I pretended my father would be OK. I discovered in his memoir that he lied to me too

October 4, 2026 — 10:00am

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Time creates chasms in memory. Past lives become increasingly opaque. Recently, my son took me for yum cha and gave me a present. These moments will become placeholders of memory. He is named after my father, Anastasios. Not for tradition, not for religion, but for memory.

It has been 33 years since my father died of liver cancer.

Anastasios was 62 when he died, two years younger than I am now. I was 31 and had just moved to Melbourne from Adelaide. I had vowed never to live in Adelaide longer than I had to. My old man understood.

If I could not live in Athens, or Vienna, two cities I had lived in the 1980s, then it would have to be Melbourne.

“You need to expand son, and you can’t do that here,” he would say. My mother never wanted me to leave Adelaide.

Obsessed by my fledgling career in the arts, I tried to not think of his cancer.

In his memoir, which I have tried to read since, but can only scan........

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