because i thought this fruit can’t go to waste and i have to do it now before i fly. i gave Nicholai all my fruit that i didn’t cut & veggies i had just bought for the christmas week and wrote a list for my packing. all because i knew i needed to make my life easier and simpler by being logical and think it through … i smile when i think of that because that is exactly what my dad, and my mom for that matter would do. so i wouldn’t have to worry about it when my brain went walk about.

good god ! i miss him and i always think how can i miss someone i hadn’t physically seen in over 18 months? how does someone who didn’t necessarily affect your daily life for so long, be so present now? how do you actually deal with the fact that he will no longer share his quiet intellect? nothing will ever be the same and i hurt for my mother who keeps saying, “i only asked him for one thing. not to leave me alone here” and i know daddy hurts that he did. i hurt for my sister who will forever miss him and have a piece of her never fulfilled. i hurt for them both having spent christmas day at his bedside trying taking 8 hours to drink one glass of water, christmas day will always be a shitty day, never was a major fan and now well i eh want to hear bout it. but i do smile that daddy had his first and last taste of sorrel on christmas day. i don’t know if i hurt for myself yet, because i just don’t know yet, i guess i will find out when i’m supposed to.

every night i see the same star on the landing of my outside back staircase and i say good night to my daddy, and i swear he says good night and hugs and kisses me, and says “good night meh lover”. every day i wake up and see his face above my head and that smile he has in our 70th (20th & 50th) birthday picture, i read a little and i swear he reads along aloud to me; books were also his thing. i know that mom and sis probably don’t see it this way, but i am envious that they are able to see him everyday now in his beautiful box amongst his books on his bookshelves.

 i wish i could.

i’ve experienced a lot of death and i am not exaggerating, lots of young death in my 32 soon to be 33 years i have lost 5 of my contemporaries already and to be honest, they don’t haunt me, they visit and say hi but they don’t stay. but this one haunts me and will always haunt me and i know so because suddenly i have been thinking it’s time to have a child never a thought that ever ever was in my head, and i still deny it to this day but if it’s a girl she is going to have a man’s name & if it’s a boy he is going to have an old man name, but either way there will be another Frederick Lawrence Kojo Bartels. i’ve decided if daddy haunts me like this everyday, then he must be saying he’s never leaving me so i think i should save myself from looking like a crazy woman in the road and instead of calling his name to the open air, i could call an actual person. but i am happy because at least what haunts me is beautiful, brilliant, compassionate and most importantly extraordinary.

always 

forever

bless. xoxo.