The Matchbox Stars

Samhain, it’s the time of year where death often slinks into my brain, nestles in the corner and sits there quietly irritating me until I’m forced to stare into its cold mouldering face. I’ve only had three significant deaths occur in my life and the last was my fathers nearly five years ago now. It was hard for me to deal with at the time, not because of the emotion but more because of the lack of it. I wrote this poem a few days after his death, after I rushed home from across the world:

Ivy clings to the rock as my limbs to the earth.
Invisible threads draw tight, constricting,
As my breath blows white in the frosty air.

Buses, airports, planes, Mothers cannot wait.
Buses, airports, planes, ….. corpse.
I have been gone and I have returned to death.
Strange that in its face memory conjures only a six year olds dream of patricide,
Knife wielding at the door of a record blaring slurring father.
Now dead.
Now just living, screaming, in my head.

I am a boy in the body of a man,
I was once fatherless and now I am again.
And yet I have chosen this,
To learn, to know or just to simply grow.
And so I call you father,
And thank you for the matchbox stars

It can take a long time to process the death of someone, especially someone with whom you had a difficult relationship or at times no relationship at all. In trying to deal with this its all to easy to focus on the negative things, the hurt, the pain, the flashes of bitter childhood memory. Eventually you have to let it go and just try to take the good things with you, and thankfully with my father I do have something good to take with me. You see despite all the other baggage, my father has left me with one outstanding memory.

One night I was sitting in our living room when I was about five or six while my father was drinking some of the foul beer that he brewed himself in the hotpress and that smelled of old socks. We struck up a conversation and he explained to me how the solar system worked using a box of Maguire and Patterson matches and a 10 pack of Carrolls Cigarettes. I remember sitting in awe as his rotated one box around the other and explained the majesty of celestial mechanics and how the earth was just a tiny spaceship in a huge universe. That night changed my life. It wasn’t just the orbits and planets that amazed me but it was the realization that the world I thought I knew was just based in my perceptions, that what I knew was just a facade in front of something much more miraculous, and it struck me even then that what my father had explained might not be the whole truth either.

This thought more than any other has informed my life, I’ve never really believed in the reality of anything, even myself, more than I’ve had to do to get something done, as I’m always waiting for someone to just magically move their hands over some matchbox stars and reveal some deeper amazing truth.

I know now that my Da’s life was hard, much harder than mine, and I cannot judge him as I did when I was younger. I know now my own failings and how hard it is for me to keep everything together. I know now the strain of fatherhood and understand how given his path through life how hard it was for him. He tried but certain things got the better of him and he wasn’t always up to the task, but he managed some good things and it is for those that I choose to remember him by.

So Da, wherever, whatever or whenever you are, thanks for the Matchbox Stars.