Eleven years ago my Dad slipped silently into death after a long, gasping battle with lung disease. I was 16.

I was in a car with my brother and sister in a mad rush from Bathurst, in country NSW, when the air went out of us too.

On Parramatta Road, just 20 minutes or so from the room at St Vincent’s Private where he had stayed on and off for the four years since his lung transplant, we stopped for ice cream. We never said a word, but we knew the hurry was over.

I think about him more often than I would like to admit, but not in a bad and sad way.

In that way where you might be watching a sunset, catching a football game or watching some spectacle on the street and your excitement slowly draws out and is filled by a wet ache for someone who is not there to share the moment with you.

Mark Dapin’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine about spending the New Year in 1987 with the people who loved his father, after he died from a bad heart, made me think about my New Year and my own Father’s passing.

New Year’s Eve 2010 was spent at a lavish but relaxed affair on a small resort island called Iririki off Port Vila in Vanuatu, just me and Mum.

The holiday was a Christmas gift from me to Mum, but was more a thank you for always being there when I needed her.

The trip was amazing, 7 days of relaxation and no blues, which is hard to do when you have been out of home as long as I have and when you have a parent who has the mothering instincts of a lioness.

And New Year’s Eve was the crescendo of a pitch-perfect holiday.

But as the fireworks lit the sky in spit clouds of hot pink, blues and greens at 9:40pm* the awe drained out of me in short time and was replaced by that familiar wet ache: “I wish Dad was here, he would have liked this.”

When you lose someone you love, well at least for me, each burst of light life throws up is followed quietly by a dull sense that something, or someone, is missing.

My Dad and I were close. I was a quiet kid, mousy but popular, happy in my own company and not needing anything from anyone. Dad drew me out.

I would follow him around the back yard through the warm months, safe in his long shadow from the biting sun as we tended to the rows of vegetables bursting from the ground in our backyard.

And the tomatoes were our most prized plants.

Watching them closely to see what they needed, we watered, and fertilised them with lime and chook poo, fixing them to grafts so that they could grow straight and tall. When the sun grew too harsh, we covered them with tight black mesh so that the light could still get in, but would not be strong enough to burn them. We shielded them in cosy brown boxes when a cold snap came and threatened to bring them down. This is what we poured ourselves into most weekends. This is the only place I wanted to be as a child, in the garden with my Dad.

And without getting sentimental or sounding like someone who has healing crystals and does all manner of amazing things with chick peas and lentils, I have a very strong feeling that Dad is still tending to his garden somewhere not far from here, occasionally looking down into his long shadow to make sure I’m safe from the hot sun.

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*The first fireworks display on the shore of Port Vila went off at the unusual time of 9:40. Vanuatuans are very relaxed and time is as important to them as iPhones and TiVo.