Getting towards the end

 

Getting towards the end

 

I've finished my book about my childhood & feel like I really don’t want to air it, for an audience who wasn’t there will have their conclusions & I don’t want that. We live in a country where if a man lays a finger against any members of his family, he is written off as being beyond redemption, in a country that has only villains & victims, like Hollywood. It’s old testament, fire & brimstone stuff. Strange for a post-religious time.

Most people here have watched more movies & tv than done anything else. They see ‘narratives’ in life, which may or may not be there. Modern medicine, for instance, doesn’t look at narratives to heal people, it looks at what works/proximity. In our post-God era, there is no basis for belief in narratives. Narratives are biblical, homilies, parables. But in a world of competing subjectivities, which story trumps the others?

The reality for my father, if we’re to say fuck it – if you can’t beat em join em – & write a narrative summation, is to say that Dad’s good outweighed his bad. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?

As one of my siblings put it “he had a few bad years” but apart from that he was “pretty crisp.”

He didn’t go to the pub, or any club. He was available at home, doing his marking & writing his elegies.

But as we know, it’s the darker poems, the psalms that have more gravitas than the hymns, more power.

I’m writing without inspiration today, as I try to finish this book. It’s quite plausible I won’t publish it, but nothing else really captivates, apart from fruit & occasional people, but with nothing of the passion I feel about my dad. I miss him. I’ve decided we’ve gotta scatter his ashes soon, so that his spirit can be with Mum’s. From the time he met her, all he wanted was to be with her. But it was instant family. Instant responsibilities. Instant swimming against the tide. The world against the 5 of them for Dad leaving the priesthood. & then all these bills arrived from people who’d given the priest free services. The hostility was incredible. My parents had done something taboo. & So we all saw what people are really like. How quick to condemn to seek vengeance for some perceived betrayal. When really it was the ending of their bad faith that a priest is somehow different to a man. Sociological deviance is like that. Break a norm & watch the birds of war gather. United in their hatred.

So we were brought up in a scandal & taught to be ourselves. Compassionate but determined. Kind to those in need & unabashed about who we are. So I write this for you mum & dad. “We’re as good as anyone else.” So fuck you!, judges.

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2023.