In a Word . . .

I’ve been seeing a lot more of my father recently. He died in 1999. Most mornings now there he is “in October-coloured weather” to quote Kavanagh. I had not expected this, nor is it alarming. Just a surprise.

For most of my life I’ve been told I looked like my mother and have been comfortable with that. Indeed, last spring during the lockdown she and I spoke by videophone.

That first time she announced “Patsy, you look just like me!” She had never said so before. Though living with Alzheimer’s for the past few years, she still recognises us all.

After that call I thought it hilarious that at 92 she should inform me I now looked like her. Inevitably, separated by decades and some uncommon genes, her announcement was a reminder that my time too is passing. Similarly those morning meetings with my father.

The Irish are at ease with their dead

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Fragments called time

I am now in the autumn of my years though, hopefully, still more September than October-coloured. Those ever-passing man-made fragments called time – minutes, hours, days, years – are there now, traced on my face in the bathroom mirror each morning, in lines increasingly familiar from perusal of my parents’ features down the years.

Like most men who shave daily I hardly see my face at all. So familiar am I with its contours, I no longer need a mirror. I could shave blind. Instead, those growing hints of my father stare back at me like one of those Louis le Brocquy paintings of Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, Yeats or Francis Bacon, as their features struggle to emerge from the canvas.

Reaping the harvest

For most, this autumn of life is when they enjoy reaping the harvest of their lives, their next generations and the pension fund. For some, however, it can be a time of trepidation, fearful of decline ahead or, worse, locked-in to a preoccupation with the irredeemable past – what has been and will be no more. Tinged with blue.

Where such people are concerned life, to quote Macbeth, “is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf” with just decay ahead to meet them. They miss the spectacular colours that autumn brings to all who will see, whether it be the season or stage in life. It has its music too.

Autumn, from Latin autumnus, also auctumnus, from auctus for "increase".

inaword@irishtimes.com