Sláinte

I write this for my friends who I know are on the beginnings of this path. And others who know the score.

I have a bottle of Glenmorangie in my cupboard which only ever gets cracked open on the 29th of December. It is, or was, my dad's birthday and he'd be 70 today. I only got to know him until he was 57.

He was taken away from me exactly a year after the 9/11 attacks leaving us with a metronomic reminder. With an impeccable sense of timing he died in bed from a heart attack, and, for the longest time it left the greatest hole in my life.

That hole was filled with all the guilt of a father/son relationship. The memories of teenage arguments, the taking for granted, the resentment. The fact that it took decades for us to really get along. When his fatherly responsibilities were parked away, and friendship, through shared life experience and hardship, could flourish.

The pain of things that you can't do any more because you shared them. A love of motorsport, of photography, of a nice glass of whisky.

I was told by a wise person, when it happened, all the traumatic stuff that goes on when your universe pulls a 180, that grief is a bit like a madness. To me, it's like a hole that you need to find your way out of. You start at the bottom in shadow, and eventually you climb out and start to see the world in colour and light.

At that point, for the most part, you choose to throw yourself back in the hole, or you choose to step around it. There's no filling it in. It will always be there lurking in the long grass waiting for you to either throw yourself in or, on rare occasions, get thrown in.

My point, I guess, is that at some point along the way, you need to choose to step around the pit. For the most part (now, but it took me the longest time to learn), I choose to walk away from it. I choose to remember the shared life. Not the missed life.

So, I came back to photography. It's why photography is special to me. Because I know it made him proud, because he told me. It's why I still enjoy motorsport, because he gave that to me. It's why I pour myself a single glass of Glenmorangie, distilled in the town where I went to school. Because whenever I came home, we'd sit by the fire, he'd creak up off his chair and pour us a healthy nip and we'd talk. Not about anything special, except that it was us talking.

That glass of whisky distills memory too, the flavour of life, well savoured. So I choose to celebrate his birth, and I try to do it far more than mourn his loss.

Sláinte dad.

I remember you.