Babel is beautiful

 

Babel is beautiful

 

Covid really hurt Dad & me

I was prevented from visiting him for two of his twilight years in Aged Care

Which I do understand

 

Anyway,

With his dementia

By the time I finally saw him

He’d deteriorated a good deal & death seemed to be approaching

He was basically non verbal by now

This dedicated ex-priest, school teacher & poet

 

One day at a visit soon after

He seemed really ‘down’

He managed a couple of abortive monosyllables

Over a few hours

He seemed ‘not really there’

& then stunned me

 

He uttered “suic”

I was shaken

I thought my meditative father had finally lost out to despair

As in “suicide”

 

For the next few days at work

Teaching, following on from my father

I had difficulty focussing

& the word stuck with me

Always in the back of my mind

For his remaining 2 bedridden years

& through the days of deep grief

I received for him his death as a kind of relief

 

Then a weird thing happened

A couple of years later

I was having a pint with an Irishman mate

We shared our family stories

Yunno good Irishmen are ‘straight up’

Anyway,

I told him about that incident with Dad’s “suic”: suicide plea

 

Then the Irishman, Ciaran, told me the Gaelic word “suac” (pronounced the same way)

Means “Up”

As in maybe my Irish father had slipped too low down in his bed, was uncomfortable & needed to be adjusted

 

I guess I’ll never know definitively what he meant

 

Gaelic

(Which only survived illegally in Eire under British Penal Law

When Ireland was enslaved* & starved)

Ended in my family

With us Australian kids

(Mum didn’t speak it & anyway my family has a complicated story)

I only know 5 or 6 Gaelic words, I think (maybe a couple more that I can’t think of right now?):

I know how to say my name, the name of my ancestors’ country, how to say blessings/cheers/good luck,

now how to say “up”

& a really good one, the Gaelic word for con man (literally ‘cute man’), which I can say but not spell

(If I meet ya & you’d like to know I’ll tell ya)

 

There are many languages in this city I live in

That I don’t know at all

So, if we speak ever

Please teach me a word or two

Much respect

As the 'Universal Declaration' (1948) should read: “in the spirit of siblinghood”+

 

 

*there are different types of ‘slavery’ & I do not attempt to claim that my ancestors had a monopoly on suffering. However relativising ‘genocides’ is not a game for me. I’ll just say a million were starved to death in ‘the famine’.

+ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) uses the word “brotherhood”. I’m attempting to update the language of that sentence, in a more accurate way than others have done. (Some have ‘updated’ brotherhood to “community”, which I believe to be a dangerous dilution).

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2025.