It had been night time all morning. Mum and I had passed the dark hours by ourselves. I remember her tears, the rise and fall of her shoulders as she sat on a wooden chair beside my da's motionless body. I remember silence.
I was four, standing in the doorway behind mum, looking past her at the thing that lay stretched out on the bed, perfectly still, hollow, grey. She spoke to me without turning around.
"Come say goodbye to your da."
I walked into the room. The curtains were drawn, and there was no light but for a small bedside lamp that cast a shadow of yellow haze over the darkness. There weren't enough light in all the world to hide the pallor of death in that room. It were better not to try. The lack of light was comforting. It kept the grim reality of death at bay, hidden beyond the senses, noticeable, yet not obvious.
I wasn't much taller than the bed. I remember mostly the angularity of my father's nose in profile, his lips parted, chin pointing upwards, eye lids not quite shut properly. The thing did not look like my da, and I would not have believed it were if not for the slump in my mother's back, as if the weight of all the universe had rested upon her shoulders like a large, black crow that tilted his head to look down on the body with an enormous black eye.
"It's okay to touch him," mother said.
I hadn't much considered this possibility in the first place, and I likely never would have if she had not suggested it. I don't remember touching my father at all, not as he lived, at least. As long as I had known him he were a sickly man in a room I had not been allowed to enter. I have foggy memories of ambling about the house with a diaper sagging from my bum, pushing toy cars across the carpet, making pictures with crayons in reading books I had pulled from the bookshelves, and all manner of other toddlerish activities. These early, formative memories are inseparably intertwined with a dread of that room.
I remember one day that the door had been left open, just cracked a few inches. It was midday, but that room was always dark, but for a soft glow of blue light that wrestled its way through the thick curtains. The man who was my father had tubes around his face, and there was a green tank at the side of his bed with wheels on it. He felt me at the door and turned his head to face me.
"Hello, son," he whimpered between heavy breaths. Then he began to cough. Just a rustling of phlegm at first, a clearing of the throat. But it would not stop. The coughing grew more violent. Louder, more desperate. My mum came running, shouting at me.
"What have you done, Eddie? Get out! You know better than to bother your da."
She pushed me from the room and shut the door. The coughing continued for several minutes. I could hear her beating da on the back with a closed fist, saying over and over again, "Out with it, Charlie. That's good. Get it all out, now."
I have no memory of my father's touch, so when my mother told me I should touch his hands by way of saying goodbye, I was reluctant. I had never seen hands that lay so perfectly still. I had never seen skin so pale. I'd have preferred to pick up a dead sparrow by the tip of his talon than to touch the ghost that lay before my eyes.
"Go on, tell him you love him," she said.
I didn't love my da. I didn't know my da. He seemed a nice man, and everybody spoke lovely words about him when they came for visits. My mum's brother Bob, for example, would come on occasion and fill the house with his loud voice and booming laughter.
"Come on, Charlie," he'd say. "Let's be on with it now! You'll make us late for football. We'll take you with us. You can play in goal with that tank strap on, can't ya? We'll make it like the old days. Get you back to your old lusty self, you. We'll get you out to the pub, find you a new bird to play with. Kathy won't mind, will you love?"
My mother always seemed more hopeful when her brother came down from Dublin, where her family had been. He helped her to remember happy days. He were like a ray of sun that shines on a green field when the clouds part, just momentarily, in the cold, dark days of early spring. He reminded her that the color of the grass depended only on the parting of the clouds. He reminded her there was still a sun in the sky, though she lived in darkness on the other side of the world.
I'd learned later that my father had met mum while at college and had dragged her down to Bandon where he'd found work as an engineer after graduating university. He had no family himself. His parents had both been set in the grave already, and he were an only child. Mum's family had taken him in. They seemed to get on with him quite well.
Uncle Bob was a man I'd grown to love as much as it were possible for me to love anyone, but he weren't in my life much, neither. He'd adopted me, after a fashion, when I went to college in Dublin. He let me stay at his home, and we would have conversations. He taught me to go "birding," as he called it, which meant going to pubs and chatting up girls. Uncle Bob never married, and he had loads of money. He was a banker, or an investor, or something. He had some murky career in finance that I didn't ever much understand. He'd be gone "on work" for weeks at a time, and then he'd be home for a few days, always restless. Never staying at home. Always suggesting a night at a boxing match or a pub. They were a good two years that I spent living at Uncle Bob's flat, and he were as much a father to me as anybody. I still think on him fondly.
But any ideas I have of the man my father was were constructed only in memory after his passing, built through conversations with my uncle, stitched together with the memories of that haunted room. I was Dr. Frankenstein, bringing to life a monster that lived inside my mind, created of those cold, thin hands and my uncle's robust stories.
But the cancer took him. Aye, it did. And I never came to know the man.
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