The last person I expected to miss was my ex-wife. I had trained myself not to. For two years after we separated, I spoke about her the way men in pubs speak about rain: unavoidable, irritating, best ignored if possible. We had done the forms, divided the books, argued over a lamp neither of us actually liked, and learned to pass each other at birthdays with the politeness of neighbours who once shared a bed.
Then my father took a turn in the Mater. I got the call on a Tuesday evening while I was on the Luas near Jervis, holding a takeaway coffee that suddenly tasted like pennies. My sister was in Cork, my mother was gone years, and there was no one to ring who knew the shape of our family’s panic. Except Claire.
I didn’t ring her. Pride is a ridiculous thing, but it has stamina. I went to the hospital alone, walked too fast down corridors that smelt of disinfectant and toast, and found my father sitting up in bed telling a nurse he had once played minor football for Dublin, which was only half true. He looked smaller than I remembered. His hands, the same hands that had fixed boilers and carried me asleep from the car, were folded on the blanket like things borrowed from someone else.
By midnight he was sleeping, and I was sitting outside the ward scrolling through my contacts. Claire’s name was still there, under C, beside a photo from Howth where she was laughing into the wind. I stared at it so long my phone dimmed. In the end I put it away. I told myself she had a new life in Rathmines, new friends, maybe a new man who didn’t leave wet towels on the bed or disappear inside himself when things got hard.
The next morning, she appeared anyway. I was in the hospital café trying to eat a scone that had the texture of plaster when I looked up and saw her standing by the till in a navy coat, hair clipped back, face careful. My sister had called her. I felt ambushed, then relieved, then angry at myself for feeling relieved.
“You look awful,” she said.
“Nice to see you too.”
She sat down opposite me and pushed a tea across the table. Not coffee. Tea, two sugars. She remembered that I only drank it that way when I was frightened. That was the first thing that undid me.
For the next three days, Claire came and went without making a performance of it. She brought clean socks from my flat in Stoneybatter. She talked to my father about the old shops on Capel Street and let him pretend he wasn’t scared. She stood beside me when the consultant used the phrase “prepare yourselves,” and later, outside on Eccles Street, she let me cry into her shoulder though I had not cried in front of her since our wedding day.
My father died on the Friday just after dawn. The city was still blue and half-asleep. Claire was the one who opened the window because he had always hated stuffy rooms. A bus hissed somewhere below. A gull cried like a child. I remember thinking that death was not thunderous at all. It was a quiet leaving, like someone stepping off a train before you had finished your sentence.
At the funeral in Glasnevin, she stood two rows behind me. Not family, not stranger. Something more complicated. After the burial, people drifted towards the sandwiches and tea, and I found her near the gates, looking towards the cemetery wall. I thanked her, badly. The words were too small for what she had done.
“Your dad was always kind to me,” she said.
“He loved you.”
She nodded, and for a second the air between us filled with all the things we had ruined and all the things we had not. Our flat near Dublin city centre. The Sunday walks in <a href="https://www.d
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
