“It’s like he’s still sitting at the table”

A phone call. Jasmin Alves (35) thinks about that every day. That connects her with her father Roland. Since October 15th. A Saturday. Unforgettable. Everything was over her head. Four children between 10 and 14 years old and a husband who is unable to get back on his feet because of an illness. Everyone needed them. And now she needed him, her father, called him and said: “Dad, I don’t like it anymore.” And he, on the way to the Oktoberfest in Zurich, comforted her: “We’ll look at it together tomorrow. We’ll find a solution, my darling.”

“There was no more ‘tomorrow’,” says Jasmin Alves quietly. In Kloten ZH, where she lives, she sits there in a red top with big glittering stars. A little sparkle in this dreary time. The young woman has lost her father. Suddenly. He fell and died from his injuries. He was only 57 years old.

Roland was always there

For the first time, Jasmin Alves and the family celebrate without her father, grandfather, father-in-law. She says: “Without Daddy, Christmas is bleak.” There is still some consolation: raclette. The last Christmas menu together. And the memory of him. She says: “Daddy was always there for me.”

Jasmine and her father were inseparable. Even as a child. They created common rituals. Like Daddy Saturday, which always went the same way: get up early, go shopping together and before cleaning the house there was a beer for him and a syrup for her in the pub. At the regulars’ table, where the girl Jasmin played the waiter’s daughter, brought drinks for fun and received tips from father’s friends. She remembers: “I always came home with my trouser pockets full of coins.”

Even as the grandfather of Alves’ children, he was one thing above all: present. When the teenage granddaughter was fed up with her parents, she would call him: Mommy is annoying, come on! And he always came, took the children with him. For tobogganing, swimming and the Chilbi.

Roland was always there. Jasmin Alves leaves no doubt about that. “He wanted to relieve me,” she says. After she became a mother, he organized the Christmas parties. Bought food, organized the Christmas tree and wreath and decorated everything with gold balls. A big festival with children, parents, gods and gods. For the child of divorce, Alves, it was something special, she says: “Thanks to Daddy, I had a real family Christmas.” That didn’t exist before.

He’s still there

Now everything is different. No candle burns in the apartment, no chain of lights hangs on the balcony railing. The children, the parents, the two dogs, all mourn. And there is something beautiful in that too. Alves says: “The children talk to him every day.” Raclette with table grill – it was her idea to repeat last year’s Christmas dinner this year. “So it is for her, as if he were still sitting at the table.”

Her father is not really gone. Jasmin Alves made sure of that. A resin heart dangles from her neck with her father’s fingerprint etched into it. She says: “He will always be there for me.”