Christmas is over. It's not that I like Christmas so very much -- no that's not it. New Year has never been my thing. It's just one day to the next when all's said and done. In fact every day is just one day to the next. But some days you never forget. Some days life doesn't go on!
The 11th January 1960 was one of those days. I was 5. I'd just started school in September and that was a big deal for me. I didn't like it!! There were other kids there. Scarey kids. You had to interact. You had to compete. You had to learn all sorts of difficult things. It was the beginning of being in the bigger world and I didn't much like the bigger world!
It was a Monday like it is this year and a Monday like no other because that was the day my father died. He was 48.
 |
| Jack Kyle |
I have written lots and lots about it before and if you would like to read some of what I've written I refer you to this POST
But the truth is I've never maybe written so viscerally and truthfully as this in piece by fellow Irish poet Donall Dempsey who is a FaceBook friend and has kindly allowed me to share this. This is what it felt like. It's how it still feels. There are days I'm still 5 inside and
NO I don't like being in the world -- Not in January -- I don't -- not today.
BEING IN THE WORLD
"I'm scared...!" she sobs
"Of what love?" I cuddle her
"Of being in the world!"
****
This was when she was only a tiny little thing in the world of long ago but her words ring truer now in this rogue world of ours.
Her granny had just died and this all too too solid world of forever didn't seem as forever as it had before. She no longer trusted it if a granny could vanish...would she vanish too?
She cried and "wanted to go where ever Granny had goed!"
She was looking at a globe and asked me if she were in the world. And is Granny not in the world any more? And when Granny finishes being dead then will she come back? And what good is the world if Granny isn't in it. She sat on my lap and listened to auld Jemmy the Joist reading from Finnegans Wake with his own voice. I asked her what did she think the man was saying and she asked "Did he lose his granny too?"
by Donall Dempsey
A rush of tears here, Oonah and Donall! I too am one who lost my father when both he and i were very young, i four, he 42. Donall's story brings back things i hadn't thought about for ages, about frantically asking where daddy had gone and not getting an answer except possibly the same place as the dog, which had died a few weeks earlier. As i semi-remember, although we were a good(ish) Catholic family, God and heaven weren't mentioned.
ReplyDelete