On Speaking Of The Dead

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. ‘Of the dead, [say] nothing but good.’

(Diogenes Laertius, 4th century)

You see, this is how I imagine it. 

Our Liam, my brother—well, he feels unsteady on his feet. It’s no surprise, really. For months, he’s been saving up the tablets the prison guards have given him to help his depression. How he’s managed to do that, I’ve no idea—I thought they checked to make sure you swallowed stuff like that? Every day, they give him a tablet to control his depression or anxiety or whatever, and somehow he has managed not to swallow, but to continue to add to his secret stash. His plan, at the grand old age of thirty, has been to overdose on them at some undetermined point in time. The vast majority of his adult life has been spent in jail. I suppose when you think you’ve had enough, you decide to call it a day.

That point in time came a few hours ago, on a Monday morning. He guessed, correctly, that he had enough to kill himself. A few hours after taking them—dry, with no water—he stands in the middle of his cell. He feels, well, not quite right. The cold of the cell bites at him just a little bit more than normal, the limited light from the window feels just that bit brighter. He closes his eyes to think, his mind casting back to the numerous kids he has, all by different women. Never could settle down, our Liam. He may or may not begin to regret his decision to overdose, but by now it’s too late. Feeling faint, he blacks out. Falls. His head smashes into the concrete, his skull fractures. He’s found an hour later after another inmate raises the alarm, but there’s no brain stem activity. Despite being kept on life support until being declared dead four days later, really we know he died when his head smashed into the concrete. Having a machine breathe for you isn’t the same as being alive. 

My father calls me later that day to tell me what’s happened, then again a few days later to tell me of the death-after-the-death, of the switching off of the life support machine. After much thought, I decide not to travel from England back to Belfast for the funeral. There are a number of reasons for this. Mainly though, it’s because he’s the second brother I’ve lost to a violent death and when you put that on top of a mother to a brain aneurysm, you begin to see funerals as just not that important. See, by then, the deceased are already gone and it’s just the body left. I don’t need to attend a funeral to grieve, or to pay my respects. The dead don’t care what the living do. 

Living in England, I didn’t want much to do with our Liam when he was alive. It was simple: he was too far gone. He was, I felt, too much trouble. I feel a little ashamed of this attitude now. As his only brother, I let him down by ignoring him. For all his faults, he wanted what we all want: to be happy. He just didn’t know how to do that and without a path to follow, his life became a turbulent one, always wandering in the undergrowth where thorns lurk and blood is drawn.

At the wake and the funeral (I know from others who did go), tributes were paid to him. He was kind and generous, they said. If not a giant (the stature of individuals in our family is not noted for being on the tall side), he was definitely gentle. Someone you could trust. Someone who would never let you down. His faults are overlooked because, of the dead [say] nothing but good. I shake my head just thinking about it as I write this. 

His funeral takes place on a council estate halfway between Belfast and the market town of Lisburn. Being involved with paramilitaries means he has a funeral with military trappings. An Irish tricolour is draped over his coffin, a fitting tribute for this self-declared soldier of Ireland who once tried to smuggle a car bomb into Belfast city centre. Shots are fired over his coffin by masked men. They are the same men who would have celebrated the death of our brother twenty years before, but that is a story for another day. Somehow, Liam fell in with them later and paid the price with the waste of a life.  We might think we choose our paths, and to a degree we even might—but more than we realise life’s division bell rings early and sends us where it will.

My father and I reconnected last year, exclusively over the phone—he in Ireland, me in England. I had not seen him in twenty-three years. He was seventy-three, and I thought I probably wouldn’t see him again before he died. A serial liar, philanderer and abuser of women and children, he was coming to the end of his life with almost no family left. His daughters, my sisters, refused to have anything to do with him. And I understood. I did. Dad was always cheating on mum. His violence towards her was like an earthquake—if nothing happened for a few weeks then we’d sit around waiting for the next big tremor, the next movement of his fist against her face. He’d hit us too, but nowhere near as often as he did her. Then, after she died—the same story with a succession of girlfriends. Liam was one when Mum died, I was ten: those years were turbulent and the very man who should have steered our ship was the one who caused the storm. 

Long story short, he died at the start of March from complications caused by a stroke. We spoke every day and I visited him. When he stopped being able to speak, I talked with his nurse and doctor.  

The nurse called me at 0840 on a Saturday morning. My wife was out walking the dogs and I sat alone in bed. The call was expected.

‘Mr. Mulhern,’ she said. ‘Your father has passed away.’ I was grateful for the efficient candour.

Two days later, I went back to Ireland and had him cremated without ceremony, his ashes scattered. My sisters didn’t want him buried in the family plot, not after all the violence and cheating. Again, understandable—who am I to judge? Who are you? 

So, what to do now? What to say? Speak only good? Say nothing? Tell the truth? I mean, Dad doesn’t care, not really—he’s dead. But to speak only good would be to embrace the scales of lies with which we obscure our vision in times like this. He brought me Chinese food one night when I was about twelve, and we sat up watching a kung fu movie until midnight. He awkwardly embraced me at the airport the day I left for university, unsure of how to express himself. Love, there.  

So, please allow me to say this. He had his qualities, my father. He could be kind and generous, and one could see he had his own mental health issues to deal with at a time when mental illness was seen as a sign of weakness. I choose to be honest and to speak plainly. He had his moments, my father, but ultimately he was an utter bastard who ruined more lives and more childhoods than he should have been allowed to. He was good and bad. He was all of us, in concentrate. 

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. ‘Of the dead, [say] nothing but good.’ It’s bad advice, though. Instead, speak truthfully of the dead: the bad and the good. It’s the only way to be true to ourselves, because there is enough good and bad in all of us for a lifetime of stories. To speak only good of my father—of anyone—hides many of the very lessons a life lived can teach us.

Fran has a Creative Writing MA from Lancaster and his fiction and poetry has been published in Litro, A New Ulster and The Honest Ulsterman. His non-fiction has been published in the London Magazine and on the BBC and in the Belfast Telegraph.