The Haunting

 

Not long ago, on holiday in the West of Ireland, I started waking in the small hours of the morning,  afraid there was a ghost in the room. Given that I don’t even believe in ghosts, in the cold light of day, I laughed it off.

But when it happened again, I found myself unsettled, and on edge: dreading the night. And on the third morning, on an early walk,  I heard a question from my own heart: “What is it that you are really haunted by?” 

And the answer came.

Today, my father is gone from this world for two years.  In the last few months, I have been noticing changes in the swell and ebb of grief. The waters have become calmer. And yet, at the same time, there’s an undeniable truth I have often felt swept up, possessed even, by a struggle beyond myself.

 And at the moment I called that a haunting, something else began to whisper, calling for me to reclaim it as my own.

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes the pipes are calling.   From glen to glen, and down the mountain side

The last time I saw my father was at his brother’s funeral, in September 2018.  We hadn’t spoken in a long time.

That January, he had lost his temper with me for not showing up at my grandmother’s first anniversary mass. Though in truth, I had not been told about it, he had convinced himself he had, and by text message, flew into one of his usual rages that, on that day, for my own reasons, I was too tired, too raw, too overwhelmed to contain.  

For a long time, this text conversation lived on my phone.  I have read it a thousand times: perhaps a thousand times a thousand.

At the beginning, I responded in some wannabe Zen, pseudo-Saint like way: sanctimoniously, dare I say it, placating and smoothing over, trying to defuse this bomb that had already gone off. When he began calling, and I would not pick up, message after message popped up on the screen, each one more cutting than the last. Who did I think I was? I would amount to nothing. When he was my age, he had started his own psychotherapy school. What did I have to show for myself? I had dishonoured my grandmother, when she had loved me so much. How could I not show up for her, when she had always shown up for me?

And, protected, yet propelled too somehow, by the screen between us, something within me snapped. I challenged back. I said, no.

This is not true. This is not what she would say. This is your own self-focused misery, and I am not having any more of it.  And when that, too, was about some deficiency in me, eventually I did that wincingly modern thing, in all its brutality and clumsiness, of “setting a boundary”.

I did something I had never done before. I blocked his number. I closed the door on his pain, and opened the door to my own.

The Summer’s gone, and all the flowers are dying: Tis you, tis you, must go while I must bide.

Nine months later, on that final day I saw him, we were late to the Church, my sister and I,  and quickly seated ourselves at the back. The congregation was large, and so when it came time for communion, there were several Eucharistic Ministers. After communion, my father did not return to his own seat, moving to sit alone in the top seat of a several rows of empty seats directly ahead of me.

From where I was, I watched him, his face turned towards the altar. At first, I felt a bristle of irritation at how very like him it was to make a grand gesture, to sit apart. At a different point in his life, even he would have called that “a load of  symbollix”.  

And yet…suddenly it seemed hard to imagine the gulf that had come between us, to believe this old, vulnerable man could ever have been in any rage at all. He was thinner now: crumpling, alone. Smaller somehow.  The choir were singing words we had, at another time, sung together:

You shall cross the barren desert
But you shall not die of thirst
You shall wander far in safety
Though you do not know the way
You shall speak your words in foreign lands
And all will understand
You shall see the face of God and live

Be not afraid
I go before you always
Come follow me
And I will give you rest

Something in me slowed, something in me opened, and a great swell of the pain of the barren desert that had grown between us whooshed into my heart. As the crowd gathered in lines to receive communion, I looked at my sister: I have to go to him.

I was so afraid.

Bypassing the nearest minister, I searched him out: sliding alongside him, linking my arm in his. How thin and stiff and diminished his arm had become, the strong arm that had been my refuge long ago long gone: too long gone, it seemed like, for a man in his 60’s. “I am so sorry, Dad.”   His eyes did not meet mine.

And so, beside him, I stayed. And sang.

Blessed are your poor
For the kingdom shall be theirs
Blessed are you that weep and mourn
For one day you shall laugh
And if wicked men insult and hate you all because of me
Blessed, blessed are you

Be not afraid
I go before you always
Come follow me
And I will give you rest

As the communion came to a close, he stood up: “Excuse me, I have to go back now”, he said, returning to where his wife and therapist friends sat waiting for him.

Those were the final words he ever spoke to me.

As he walked away, the music faded. Directly above me, my eyes met the young child Jesus, his arms outstretched. I was alone now, in rows of empty seats I could not leave.

I unblocked his number that night. He rang, but left no message, and I did not return his call.

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow. Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow, t'is I'll be there in sunshine or in shadow. Oh, Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so!

I think I have been haunted since that moment.

I said to someone this week I hadn’t seen my father in the six months before he died, but I realised yesterday that it was closer to a year.  The day that became his funeral date was the date I had scheduled, by agreement, to end two years of therapy in  which he had always been the ghost in the room: sometimes like a metaphorical Poltergeist, knocking down some sensation or slamming some emotional door; sometimes more corporeal, with his own place in his own chair, sad and unreachable.  

When he died, at first, and perhaps like all the Dead, he became a Saint, and the only stories I could tell, or perhaps more accurately feel, were those of sunshine, and not of shadow.

But in recent weeks, I’ve been struck how we are rarely haunted by what the light touches, and maybe what is most true is that the Dead’s need of us, and our need of them, is that we walk honestly with who they really were in our lives, making room for all of what it was like to be in relationship with them - not only on the bright days, but also in the dark.

For the longest time in coming to terms with the rupture of what I had believed could never be broken, it seemed to me that what I really needed was to be forgiven for shutting the door on him.

But the ghost that visited me told a different story:  

I love you. I am sorry. Please forgive me. For all that I did, and all that I was not able to do.

And I hear you Dad. 

And today I will go, to the place where you are lying, and kneel and say an Ave there for you. I hope with all my heart that you will hear me, and that wherever you may be in this moment, we will both be all the freer for the hearing.