And so, my father, hail and farewell for evermore.

And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

- Philip Larkin, "High Windows" from Collected Poems.

One of my earliest memories is of you and me at home alone. You made me mashed potatoes, and I remember how differently it tasted. You probably put way too much butter in.

Then you wrapped me in a nice warm coat and zipped me all up and off we went, over to the park opposite Meadowbrook, beside the John Barleycorn Hotel. And I recall us walking up a hill.

And then at the top we stopped. And I’m standing beside you now, and I see you looking out into the world. I'm warm, with my belly full, and we are holding hands, eyes fixed on the horizon, together, in silence.

I saw then how to look upon the world; how an artist looks and listens for the music of what happens. I learned about prayer and what the sacred feels like - I felt simply loved. Total silent open endless love. The kind of love that you were best at, and that stood beside me minding me and teaching me my whole life. The kind of love that will never leave, and, if I do it right, the kind of love that I will leave behind me too.

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You dropped me to school one morning in the car. It was my first or maybe my second year in school. And I dreaded it. I think it was because the teachers were unhappy.

Usually I walked up with Nór, but today you drove me. Maybe it was raining hard. You had to be at the university but when we arrived outside the gate of the playground I knew I had to stall you for as long as I could before making that sorry trek across the yard.

You gave in and decided to teach me how to read the clock. You pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and started to draw faces with hands, and I was in heaven. The quarter to, the half past, I wanted it to go on forever.

You always taught me about time. Especially the waiting. Waiting in the long grass for when the time is right. And striking when the iron's hot. You were a master at both. Those nanoseconds before hammering that white-hot key. Or waiting for years for that jealous adversary to weave enough rope for themselves.

Then you really had to go, to pioneer and stake a claim on the wild frontiers of higher learning. And as I slid down from the seat onto the tarmac, you said what you said to me everyday on my way to school. It was your blessing - 'be good now, and don’t forget to mind all the little babas'.

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And that famous time you were tucking me into bed in our home in Murroe. Maybe we were only renting it then, so might have been before I was eight years old. Sitting on the side of my bed, your full adult weight a gravitational force beside me, your warmth and fatherly smell an overwhelming comfort.

I would ask you questions. The deeper and more philosophical the better. I learned early that these were the ones that sucked you in. I was wrapped in wonder at the earnestness that you would muster. Every question returned with a professorial elucidation. And then it was time for you to go, and you kissed my forehead, and then it hit me - "What is time Dada?”

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You always told me the truth. I could trust in that. You always said how you would never break a promise. And that fascinated me.

You often reminisced with me about the night before your first day at your new job at the University of Limerick. I was heading out the kitchen door on my way to bed, I looked at you over the breakfast bar and whispered, "best of luck tomorrow dads". And I also remember that. I knew something was going to happen. And I knew you would be fabulous. What I didn't know is that, the moment I left, you glanced up through the high kitchen windows, and saw a shooting star stripe across the sky.

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And heading off to boarding school at the age of twelve, you sent me packed with the essentials: a best of Van Morrison double cassette album and a hardback first edition copy of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. It was first edition because the second run hadn't been printed yet. And I felt like the coolest fucking kid in the whole school.

But after a few weeks, you came up to visit me in the middle of the day to drop something off. Maybe I had called to try make you to come. Perhaps you'd heard the quiver of homesickness in my voice. But I knew what I was going to say.

The minute you saw me you knew too, and you put your arm around me and we took a walk up to the church. I couldn't fight back the tears. As you consoled me I remember whispering between the sobs, ‘I really don't know how I'll stick this for another six years.’

And from that moment on, I felt totally at home in that wild and weird place.

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From when I was around twenty-two to thirty, we lived together, us three lads, held in the prayerful palm of old farmhouse Dromore. There were these mornings, usually weekend mornings, mid mornings, when you would burst into my room balancing an abundant and precariously overloaded tray of goodies for breakfast. Boiled eggs. Toast. An overflowing pot of tea. As much Mulcahy pottery as could be mustered. Sometimes even a little flower in small jar. "Carpe diem!!!" was the war cry, either to prepare me for the feast to come, or kept just for the theatrical grand entrance.

You offload your goods on the coffee table and then slide the tray down on the duvet as I prop myself up. And then we would eat. Sometimes talking, and sometimes not. And I couldn't imagine a more magical rite, the holiest of communions, the sense of pure essential specialness, how time would somehow slacken to a saunter - waking into a new day, encouraged into the great unknown, with a tray of loving invitation at my side.

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For my father’s wake, his body was laid out in the front room of his beloved home, Dromore House. There he laid for three days, a vigil kept around him. Candles lit and incense burning, music playing. Cups of tea and tears and smiles and hugs. Speaking to him through sobs of such tenderness and love, touching his face, hands upon the miracle of his hands. Memories flooding over me, of childhood especially, wave after surging wave with the same sensation of a bully’s push and a playful pull, and then the backwash of sand sucked out from under my feet - then nothingness, for a time, before the next wave rose again.

His spirit was so present there. Not the same as when he was alive. It was a different presence; strange - but he was there. I felt him there. Like a burning fire that burned but never changed. Needed no fuel. Needed nothing. Gave no heat. Gave only presence. Life presence. Like those timeless moments when light washes the room through the thought of high windows. Time hangs thick as fruit before the Fall. And there is just this sense of everything - everywhere - forever

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.