My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

  I remember a night, in the days before Christmas, when I watched her walk up the stairs to her bedroom. In one heel, plantar fasciitis, which tortured her with sharp pangs. In the other leg, bruises, a dull pain that made her uncertain and unsteady. She barely had the breath to lift her limbs. Her state was enough to overwhelm me with helpless guilt and anger. And yet, this image of her, a lonely and sad wreck, is transfigured now, when I recall it. After all, she pushed through the pain. She endured—stubbornly and patiently—the financial stress, determined not to let me know too much about it. And that ascent up the stairs was the most impressive feat of physical courage I have ever seen with my own eyes. She moved one step ahead of me, slowly, deliberately, cautiously, but willfully.

  A few days after that climb up the stairs, her best friends came in and surprised her by staying through Christmas. She and they came and sat at my dining-room table for breakfast on Christmas Day, and she smiled at me, happy to see me settled in a home and with a good wife. By her lights, I had turned out well. She explained that she wanted eight grandchildren and soon. We all laughed that she should have had more kids if she wanted that.

  Her friends went back to London after New Year’s Day. Two days later, while I worked, she and I sent each other messages about a new Winnie the Pooh movie coming out. She had decorated my childhood room with these characters, and they always made me think of her. “We should see it together,” she wrote back. A few hours later, I got a call that she was being rushed to the hospital. I rushed there, to find her already dead.

  After I called her brother and best friend, I called you. “Do you need me to come over,” you asked, “to stand by you?” I didn’t think so, no. We hung up and I tried to turn to funeral preparations.

  My grief did not wait until I had finished making all the phone calls and arrangements. My wife and I retreated to her parents’ home across town. They tried to console me, but their presence only emphasized the difference between families like theirs, intact and together, and my own. Everyone from my wife’s childhood home could gather in an hour’s time on my account. My closest blood relation was three thousand miles away, and had to ask whether he should come.

  Some people feel a guilty sense of liberation when their parents die. They feel they finally have escaped a shadow. I felt nothing like that. In the face of my mother’s suffering and death, I saw my whole world, my whole way of being, as counterfeit. The myth of the darkened past giving way to light was obviously wrong. In the past was my mother as she had been—strong, independent, and full of fight. In the future there was no way to make up to her for all the eyerolls and the guilt I inflicted on her when all she wanted was the company of her son.

  Even the version of religious faith I had readopted suddenly seemed like a fake. I wanted the sweet consolations and mercies it offered. I had wanted meaning for myself, and I wanted salvation for myself. I had disguised the culture’s idea of freedom from judgment under the vestments of Christian forgiveness to make it more convincing.

  Just fifteen months earlier, at my wedding rehearsal, my mother had responded with perfect meekness to the priest who invited any penitents in my wedding party to confession. Having been away for decades, she asked for some encouragement from me, and I gave her some. I loudly claimed to believe in this faith, but it was she, who made no such boasts, who suffered like a saint. I know that canonizing one’s mammy is another Irish cliché. So be it.

  I felt grief, and soon I would feel fury too. A perfect zealous hatred burned through me as I went through her papers, frantically searching for some guidance on her will or on any life insurance policy. I discovered that in the last weeks of her life she was approved for yet another refinance of her home loan, made in line with the terms of a new federal bailout program. The terms should have been criminal. The monthly payment would eat up more than two thirds of her Social Security disability check. And the payments would stretch on for forty years longer. Under the guise of helping her and stabilizing the economy, someone collected a fee when the very sick middle-aged woman on the other side of the table from him signed on the dotted line. This agreement would make her home a debtor’s prison and keep her on subsistence, while she paid off nearly three quarters of a million dollars of debt for the rest of her life. The Irish in history killed or emigrated to escape tenancy terms less onerous than this. She died before the first payment was due. But here I was, looking at a contract that, in an age that had any sense of duty beyond self-enrichment, would have inspired widespread rancor and war upon the wicked.

  My mother was a child of her age. She believed that people would accept her decisions. And for the rest of her life, she paid dearly for it. Despite all the happy talk in America about an enlightened age accommodating all kinds of families, she still experienced shame on my account. She lost a job over being an unmarried mother. As the unmarried daughter in an Irish American family, the primary responsibility of watching over and then taking care of her aged parents was left to her. Men paid her less attention than she deserved. After all, she was carrying baggage.

  Now I see, she was carrying a cross.

  I was furious too at the ambivalence of our culture in the face of her death. This myth of liberation was like a solvent that had slowly and inexorably dissolved any sense of obligation in life. It dissolved the bonds that held together past, present, and future. It dissolved the social bonds that hold together a community, and that make up a home. And, here at the end of the process, I was alone. An atom that becomes separated from a larger chemical structure is called a free radical. And that is how I felt, supercharged with this urgent longing to reconnect to something larger.

  A healthy culture provides all the proper ceremony for death; it gives rituals that allow people to grieve as individuals, and families. But in an age of self-creation, of a curated life, lived in row houses where people hardly know their neighbors, the bereaved are confronted with an endless series of menus and options. All provided at exorbitant cost.

  The modern Church too was useless. I felt nothing but sorrow and inadequacy in the face of her death. I felt like, in penance, we should be made to pray for my mother, to ask forgiveness for the wrongs and slights we inflicted or allowed. But without me frantically managing the Church myself, it would have given us its new ceremony, everyone at the altar dressed in white, like at a hospital, anesthetizing us with a feeling of unearned peace. It would have provided a stranger at the lectern, giving banalities about a “better place” that we all would have pretended to find consoling. A healthy culture lets you know what is right and proper, so that only when the great work is done, you find a peace worth having. Instead, I asked for a proper requiem, with a priest dressed in black, music that expressed hope but in the only way hope can make sense, calling out from within a present shadowed by sorrow, grief, guilt, and shame.

  Everyone from my childhood home was now dead. I was at the end of history, yes, marooned there. I had no siblings who could give me the consolation that comes through retold memories that are shared only in the intimacy of a family home. I had no grieving widower father who needed support more than I did. As yet, I had no children in whom I could find a mission, or at least a living sign of that hope.

  Hours into this ugly, furious scramble to find the resources—financial, spiritual—to bury my mother, I called you again. I called you feeling enraged at you too. Yes, your relationship with my mother was a fraught wreck, or, at least, my existence made it one. But could you not see that it didn’t matter what I claimed to need, or what I felt? This woman had raised your son. I steadied my voice, the way my mother tried to when she wanted her feelings cast aside in a decision: “I don’t need you to come,” I said. “You should come for yourself.”

  I knew with awful clarity that night: This grief would follow me for years. I still had this guilty feeling that somehow my existence ruined her life. Without me, she could have moved back to London, where she was happy. W
ithout me, she could have found a husband. And now, every happiness in my own life would be shadowed by her absence.

  I told my wife that when I was young and excited about my favorite basketball players, I would run up the stairs almost every commercial break or time-out and interrupt whatever my mother was doing to report on their disappointments or exult in their triumphs. My mother tolerated these intrusions into her life with perfect patience and equanimity. Of course she did. One day, I would have my own disappointments and triumphs to rush to her. This was all a mock rehearsal for the real satisfactions of life ahead.

  And how I wish she was here for this one. We expect our daughter to arrive any day now. And though I am very, very happy to get on with this next phase of life, I wish I could share it with my mother. She had been asking for this, longing for this day, and bothering us to bring it about in the last days of her life, with some of her last breath. She will never meet one of her own grandchildren. There’s no shrinking from that fact. Or from the way this coming triumph in my life is ringed with bittersweetness and sorrow.

  From a very young age, I vowed that if I had children I would not raise them in a broken home like mine. But my fear is that, no matter how well I keep one together, I don’t know how to repair the brokenness that surrounds the home, this malady that afflicts us all, that dissolves all connection between past, present, and future. This thing that makes our grandparents into strangers to us, that leaves us disconnected from one another, ill equipped to meet these moments in life, when real injustice, real sorrow, and real grief visit us.

  Your son,

  Michael

  V

  Rebel Songs As Lullabies

  The great Gaels of Ireland

  Are the men that God made mad,

  For all their wars are merry,

  And all their songs are sad.

  —G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse”

  Dear Father,

  You visited again, not long after Mom died. I had the unique privilege in life of inviting my father into my own home before I’d ever been in his. We went to lunch in town and you asked me something I hadn’t anticipated: “Do you have anything you want to say to me, Michael?”

  It was bold of you to ask. We hadn’t spent even three months in each other’s presence in the past twenty-nine years of my life.

  You repeated the question a few times, because instead of answering I was probing for the reason you asked. Something to say in light of my mother’s death? Or, as a man? We normally keep things light. Did you want me to lay into you? Were we finally going to have it out? Would I finally put the guilt on your head? Would I let out my secret hurts?

  I don’t think of you as very calculating, but there was something artful about the way you asked. You said it as though it would be perfectly normal if I did, and that it would be perfectly fitting for you to hear it. There was no pressure on me either. That we spoke about it in a restaurant kept the threat of bursting into anger or tears safely at a distance.

  Rather than answer, I gave you a canned description of my childhood without you. You would come and visit, maybe once every two years or so. You would stay for a few weeks. You would dote on me and then you would have to leave. I would be disconsolate for a week or so thereafter, and my mother resented you for it. She thought you were somehow enjoying the pride of fatherhood, and leaving her with the rest. You already knew this story of our nonrelationship, one my mother had told you over and over again.

  On that day, I couldn’t confront your question honestly. “Do you have anything you want to say to me?” Aside from those days immediately after you left, I said, the experience of your absence was just that: an absence. Like the big scabs on my knees from a crash on my bike, it was something I picked at for a few days until it disappeared. And then I went out and played.

  I was trying to soothe you. To relieve you of guilt.

  I had also grown up and married, and in the school of life had made a study myself, I told you. I knew that only a few decisions separated us. If things had gone just slightly differently, I could someday be sitting as you were that day, inviting my estranged son to have it out with me. I wrapped it all up by saying that, by the standards of the world, I was happy and successful. I was not in jail. I had a job, lived in a nice town, and had a beautiful wife. And that made everything easier for both of us, didn’t it? As if to underline the point, I ordered an espresso, and at the end of the meal, I offered to pay.

  Afterward, I congratulated myself on my maturity. I felt I had paved a way forward for us. We had a complex history, sure. But we could be men about it. There’s no wrecked life that can be blamed on you. There’s nothing I lack that can be held against you.

  How evasive! How beside the point! I had recast our estrangement as just the unfortunate mistake you made in conceiving me. Too bad about your firstborn son being three thousand miles away and knowing nothing about you. I had reframed your fatherhood as merely one among many conveniences I happened to miss in a life otherwise defined by middle-class success and material acquisition. I don’t know how you view our history, but please forgive me for suggesting this was mine. Just as one day it dawned on me that I had missed you, I realize now: You had missed me.

  It’s as if this language of getting ahead and technocratic manipulation becomes the default mode of thinking around us, and we adapt ourselves to it when we don’t know what to say. I’m discovering now how much parenting advice and guidance is packaged this way, how it recasts fathers not merely as providers, but as social engineers, as “wonks.” Read to your child, because children who read with their parents on average make a million dollars more over life. Eat dinner with your child, because a child who eats at a family table becomes more sociable and in the long run will marry better and get more promotions. Cuddle with a child; cuddled children get better mortgage rates as adults. As if parenthoods could be judged by the grades we got in school, or the salaries we achieved.

  When my daughter makes eye contact with me, all of this talk is revealed as nonsense. As totally beside the point. This advice presumes love is the base input, an animal instinct that is transmuted by a civilizing process into the thing that matters—wealth, advantage, and status. I know now, viscerally, what nonsense this is, what a profanation it is.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been a few weeks since we brought our daughter home from the hospital. We are, like all new parents, sleep deprived and discombobulated. I think it’s only just dawning on us what this responsibility entails for us moment to moment. In some ways, we are living in a constant repeat of the first night she came to us. After a long labor, my wife needed more attention from the doctors, so my daughter and I were put into a dark room by ourselves, for nearly an hour. I stripped off my shirt, pressed her next to me, and sang over and over again the same songs: “The West’s Awake,” “The Foggy Dew,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” even “The Patriot Game,” which I try to sing in that lullaby way Liam Clancy did.

  I do the same thing over and over now when she cries and resists the comforts of sleep. I know it sounds crazy. She screams bloody murder, and I sing about blood and murder. This experience, of immersing her and myself in these songs and in this history, has given me a new way of seeing not just our relationship, but the world.

  The New York Times has started running articles about the centennials being commemorated in Dublin. One of them said recently that the men of the Rising claimed to act on the authority of “the dead generations, who could not demur.” In those last four words is a view of Irish history—of everything, really—that these songs no longer permit me. I recognize in those words “the men of letters” in your generation, and a younger version of myself, the one who thought he had put away all delusions. The dead are just silent. What else could they be?

  And what is a nation? In this way of thinking, a nation is at best a
problematic, if still useful, administrative unit. That is, it’s merely the arena in which technocrats and wonks do their work of making improvements on society. And now our men of letters cannot develop a political or moral thought without searching out a social science abstract from which to loot it. Most of the time, I find they don’t read the studies. Why bother? The authors of the studies know what the wonks desire to say, and design studies to give their words the look of authority. It’s a perpetual-motion machine. And like a machine, it generates only the illusion of a working intelligence inside it.

  From where I sit, the Easter Rising and its popularity has been misunderstood by the great and the good from the moment it began. It is almost as if the Rising happened behind a veil that excluded respectable opinion: In today’s Irish papers the Rising is denounced as a senseless, theocratic plot. In the exact same papers in 1916 it was denounced as senseless communist agitation. Within a week of the events, the Rising became known on Irish streets and in British government offices as the “Sinn Fein Rebellion,” even though Sinn Fein had almost nothing to do with it. The Rising was misidentified by the authorities and misunderstood by the approved commentators even before its leaders were executed.

  What I think bothers official Ireland most about the Rising is that its leaders were so thoroughly vindicated, in ways that are impossible to justify through the accepted terms of social science and technocracy. In military terms the Rising failed, as its leaders anticipated. But they also knew that Ireland would be so inflamed by their deeds that she would one day seize independence. They wanted to redeem the city of Dublin from its complicity in colonial rule, and Dublin streets and buildings found their place in a people’s ballads. They predicted that their names would be entered into the long and glorious roll of Irish rebels; and they are, all of them, at the head. Ever since, historians have been trying to catch up to them, trying to explain how everything went wrong, and yet exactly according to plan. How was it that a band of radical poets and language activists won a fight that they lost, a fight that Ireland had lost, one way or another, for centuries every time it was tried? They still cannot see it.