'Dad is gone 15 years next week - because his presence is everywhere, it feels like five minutes'
'One of the towering privileges of my life was to be there to assist Mam and Dad as the ticking clock ambushed their strength and vitality'
It was the love poem, the earthy yet eloquent hymn, the soundtrack of our crushing grief, as we shouldered my father's coffin from the church.
Finbar Furey's singular delivery, his beautiful, haunting, lived-in articulation, his voice seemingly lubricated by a shot of gravel, every atom of his being invested in the lyrics, invaded the congregation's bloodstream.
"I never will forget him. For he made me what I am. Though he may be gone, Memories linger on, And I miss him, the old man."
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As the sobs and unforgettable banjo melody scorched into our consciousness, it was as if some emotional mixologist was stirring together the tears and music and verse to create the perfect bereavement cocktail.
Dad is gone 15 years next week - because his presence is everywhere, because love is immortal, it feels more like five minutes - but, recently, that 2009 hour that so wrinkled our universe thundered back across the decades to again seize us in its vice-like and affecting grip.
A reminder of what it is to lose the man who gifted me life, a giant of my world, to awaken memories of a day, that, irony of ironies, will never die. The occasion was another funeral - of the great Maxi MacManamon, father of Dublin football's 2011 liberator, Kevin.
When the first chords of that banjo pierced the silence, the jolt carried the force of Mike Tyson's balled right fist. I could feel my father so close at my side, that I almost turned to begin a conversation.
"He was more than just a father. A teacher, my best friend."
A line I read recently vividly described the sensations coursing through my body. It was as if my heart was "a submarine sinking back into the foam." I stood in a church in Templeogue and, more than 5,400 days after I last set eyes on him, Dad's smile - the one that, despite the unfathomably hard blows he had been dealt on his journey through life, rejected cynicism - kidnapped the entirety of my being.
At that moment, more than anything on earth, I wished I could sit with him in Neary's for just one more pint, watch him swirling his glass in the idiosyncratic way of his, and hear him again tell the stories of his youth. To watch the sheen in his eyes as he talked of how he met Ma. For it to be Dublin town in 1962 all over again.
It was as if some soldier of fate had unpinned an overheated grenade of feeling and hurled it in my direction. For some reason I chose not to duck away from its flightpath. This might sound daft, but I was delighted I felt so moved. My sadness somehow made me happy.
It was confirmation that I hadn't forgotten, of the longevity of love. A reminder of how blessed are those of us who have bathed in the warm glow of a parent's unconditional emotional benevolence. Some stories that seem to stretch beyond any previous known limit of depravity have made headlines over the last numbers of days.
One about a father who raped and abused his own child over an extended period was unimaginably horrific. I stopped reading half way through, recoiling from details too unbearable to consume. At a bar counter recently, I got talking to a thirtysomething American who hadn't spoken to his old man in more than ten years. Their relationship was a closed book. Think about that and how awful it must be, a chasm so wide that it cannot, will not, be bridged.
It got me thinking. The most sunlit and supreme good fortune that shines on so many of us - the love of a parent, the self-sacrifice that opens doors of opportunity for sons and daughters that would otherwise remain bolted - is something we often take for granted. Like the life-giving air that we breathe, we rarely stop to consider its inestimable, couldn't-live-without-it value. It's just there. Except, of course, when it isn't.
How much loneliness and neurosis would a dysfunctional father-son/daughter relationship foster in your psyche? Where do you get the currency to go on once that paternal gold is stripped away and you are left feeling bankrupt and broken and so horribly exposed?One of the towering privileges of my life was to be there to assist Mam and Dad as the ticking clock ambushed their strength and vitality.
If observing their decline was heartbreaking, there was the enormous consolation of just being there for them, holding their hands, spending glorious time at their bedsides, repaying the tiniest fraction of the Himalayan dimensioned debt owed to them for all their years of sacrifice. Many of you will have walked that same road.
It is why, when hearing that Joe Biden's son, Hunter, is encouraging his clearly struggling father to walk again a road he is patently unfit to travel, my brain struggles to compute. Imagine, for a moment, this frail, ailing man, clearly in the grip of the physical and cognitive decline that comes to us all if we live long enough, was your father.
If Joe was your own blood and you saw him thrashing helplessly in the waters of old age, would you not dash to save him, to throw him a lifebuoy, to place a protective arm around his shoulders and carry him to safety? Would love not demand such an intervention?
Instead, seemingly to sate the egos of those around him, a vulnerable octogenarian felt compelled to plough on, to tackle an incline that is clearly beyond his capabilities.
Random things bring Dad back to life. As I walk towards Croke Park to watch Cork and Clare sing a song for Ireland, one of the sights that will make my heart dance is that of young sons and daughters - giddy and in the uniform of their team - walking spellbound beside their parents toward the great cathedral.
I was that kid once, me and the Da, side by side, enlisting in Heffo's Army, a quiet man's way of telling his son he was loved. On Wednesday, I managed to get my hands on that most elusive of prizes - two All-Ireland hurling final tickets. The phone call to the Cork father and son - a hurling mad kid who has been with the Rebels for every yard of this summer's uplifting journey, but who who was resigned to missing tomorrow's day for the ages - offered me a vicarious thrill as precious as life itself.
The father, close to sobbing himself, put his 13-year-old boy on the line and his shrieks of joy, his uncontainable elation, were worth more than a year of Lotto jackpots. Father and son will march together to Croker today, a modern slant on Finbar Furey's days of childhood wonder.
"As a boy he'd take me walking,
By mountain, field, and stream,
And he'd show me things
Not known to kids,
A secret between him and me."
In the concert hall of my soul, Finbar Furey plucks a banjo. Fifteen years, but, God, I miss him, the Old Man.
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