The sun is shining and it makes the color of the grass and the beautiful bouquets and wreaths of flowers look electric. There are a lot of people here crying, a lot of love and stories being shared for this man. I think Colin would have been happy with it, but who knows. He might have secretly hated everyone here and complained about the color of the flowers.
“We should go sit down,” Hemi says to me, guiding me by the elbow to the seats.
I sit down next to Agnes, with the Major on the other side of her. Padraig is at the podium, ready to deliver the eulogy. He’s wearing a dark grey suit that I picked up for him in Cork, and even though it doesn’t fit him quiet right, he looks stunning in it.
“How are ye doing, dear?” Agnes asks me as she takes my hand in hers and gives it a squeeze. The tenderness brings a tear to my eye.
I nod, pressing my lips together. “I’m doing okay. How about you?”
“I have a hole in my nylons,” she grumbles. “The only good pair I had.”
I give her a sweet smile and rest my head on her shoulder for a moment, letting her know that I’m here. Her humor and grumpiness are defense mechanisms if I’ve ever seen one. I’m just lucky that she’s been able to get over the lies we told. When it comes to her relationship with me and with Padraig, it’s been repaired.
It hurts that the same didn’t happen with Colin.
Padraig holds up a sheet in his hands as he briefly looks over the crowd. The sheet is shaking but I can’t tell if it’s tremors from his MS or from the grief. This week, so many of his symptoms, the shaking, the fatigue, could easily be blamed on either affliction.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Padraig clears his throat and begins by reading the poem by Dylan Thomas. “Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, they wave by, crying how bright their fragile deeds might have danced in a green bay. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
He swallows hard, clears his throat, his eyes looking over the crowd and blinking as if trying to clear tears. “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way. Do not gentle into that good night.”
Padraig pauses again, closing his eyes, breathing hard. When he opens them there’s fear and sorrow across his brow. He blinks at the paper and puts it aside. “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He reads it all by memory and I have to wonder if that’s the poet soul of his mother speaking through him.
“And you, my father,” he begins and then stops, his words choked on a sob. He presses his fist to his mouth, trying to bite back his soundless cries until he can compose himself. “And you, my father, there on that sad height, curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night.” He pauses and looks up at the sky. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
After a few beats, among the sounds of sobbing and crying and sniffling that comes from all round us, he takes in a deep breath. “My father raged against the dying of the light. For those of you who knew him, even if you didn’t know him well, you knew he raged, especially if his favorite team was losing.”
To my surprise there are a few chuckles in the crowd. I’m also surprised Padraig is taking the humor approach after opening with that poem.
“Of course his favorite team was always Munster,” he says to which almost everyone cheers and hoots and hollers. Padraig had told me that this was the team most people here root for. “And when they’d lose, which they do a lot, the whole town would lock their doors. But my dad, Colin, was more than just an angry old sod. He was a terrible driver as well.”