My Father Left Me Ireland by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Author:Michael Brendan Dougherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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