by Andrea Corr
I have heard it said that you can only ever be as happy as your least happy child. And maybe it is no accident, then, that this was the time our dad felt he could go. He had hoped, in our closed-door years, that we would reunite and that he would be side stage once more, watching us. Preferring it there beside us, to out front. He felt more a part of it there. He does deserve this final applause.
Jim, Sharon, Caroline and Andrea were together again. Doing what he considered each of us did best. No lost skittle, lonely and vulnerable to the wind. But bolstered again with John. His work was done. And he had been so brave to continue for so long without his love. Missing the way she said the word ‘milk’ and his name ‘Gerry’.
On the Monday of a studio week, walking into work, I talked to him on the phone for what was to be the last time. He was in good form. Had had a good night, as he would say. He didn’t sleep well any more. He was looking forward to meeting Gayle, the sister we had made through Jim, and his grandson Brandon later that day.
I remember that day having quite an existential conversation with Jim, about moments of awareness of Mum that we both had felt we’d had. And sometimes I think now that I felt something brewing. Crying watching Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ video and Sergei Polunin dance to Hozier’s ‘Take Me to Church’ …
When I tucked my children into bed that evening, Caroline rang to tell me that Daddy had had a heart attack.
And this is the story of a blessed passing. So many ‘could have’s avoided. Like, he could have been on his own and not meeting Gayle and his grandson, that day he walked into his beloved town for the last time. I met an old man once who groaned as he painfully and slowly lowered his exhausted self to sit on a park bench beside me. He said, ‘Old age is nothing but a series of indignities.’ It was not that for Daddy. He walked three miles every day. His mind was sharp – well, as blurry-sharp as mine is. And he had faith. His daily prayer was ‘In God’s way may we be united again.’
He pretty much resided down memory lane with Mum at this point, and I imagine, at eighty-two, on one of his sleepless nights, he must have wondered how and when he would go. Did he turn back and take one last look at their home after he locked the door that day?
He had outlived many of his friends, his siblings, his son and his wife. Moving on to join them doesn’t sound so bad.
They used to sit by the fire on a Friday night with a couple of gin and tonics, and Mum would say to Dad, ‘It’s good here, isn’t it?’
Well that is my prayer. That she is saying exactly that, to him and to Gerard, now.
We all had three days around his hospital bed. Swallowing the tears back into our eyes, whenever he opened his. And making him mime-laugh, the only way he could, all rigged up. He had been christened Patrick Gerard, and so the nurse, whenever she would ask him to try and not move his leg, would call him Patrick. I told her if he did it again to say, ‘Gerry, put that leg back down, lively!’ as that’s what he used to say to us. ‘Get up those stairs, lively, and do your homework, lively,’ or ‘Put your bike in the shed, lively!’ … ‘Tidy your room, lively!’ …
The matron – coincidentally from Dundalk, as was the surgeon – said to me, at a moment when I was out of view crying, looking in at him in his room, ‘This is good.’ God knows, she knew how lucky we were, getting to say goodbye. At one of these moments he nodded from the bed as if beckoning one of us back in. So I went in and he mouthed ‘Thank you’ and I said, ‘Thank you.’
And that was it.
‘Stay’
Prayers float as coloured letters to the gods
Make mine a land without compassion
A melting pot of pain
Stirred slowly to the boil
We had a radar now it’s gone
This is a cruel cruel love
I’m stood on the dark side of love
This a cruel cruel love
I’m stood on the dark side alone
Let love light your way
And forever always with me stay
I’ll live while I’m alive
But forever always with me stay
Still reeling though I knew you’d one day go
There’s no softening this shock
Write me a song and throw me back upon your knee
Help me move forward
Now I’ve lost where I began …
(© Mark Doyle)
It is dawning on me that this is, in fact, a barefoot pilgrimage that I am on. And the ground now, the cruel and jagged rock beneath my feet, where the red stains the blue, makes me want to be lifted like the crying child I was on Communion Day. The mirage is of velvet pebble, at least, if not moss that tickles. And I’d say my sisters and brother feel the same way. But it is tears and grief that made White Light. The waves would come on each of us at different moments. As if we were passing the baton in a relay. We are all at the surface now, exposed and raw. Moments of hilarity … the dark humour we’d inherited … to crying again … With no real difference between the laugh and the cry. It’s like we were all mad, absolutely untethered, and aloft. Holding on to each other through our music.
I had whispered in Dad’s ear when he was no longer opening his eyes, when he was dying, that he could go. That we would be OK. And I sang Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Angel’, his favourite song, about Mum, in his mind. Because there is no way you would get to do this, to die, a better way, another time. And it comforts me now when I recall that he was completely without fear. He knew, and he was ready. This gives me faith.
Parents teach you how to live and to love and I imagine, to die. They do it all first, before you. Like a mother tasting a little to check the temperature, before feeding her baby. And through all that they had survived, the devastating loss of Gerard, their parents, friends, neighbours … and then for Daddy, the loss of Mum, they taught us to survive. To live and love on.
Until we meet again …
So you see now that this is the band you had before you in Hyde Park, five months later. September 2015. Our first gig in ten years. This is why we cried when you sang ‘Runaway’ … Why John cried and his daughters cried, side stage. And I’m back to loving strangers, because that is who you are. Thank you.
Tears of St Lawrence
The night sky
I cried for you
For the ones that we’ve lost
That we’re missing
Bid adieu
Celestial goodbye
Lay now and rest
And I’ll do my best
To start again
I begin again
Why do we always notice
What’s been taken
And shout to the world
Everyone
My faith is shaking
One moment’s change
I’m drinking to trust
And surrender
And come what may
And begin again …
The welcome you gave us at that Radio 2 gig not only overwhelmed us, but I think I saw it in the eyes of our record company when we got off stage: there were more than embers in this grate. It may be possible to fully reignite. But with the bellows came the outside pressure. Some of which I am grateful for and some I am not. Songs appeared in our Dropboxes. The ‘hits’. Here we go again.
We had produced and written, to my mind, our best songs to date. What we needed was a producer to take some of the burden and direct us to the finish line. I did not believe we needed songs. I think, also, that I was more precious than ever about what we did, now that both our parents were gone. The broken-hearted place that these songs had come from. And we were not making this record to be number one. If that were to happen it would be incidental. So the baby and the eldest swapped positions and I was heading for a bedroom rebellion of my own.
‘Why are we talking about other people’s songs?’ I
would ask …
‘Do you think Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, on hearing U2’s The Joshua Tree, said, “Hey, Bono, wait till you hear what I wrote”?’
And I can hear you say now, ‘You are not U2 and this is not The Joshua Tree.’ But what is the point if you, yourself, do not believe in the integrity and the quality of what you are doing?
Anyway, I didn’t follow through and I am glad that we co-wrote ‘Kiss of Life’.
We were highly vulnerable to being undermined, John included, and finished this record in a cauldron, John Shanks joining us in London for the final three weeks. Then Jim on the phone to LA, trying to get the mixes right, through the night, so that we would make our November deadline.
You might imagine this record, so, to be melancholic. But it has the other reaction to loss, fighting through the darkness. Defiance. Life. Now they are gone, we are closer … we are the top layer. Facing our own mortality, we ask what and who will we be, before we go. Honour thy father and thy mother. Honour the gifts that you have been given, in sharing them. Gratitude.
And it’s a release from that room.
The mantra now is ‘Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour, every minute, sweet’ … The whisper in the rush. From first single to photo shoot, TV show, performance … Sharon and myself, dancing side stage, watching our sister, Caroline, go on first, and her silhouette come alive on the curtain. This may be the last, ever. And whoever heard of getting a second chance twice? Truisms, paradoxes and deep joy. A record fundamentally about death and life that is not morbid. Telling yourself not to let your fear sabotage your – perhaps – final performance, and at the same time, forgiving yourself, quickly, if it did a little bit. As it isn’t life or death. You know that now.
Joie de vivre.
The joy of life.
Carpe diem.
Quotidie.
And don’t call it a tour, whatever you do, or I might not manage it. Let’s say a few gigs. But it was a tour and it was exhilarating and I don’t believe we have ever been better together. We toured White Light through the blackest rumble of terrorism. But there was something about that that intensified the energy, the love and the gratitude. The Bataclan, where we had played a sweltering and memorable gig so many summers before, ever present in our minds. But it only made me love you more. The night we played L’Orient, Bastille Day, we finished only to hear the Nice attack had happened and sat up in our hotel lobby watching French TV, horrified by the scenes.
We arrive in Brussels on a Sunday and it is like a ghost town. Looking out the car window and I am scared, because I am not with my children. Asking myself do I have a bad feeling, and giving myself one in the asking. Armed vehicles and soldiers on empty streets. Our hotel like the one in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I lie in my room, close my eyes and listen to my audiobook, because that is what calms me … and when the lift doors open, later on when I’m leaving for the gig, I audibly gasp, because there are three armed soldiers waiting to enter it. One of them smiles at me because he saw.
God, I feel sorry for us all. I am a coiled spring. But three hours later, I stretch out on stage and I am willing to go with you. And our songs take on the meaning of the time. ‘Bring on the Night’, ‘White Light’, ‘Stay’.
And then Kew Gardens. The most beautiful summer evening, just days after the Nice attack. The world on high alert. Aeroplanes overhead. Thousands of people brave the beauty in the time of terror. And our front row … a girl in a hijab, a beloved lesbian couple, black and white, all creeds, all colours … There is no division. There is no intolerance …
There is only love.
(© John Reynolds)
‘Three Robins’
Changed
I am changed
Forever altered
Losing you
Three robins will rest
On the step of the sill
Looking in at the girl they grew
Chill myself out
Too much one night
Felt the glow of the afterworld
Talked to you
Cried my Pandy heart out
Every word that I said was true
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you
What we said in the end
Was true …
The story of how the robin got his red breast is beautiful to me. I read it to the children last night. If we could return compassion and poetry such as this to religion … Oh how would our world be? The thorns in His crown. The little bird soul tries to remove them and in doing so the red blood of Christ stains his breast.
When Daddy had just died and we were in that timeless fog, sitting in our living room, his coffin in front of the organ, talking to the priest about the arrangements and the eulogy, I moved my eyes from the priest to a robin resting on the window sill behind, and then another robin joined, and then another … And the three looked right in at the crying girls and boy they grew. This is true.
It’s a seismic shift when you realise you have no parents left … At least it felt like that for me. And the pain avoided the first time around comes to meet the new rawness and give the current salt and a brutal force that threatens to drown you at times. To realise nobody will look at you like that again. I used to catch Mum across a room watching me. It was all love. No one will love me like that again. And now Daddy. I had come to fear this from the moment she died and now here it was. The goodbye that I had begged them not to say was, at last, said. Golden silhouettes in the doorway …
We asked him the questions we did not get to ask her. Advice on babies’ sleep, food, etc., and we no longer now had even his speculative answers, or ‘Your mother did all that. I’m sorry, I don’t remember.’ Bold Gerry, a man of his time … never pushed a buggy, changed a nappy, made a purée … I think he felt foolish then and a bit embarrassed to admit he had obeyed the domestic laws of the Irish time (for they could short-change a man) and that he regretted the lost chance to be a part of these everyday acts of love.
He pushed our babies, thank God, rocked and held them and made them giggle, pop-popping his lips together, blowing on their tummies. Things he must have done to us. I used to leap from the kitchen countertop into his waiting arms.
He loved hugs himself. Was starved of them. When I linked his arm we both felt what he missed.
My boy Brett and Daddy have the same forehead (fivehead, as my husband calls it).
How Mum would have loved that time. I’d say nearly more than any time. Her drinking in of the present, and of her children’s celestial ascent and glory, was in part because she blindly believed, like we all do, that she would reach these, the most blessed of times, too, and live them with us. She wouldn’t have needed an earphone to hear us then. She would have been around. She would have helped us. She would have loved our children. Her grandchildren. So much.
I think it was bittersweet for him to watch us love our babies as he had watched her love us. He would remark, ‘That’s so like your mother, Pandy,’ and it was in those moments that I would become aware of her absence seated still by his side. The one he was never unaware of. The one that never left him. That he never got used to.
He never stopped missing her.
I will never stop missing them.
Curling orange peel on the stone bench behind me. The sea sparkling the setting-sun light, into this tree cave where I’ve rested the summer long. An offering, perhaps, from a previous pilgrim. The holiday is drawing to a close, as this day is to an end. Years and miles beneath my feet and the blue paint chipped in abeyance of my superstition. For I move from pagan to Christian in a Lughnasa dance. Magpies saluted, Hail Marys, Glory Bes, but most of all, Lord:
Make me an instrument of Thy peace,
And let me just hear them
Tell the story
In the breeze
And let me just write it
Here.
The flame ignites, blinds white, to the smoky fog of the Peruvian wood and the hands of a guru.
I am back at the beginning.
The satellite to Jupiter Calling was first spotted in the breakfast room of a Berlin hotel. John tells us that maybe it’s time to start writing again and working on the follow-up to White Light. (Wouldn’t that be heaven, Johnny? Well, it’s in the sky at least.)
We were just releasing our second single, and were thrown. But the world we had rejoined was changed. Pop-up emails in the windows of our sunglasses and a perpetual west-scrolling river of attention deficit beneath our eyes. We are back to one week on, one week off, write, record, a song a day, prejudice and early dismissals strictly forbidden. In a small studio with a grand piano, in Notting Hill. On our weeks off we were virtual-writing. Melodies, songs, lyrics, chord progressions, Garage Band, into the microphones on our phones. Press record, ‘Quick, quick, get it’, press send. We discovered the sound we wanted, unpolished and raw, in the middle, broken-down section of our 2016 tour. And we found its aching and raised heartbeat there, too.
The songs were on trucks going by, in playgrounds, in paintings, on walls, in photos, in headlines, and waiting at the school gate. They were in lost innocence and the guilt felt when you watch, blink and turn away. And they were in the cold and rigid hands that gripped my heart in a vice, a year on from Daddy’s death. A year, I have found, till you wake with their voice, at last, in your ear again.
Close your eyes to keep it. There you are. I miss you.
Say it’s gonna be all right.
‘Road to Eden’
So many tears
In holy water
So much fear in Heaven’s way
I ask you when
When will I grow up to not be afraid
And be who I am
Cherish what you left
Courage is all I’m asking tonight
The candlelight dances