Nine years ago, I watched my father die. My mother, older sister, two brothers and I held him as he passed; we prayed from a found book of Catholic prayers, chanting words we knew would comfort him, filling emptiness we couldn’t endure otherwise. In private conversations we’d told him how much we loved him. We hoped he could hear us; he was so drugged on morphine that his open eyes were unseeing and his only communication was loud, anguished moaning. Yet at the very end, when my mother looked into his eyes and shared a strength that a lifetime of marriage had nourished between them, my father looked at peace. Those moments were the most intense, beautiful, and profound of my life.

We’d known this time would come for months, but my father had held out hope he would recover. He was extremely protective of my mother, concerned about leaving her financially vulnerable and facing burdens he’d promised to spare her from. During my visits I watched my father show my mother how to pay bills online and access all their household accounts. I caught tension at times, the panic in my mother’s voice, frustration in my father’s, all of this grown out of the unbearable knowledge that their union in life was ending after over fifty years and five children together.

Other memories of those months: the three identical silver bracelets with hearts my father gifted us daughters for Valentine’s Day; him hunching over the mantelpiece in pain, seconds after a phone call in which he told a friend he was “terrific!”; his friends, “the breakfast club,” holding hands in a circle at the diner, praying for him; my older brother purchasing my mother conjoined stuffed animals that sang, “I’ve had the time of my life” to each other; my younger brother discovering the stone, still warm within my father’s dead hand, with the word “Faith” inscribed on it; Diane wheeling her luggage up to the house the night after my father died, not knowing he was gone, and when we gave her the news, putting up her hand in self-protection; me walking behind his coffin, arm-in-arm with my mother and sisters, trying not to cry; soldiers folding a flag at my father’s grave, then all of us singing “True Love” a capella; Diane and I at the reception, reading an early love letter from my father to my mother to the delighted laughter of everyone present; me coming home to Asheville and dreaming night after night that my father was in the room with me; me calling the radio station that played non-stop Christmas tunes and asking them to please stop because it was killing me; me changed in a million little ways.

My parents didn’t parent us perfectly. I wish I were better mentored, but my mother says, “Would you have listened?” And I don’t honestly know. But they were perfect for each other, and enjoyed a great romance. When my father first saw my mother across the room at the very same Irish Dance hall where his parents met twenty years earlier, he said to his buddy, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” They were the kind of couple who pulled chairs together when they visited, so they could sit side by side and hold hands. They danced weekly with their friends from the Irish Cultural Center until a month before my father passed, when he could no longer stand for very long. They said, “I love you” to each other every day, many times.

At their 50th anniversary they renewed their vows. I remember holding back tears when my father began to cry as he recited his vows to my mother. She tightened her grip on his hands, looked into his eyes, and smiled to give him strength, as she did many times during their marriage, and as she did at the end. Although my parents’ poem was “How do I love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, their song was “True Love” by Cole Porter. My father would always sing the lyrics into my mother’s ear as they danced to it. It was the last song they danced to, when their favorite Irish singer, Margaret Dalton, sang it in their honor. Margaret Dalton also sang it, and invited all of us to join her, at my father’s burial. Her deep and lovely voice will stay with me always.

“True Love”

Suntanned, windblown

Honeymooners at last alone

Feeling far above par

Oh, how lucky we are

While I give to you and you give to me

True love, true love

So on and on it will always be

True love, true love

For you and I have a guardian angel

On high, with nothing to do

But to give to you and to give to me

Love forever, true

For you and I have a guardian angel

On high, with nothing to do

But to give to you and to give to me

Love, forever true

Love, forever, true.

In memory of Martin Joseph Barrett 1932-2008

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