Raising a Glass to My Father’s Spirit on New Year’s Eve
Reflecting on love, loss and how an uncanny coincidence in a bookshop, while reading Paul McCartney's The Lyrics, made me feel my late father's presence...
On New Year’s Eve, I often think about how my late father would have raised a glass of Bailey’s to toast the year ahead with his signature optimism. He was a teetotaler but would break out a bottle of his favourite tipple during Christmas.
As I get older, I’ve come to accept something: I’m no Clint Eastwood. The tough exterior I once prided myself on has softened, and I’ve turned into a sentimental fool. These days, even tearjerkers like Hereafter—with Matt Damon playing a man helping the bereaved search for answers about the afterlife—can leave me misty-eyed.
But for much of my life, I was never a big fan of Father’s Day or Mother’s Day. The cynic in me saw them as little more than marketing ploys, clever schemes by greeting card companies to sell sentimentality for a profit.
But I had a change of heart when my father, Gerry, died suddenly in 2014. Losing him changed everything.
Everybody wants to believe in the possibility of being magically reunited with loved ones in heaven. Obviously, none of us are dying to find out the answer.
I've always been a doubting Thomas myself. But I'm becoming a bit more superstitious these days. It’s all thanks to a freaky experience with Paul McCartney's book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
It all happened after I mentioned in one of my Sunday newspaper columns how I could no longer enjoy listening to The Beatles' When I'm Sixty-Four. The reasoning being, Gerry used to jokingly belt it out all the time when he quipped about getting old.
It was one of his two favourite party pieces, along with the Heigh-Ho ditty the seven dwarfs sang as they marched down to the mines with shovels and pickaxes slung over their shoulders.
My dad humorously changed the lyrics to "I Owe, I Owe" as he himself left home in the wee hours of the morning to earn his crust as a breadman in Dublin, and later Co Kildare, with Johnston, Mooney & O'Brien.
In a sad twist of irony, he died shortly before his sixty-third birthday. That particular Sunday column about him was coincidentally published coming up to what would've been his seventieth birthday.
I've often heard you need to be tuned in, so to speak, to spot the signs of lost loved ones sending messages from beyond the grave. And if that's truly the case, I heard it loud and clear on that particular Sunday.
I was still feeling a bit blue with childhood memories dancing around my brain, having only written about those personal recollections 48 hours earlier. So, I decided to cheer myself up with a quick browse in a bookstore.
While there, I couldn't resist having a gander at Macca’s doorstopper of a tome, considering his tune was mentioned in the article out that very same day. The pages slowly fell open, as if guided by an invisible hand, to reveal the lyrics of When I'm Sixty-Four.
You couldn't make it up. The spooky coincidence had my heart singing to the beat of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Surely it would make even an atheist wonder if something could be out there.
My dad also used to joke about how if he died first, he’d find a way to send my mom, Rosaleen, the winning Lotto numbers. “It would be living proof of an afterlife,” he quipped
Not so long ago, she found a piece of paper in Gerry's old jacket with six numbers jotted down in his handwriting.
It would really feel like much more than some mere “lotto” luck if they ever transpire to be the winning numbers. It would give a whole new meaning to his numbers coming up now, so to speak.
We had a great relationship, and I can take solace from the fact that we were never afraid to express our love for each other.
I'd give all the money in the world to watch him open one more Father's Day card.
