A Paternal Mythology.

A message to my father Peter Garvey

My father left my life when I was 10 years old. It was abrupt and brutal. We had all been preparing for my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. It was a milestone for my parents. The celebration was not to be however. His massive heart attack resulted in a shrill loud snore which sent my mother into a frenzied alarm. He died quickly according to my knowledge despite my brother Peter’s courageous attempt at resuscitation. We gradually filed in to the bedroom, sibling after sibling, to pay our respects to our dear father. I was woken up by my mother sobbing beside my face, telling me that her husband was dead. I had cried in the very same bed only a couple of days previously imagining what it would be like to lose a parent. It seemed my psyche had been preparing me for the ultimate finality that occurred that night. The slight eddies of my imagination quickly turned into the riptide of my reality, dragging me down. Smothered and drowning.

Peter Garvey in the Yukon.

The singular shock of seeing your father dead, lying in his bed, stays with you. The jolt of witnessing your siblings react to this also stays with you. He slept on his back when he was alive so it was hard to accept that he was doing anything but sleeping when he had died. I knew he was gone though. Mam asked me to give him a hug but I struggled as it just did not feel like Dad. Orla’s wails punctuated the fact he had passed. I admired my sister. She was honest. Her unshrouded heartache was there, for all too see, and hear. My father, wrapped up in a body bag, being carried to the ambulance, seemed to signal the finality of it all, to all of us. Orla screamed in anguish, watching our father be taken from our home. I watched all of these occurrences as if disembodied. The physical impact arrived about a half hour later when I threw up on the side of a road on the way to Clarinbridge to break the news to my older sister Denise, who was unaware of the fact that her father had died in his sleep two hours earlier.

This was our familial tsunami. We all had to attempt to assimilate and absorb what had happened on November 23, 1991. Peter Garvey became a mythological figure in my life that day in November. In his own life, he had been a man of few words but of massive kindness. This is what everyone said about him after his death - how kind he was. An Indian stranger turned up at our front door in Riverside after he died and thanked Mam for a random act of kindness Dad had shown him. The man’s wife was sick in hospital and he had no money to get a taxi down to the hospital. Dad locked up the petrol station he was working in, drove the man down to the hospital and waited for him in the car park until he was finished and dropped him back home. This is one story about my father that sheds some light.

He did have his darkness and his pain. He stopped drinking at the behest of my mother Nancy. St. John of God’s got him through. Nancy got him through. He got himself through. We never saw him drink - he completely gave it all up for his wife and family. Like any sane sober person, he went into the pub business for many years in Bettystown, Meath and in Killalla, Co. Mayo. That is where I came along - the only Mayo man in the family.

In the ten years I had with my father, I am unsure if I really truly got to know him properly. I dare say lots of sons would say the same even with paternal life spans of 80 years old. With the passing of time however I have felt his presence in a very acute manner. He has been there. He is there. He will be there. His absence in my life has filled an even bigger void than would have been filled with his presence. His constant commentary on my life has acted as a moral way-stone guiding me towards choices that embody his spirit.

Peter Garvey. Beer in Yukon.

I feel his presence when walking across countries, when talking to Benedictine monks, when encouraging a student, when appreciating nature, when helping someone who needs it. He is all encompassing. He is a father figure in the truest sense of the term yet not actually physically present. In some ways I have always felt a need to prove myself to him, except on my own terms. His death meant I had to decide what these expectations were as opposed to these being foisted on me. I genuinely don’t know what his aspirations for his youngest would have been. Whatever the case, his life has catapulted me in directions I daresay I would never have gone. His travels to the Yukon aged 23 inspired me to walk across Spain in 2005 aged 24. His trip to Lough Derg inspired me to spend two weeks in a silent order Benedictine Monastery. His humanity inspired me to treat people with kindness. He was very much himself. I try to be the same.

He was, like me, the youngest of six. He left the farm for a life of expansiveness and adventure. I often wonder what the 20 year old Peter Garvey was like. I see the photos with the chiselled chin and twinkling eyes and want to have a drink with him. He was my Kerouac and my father. I projected and still project everything on to him. The finitude of life and and need to experience was directly imparted to me through his death. Everything became urgent. It was imperative that life needed to be lived. The reason being that a massive heart attack could hit you in your sleep resulting in your exit from this life. I often wonder what my life would have turned out like if he had lived. Would I have had the same impulse to gain experience? Would I have had the same need to treat people well?

This is my message to him: thank you dad. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to live a life that is directly shaped by your 65 years on this planet. Thank you for being Peter Garvey, a man that had an endless capacity for kindness and gentleness. Thank you for showing me what true love is through your marriage to my mother. Thank you for showing me the Seven Sisters in the clear starry night. Thank you for telling me I was a great scholar even when I didn’t know what it meant. Thank you for everything.