Saturday 16 June 2018

This Year’s Father’s Day

It is the scruffy looking young lad on the train that caught me again.  Lying half sleeping, sprawled across the shared table, he is wearing a knitted hat and a parka jacket, while the rest of the passengers on board swelter in their summer’s finest.  And I can see my father now, bursting in through the door of the back kitchen, in great form. Loud. He’s full of news, lies and cattle prices from the Sales Yard in Kingscourt. It must be Thursday, because that’s ‘Sales Day’, or at least, it was then.  He’s in his familiar short-sleeved shirt, half-tucked in, half out. My mother has persuaded him to put on a clean one before he left for town. He has probably protested, but gives in to her fussing, without much of a battle. He’s laughing about the old man at the Sales Yard who was wearing a top coat and wellies.  ‘In this heat! A top coat. With grand shiny sleeves. Oh, the smell off him too. A lovely whiff. Did you hear me? A top coat, I tell you !’. And he trails off, into another story and wonders what’s for tea.

I remember now, that The Sales ARE still on a Thursday in town.  I happened to be there one day
recently, doing the, what is now customary, trip to Super Valu with my mother’s shopping list before I
pay a quick visit to my father’s grave across the road.  For a long time, I had no interest in visiting him
there and avoided it with any excuse, but I’m at ease with it now. The new surround on the grave
invites me to ‘Stay Awhile’ and I do.  It’s peaceful. I assess the current state of the flowers, admire the
pinky hue of the fresh chippings and wonder who left the latest memento. I read the inscription on the
headstone, amusing myself as I do so - it’s not as if I don’t know how it reads.  I drive through the town
for a gawk, past the jeeps and the cattle trailers and ‘M&F Stores’, the drapery shop where I worked for
many years. I was often addressed by farmer customers as ‘John Russell’s daughter’, and they’d tell
me that I looked like his sisters.  

The comforting smell of cow shite stays with me in the car long after I leave town.   

I smile thinking of my father's feeling-sorry-for-himself announcement to me one day in the kitchen,
when he was still hail and hearty.  ‘Sure you wouldn’t have a good word to say about me if I died’. I
continued eating my cornflakes and said nothing. In my head though, I agreed with him - What would
there be to say?

But writing about my father has given me great comfort after his death.  Oddly perhaps, I found it
easy to write and in fact, the more miserable I was, the quicker the words spilled out.  It helped to
heal what I didn't realise needed mending. As the healing came though, the words started to dry up
and with that, came a mixture of sadness that I was letting him go but also, a sense of relief, because
grieving is bloody hard work.  Worse if you try to resist it.

I thought that I was done with grief. But then my friend’s elderly father died, a man I barely
know.  I can see the pain in my friend, that wave of unexpected emotion that hits like a derailed train
and pushes out through your chest.  I go to the funeral home where he is laid out, but decide then that
I won’t go to his funeral, for fear that I’d become such a blubbering mess that people will take me for a
chief mourner.  My excuse seems lame, albeit truthful. The schedule of grief is unpredictable, I guess.
That's what it is good at.

Since their recent immersion in rugby, I’ve thought, with some regret, about how my father would have
enjoyed how children’s embrace of rugby. He would have been amused with my son’s knowledge on
Irish and international players and their current state of health, statistics on stadium seating capacity,
amongst other things.  I can picture Leon bombarding his Granddad with trivia and questions, until my
father would loose patience and tell him to ‘whisht gasun’ in a raised tone. My son wouldn’t know if he
should read it as a joke, or if Granddad was serious. He would look to myself or his Nana for a clue and
we would start laughing, giving Leon permission to join in. And then we are all laughing, except for my
father who is wondering if he’s missed something, or if we are laughing at him. He’d turn up the volume
on the TV and tell us that he is watching the match and to ‘make tea … one of yis’.

Father’s Day this year will be just another day that won’t stir much in me either way.  It's one
less card to write and one less present to panic-buy. I'm not looking to make a connection with Dad, but I
know that he will catch me unaware sometime soon again. It will be subtle as a flying brick and I'll catch it
with both hands.

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