Dad’s Diary

We are constantly surprised by time. We glance at the clock in the morning, realise we’re late, and make a panicked dash for the door, abandoning a half-finished cup of coffee. Each New Year’s Eve surprises us too, as we suddenly find ourselves thrust uncomprehendingly into an exotic new year that once lay in the realms of science fiction.

Each birthday, we are taken aback that another year has gone, as a breath carried off by a storm. We know that our years on Earth are numbered, and so we want to savour them. Yet they flash by in a moment, and fall away forever.

The permanence of time’s passing is sobering. The past can never be recovered, and what is done can not be undone. Once it is gone, the past could have been a dream. Perhaps that is why we take photographs, to try to cheat time. To bend its rules by glimpsing backwards into the past, and to clutch at evidence that those moments were real, and meant something.

Time can suprise us in a happy way too, as when we meet a child we haven’t seen in a year or two. Time is the fertiliser that has let them grow so astonishingly. They have thrived and are suddenly no longer the baby, or the toddler, that we remember. They are taller, stronger and coming into their own. A gleam in their eye reveals their character as it emerges.

I remember vividly the first time I saw my children open their eyes, only moments old. In those instants, I saw the light within them shine for the first time in the world. My whole being willed them to shine brightly, and for a long time. They, and how we raise them, are perhaps our only real legacy in the world.

Each of us alive today is part of a chain stretching back to the beginning of time. In raising children, we create a new link in that ancient chain. As we propel a new generation forward, if we raise them to be decent and kind to others, and try to be so ourselves, we leave something of lasting value in a transient world. Something that perhaps even time cannot touch.

Caught up in the busyness of our daily lives, when news comes that someone we care about has died, we are jolted. We think of the unimaginable place of grief those nearest to them find themselves in. A precious and unique light has gone out. A couple of weeks ago, I awoke to the sad news of my uncle’s passing. He was the second of my father’s brothers to die in just a year. They were both well-loved, much-admired men whose wonderful wives, children and grandchildren remain behind them, along with much other evidence of lives well-lived. It is a consolation that they leave so much goodness in the world.

Photos

Our family gathered together by Cork harbour for the funeral, on a winter’s day. We spent time together afterward, cheating time for a while, as we looked at photos that vividly revealed my uncle as a happy child and bright young man. His warm smile seemed to shine out from those old photographs, a constant across the decades. Many fond memories of him were shared. I recalled being happy as a child, and feeling inexpressibly safe, surrounded by my many uncles, aunts and cousins, all of us part of the great, broad Fitzgerald clan. In the days that followed, I remembered many small, kind moments with my uncle; handshakes and smiles when we would meet. Not even time can take those from us.