Like Meghan, I have a very complicated father: SARAH VINE,
Fathers can be very complicated. I know this from personal experience.
Mine, known affectionately to my children as ‘Bad Grandpa’, is the kind of character that only exists in Quentin Tarantino movies.
Actually, no: imagine if Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick got drunk with Alfred Hitchcock and then went round to Richard Burton’s place for a nightcap and a game of strip poker. My father is the kind of character they would write.
He’s a nightmare, and that’s an understatement. Always was. He drank, made terrible decisions, had affairs, got into trouble with the wrong kind of people, antagonised all his friends, played mind games with me and my brother, told me I was fat, stupid, ugly, useless, crushed us both, behaved appallingly on every level and at every opportunity.
He was married to a goddess (my mother) and yet he had no idea how to love her, not in the way in which she deserved.
Even so, I love him. I love him when he tells me to f*** off as I help him along the pavement to dinner. I love him as he demands his jumper, then swats me away as he tries to put it on, then asks for my help, then declares he’s too hot, then shouts at the waiter to put on the air conditioning.
I love him when I ask him what he’s been up to and he hisses: ‘Waiting to die.’ I love him when he can’t find my mother and gets in a panic. I love him when he sits sadly, staring into space, lost in his own regrets.
It wasn’t always this way. I used to hate him, of course I did. He caused so much pain, how could I not? For years I didn’t see him. My ex-husband, who is a very patient and famously polite man – even he couldn’t handle him.
I think a lot of the reasons my marriage went wrong were to do with the damage he did to me. I just didn’t know how to be loved, because I had never experienced it. Still don’t, really. Better off alone, that’s his legacy. What was it Philip Larkin said…
Anyway, the reason I mention all this is because the Duchess of Sussex’s father, Thomas Markle, is in a bad way. A really bad way. The 81-year-old, who has been estranged from his daughter since her marriage to Prince Harry in 2018, was rushed to hospital after being taken unexpectedly and gravely ill at home. He underwent around three hours of surgery and was last night facing a second procedure to remove a blood clot.
Mr Markle has been in poor health for years. He suffered two heart attacks on the eve of his daughter’s wedding which prevented him from attending. But there were other factors too, not least a sense that he was a bit of a loose cannon, an unknown quantity.
In the event, King Charles stepped in for him, walking Meghan down the aisle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. As Mr Markle later told The Mail on Sunday, it ‘was the most gracious and kind thing to do. I shall be forever in his debt’.
Since then, he has been kept very much at arm’s length from the duchess’s new family. He has never met his son-in-law or grandchildren Archie, six, or Lilibet, four. In 2022 he suffered a serious stroke which left him unable to speak. He regained some speech after months of therapy but has become increasingly frail in recent years. He lives in the Philippines, a world away from Meghan’s stellar existence in California.
Now he is seriously ill, perhaps for the last time. And all I would say is this: however bad things may have got between them, however stupidly he may have behaved (and he has done some very ill-advised things), however much unresolved conflict or hurt, it is still not too late. However much of a wrench it may be, Meghan should grab the kids and go to see him before it’s too late.
She will never regret it. Finally forgiving my own father for the mess he made has been one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done in my life. Getting over my own toxic relationship with him has allowed me to build a new and far better one, unencumbered by resentment and rancour.
Don’t get me wrong: he remains the man he always was; I can’t change that. But I can change my own attitude and responses to him, which I have done. I now know that when he one day finally shuffles off this mortal coil we will both be at peace with each other. I hope Meghan can find the same with her father – before it’s too late.
