My father’s death, and a love that was hard to put into words

JOHN SELF, the antihero in Martin Amis’s pulse-quickening piece de resistance Money, explains to the reader: “Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette”.

Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always composing another thought about my late parents. It would have been their 69th wedding anniversary last Friday. It only seems like yesterday that they died. It was an awful time, especially with my father (because our relationship, like most father-son relationships, was complicated).

I remember his time in the hospice, watching him waste away, move further and further away from the person he was. His final days on earth, in a hospice.

It was awful to see him end his days in a hospice. All the staff were amazing and could not have done more for him but still, no one wants to see their dad die in a hospice. It is not how he imagined it.

I loved him but we were not ones for those kind of chats. We were never ones for talking to each other when he was in full health. Everyone always found him the most charming gentleman with a way with words. I rarely spoke to him properly during his lifetime. It was probably the normal father-son relationship for the times. When he was dying, I tried to up my game with the conversations but at that stage, it was too late.

I found it awkward to tell him I loved him just as he found it awkward to tell me he loved me. I still feel sort of guilty about it now, that I was perhaps not good enough a son for him in some sense, and he deserved better from me, and that I probably brought more grief into his life than joy.

When he died, it was like a storm warning of tempests to come. The tempests didn’t come. Instead, I started to realise how much I really did love him and how much he did love me, and all his siblings and my truly beloved mother. It was only after he died that I realised it was that cliche of my father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.

He got on with everyone he ever met and everyone he ever met had a kind word for, or about, this gentleman from Ranelagh. Somehow, without resorting to self-pity, I doubt I am as universally loved as he was.

He never gave me advice. In hindsight, I would have loved a bit of advice like the kind dispensed in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan: “He ransacked his mind for something good to say, and found almost nothing. ‘My father gave me only two pieces of advice,’ he said, ‘and only one of them has stood the test of time. They were: Don’t touch your principal, and keep the liquor bottle out of the bedroom’.”

I have some of his old books. I look at them and investigate the pages that have been folded over or have words underlined. I try to imagine what he was thinking when I look at the pages that are marked. It is like I am looking for a code or a sign. Then, after an hour or so, looking for clues or answers, I usually give up.

Coming up to Christmas is the worst. Gnawing thoughts of loved ones who are gone forever seem to emerge more painfully into your consciousness than at any other time of year. My mind is an impermeable tangle of thoughts.

Thoughts of your parents being no longer with you makes you think of existence — and how empty that existence seems sometimes without them. But you are also inescapably drawn to thoughts of your own death one day. With all that comes memories of your childhood. With this comes the realisation that you are old now and those times are another lifetime ago. Sometimes when I play with my kids I can’t help but think of what they will remember of me and their mother when they are old (ish!) like I am now.

I have so many great memories of my mother and father. I wish they were here now, even just for a moment to see my two young kids, whom they never got to meet. I would like to think that they watch over them.

And me. ******

I was expecting patrician hauteur when I arrived at the Unicorn restaurant in 2000 for dinner with the great Ulick O’Connor.

I wasn’t entirely wrong. It wasn’t until after we’d finished our starters in the restaurant in Merrion Row that he began to be even remotely friendly or what passed for strained politeness 19 years ago.

Once he, eventually, warmed up — I can’t remember if he was drinking; I certainly was, mostly because of shock and awe — Ulick O’Connor was a colourful contrarian. Endlessly entertaining. Endlessly indiscreet, too.

As the main courses arrived, Ulick practically sang a poem to the entire restaurant: “By brooks too broad for leaping/The lightfoot boys are laid;/The rose-lipt girls are sleeping/ In fields where roses fade”.

When I asked him about the meaning of truth in life, his answer was unforgettable.

He pulled Virginia Woolf out of his wonderful head like she was sitting beside us at dinner all evening.

“For there is virtue in truth,” Ulick said, quoting Ms Woolf, “it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems able to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.”

I thought I’d never I see or hear from him again after the Unicorn.

The following day, a courier arrived at my flat with a carefully wrapped gift of a book, authored by my recent dinner companion: Biographers and the Art of Biography. It was signed, “Go raibh maith agat, Ulick”. I’ll never forget him.

Like radium, he will give off truth for ever, wherever he is.