Dad,
I love you.
When I was born you told me you jumped for joy and I have always felt special for you, or rather, you have always made me feel special. More than father and son, for many years we were companions : sharing hours, days, months ; just being together, discussing life, aspirations, sharing small pleasures together – intensely, deeply, humourously ; sometimes very humourously, drawn forward by your eye for the « ridiculous » as well as for the « profound » and shifting from one to the other in a few seconds. And now you are gone and I am left alone – not alone in the world, but the lonely survivor of our companionship. Alone because no-one else can fully understand exactly what « I » miss ; because our relationship was genuinely unique.
And you, what happened in those last hours ? How much did you suffer ? Were you at inner peace despite the suffering ? Did you feel God reach out to you ? My place was by your side and that was taken away from us.
In one of our last conversations we said that love – the existence of a relationship of love – is a reality which exists in itself independently of time and distance and I thought, and I think we both thought though neither of us said it, independently also of « life and death ». Well, now is the time to put that into practice, to discover it. But I will still miss you. Our conversations. Your wisdom. Your humour. Very simple things : every time I go for a run, taste a particularly good beer, play cribbage, … I will always think of you, you will suddenly be present, as always.
And lastly Dad, when I jumped into a taxi in Manila in the Philippines just after hearing about your convulsions just over a year ago, Frank Sinatra was singing « The Unreachable Star » on the radio
and there was so much of « you » in that song – it was more than a coincidence – And the words that came to me were « My Dad taught me to dream ». Thank you. Thank you for all this and so much more. Goodbye. I love you Dad. I love you.
Your son, Mark