Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. Eleven is not, to my knowledge, a magical number, but as I see Ken’s name in the memorial book of the dead in the church I serve, recollections of him pile up. Eleven years ago in a room to one side of a house in Bensville, surrounded by his family, Dad’s body oozed from mouth and nose as his spirit made the journey his Catholic faith had prepared him for.
As Dad died it was my privilege as a priest, (albeit one, as my brother Paul has written, ‘of the wrong stripe’) to commend him to the loving judge and father Ken and I believe will receive us with open arms.
The elements of faith, which are not universally believed in or tolerated by his offspring, added to the inevitable confusion of emotions that attends any death. The calming, faithful presence of our mother Norma ensured that the rites of passage followed the rites of Mother Church.
My father, whose life had been one of an almost constant outpouring of words by mouth or pen – his work also appeared under the pseudonym John Dawes – had once written of himself that, having been informed he had no priestly vocation, life took a new path:
‘But given me a pen
And words to spin therefrom
To keep the truth for men –
He willed it thus!’
(from Fiat Voluntas Tua)
The cascade of literature has continued: within hours of his last breath my sister Vicki was addressing her grief through verse; my nephew Daniel has paid tribute in a narrative piece. Some years later my brother Paul, in his first published collection of poetry, An Existential Grammar, muses on Ken’s final days in the evocative Lost and Found.
I had joined the familial resort to verbiage in advance in a privately compiled pamphlet with the unimaginative title, Dad Poems. I even had the temerity to send it to Ken, whose loving, indulgent and critical response is either found or lost in the collection of the Kenrick Scully papers in the archives of the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.
It was at the Strathfield campus of ACU that I spent my sabbatical in 2013, the spark which led to the production of Three Angry Men, my teasing out of my relationship with God, my father and my inner self.
For the faithful death is not a full stop. It is a book over which we no longer have control. To continue the clumsy metaphor, we have to give the writing of our life over to the Great Editor to assess it for publication. No more can this hope and expectation be seen in a poem Ken himself wrote:
At Morning Mass
(on his 81st birthday)
When morning comes
I shall wake
and go to some Camelot.
There I shall whisper
to the breeze and tell
of times gone by;
of when I was young
and saw a world
so sparkling and fresh
that in that morning
standing by the shore
I saw Him rise and say:
My beloved come to me,
give me your heart,
for I will keep you
through all the day
till night comes down
and troubles fade away.
As Dad died it was my privilege as a priest, (albeit one, as my brother Paul has written, ‘of the wrong stripe’) to commend him to the loving judge and father Ken and I believe will receive us with open arms.
The elements of faith, which are not universally believed in or tolerated by his offspring, added to the inevitable confusion of emotions that attends any death. The calming, faithful presence of our mother Norma ensured that the rites of passage followed the rites of Mother Church.
My father, whose life had been one of an almost constant outpouring of words by mouth or pen – his work also appeared under the pseudonym John Dawes – had once written of himself that, having been informed he had no priestly vocation, life took a new path:
‘But given me a pen
And words to spin therefrom
To keep the truth for men –
He willed it thus!’
(from Fiat Voluntas Tua)
The cascade of literature has continued: within hours of his last breath my sister Vicki was addressing her grief through verse; my nephew Daniel has paid tribute in a narrative piece. Some years later my brother Paul, in his first published collection of poetry, An Existential Grammar, muses on Ken’s final days in the evocative Lost and Found.
I had joined the familial resort to verbiage in advance in a privately compiled pamphlet with the unimaginative title, Dad Poems. I even had the temerity to send it to Ken, whose loving, indulgent and critical response is either found or lost in the collection of the Kenrick Scully papers in the archives of the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.
It was at the Strathfield campus of ACU that I spent my sabbatical in 2013, the spark which led to the production of Three Angry Men, my teasing out of my relationship with God, my father and my inner self.
For the faithful death is not a full stop. It is a book over which we no longer have control. To continue the clumsy metaphor, we have to give the writing of our life over to the Great Editor to assess it for publication. No more can this hope and expectation be seen in a poem Ken himself wrote:
At Morning Mass
(on his 81st birthday)
When morning comes
I shall wake
and go to some Camelot.
There I shall whisper
to the breeze and tell
of times gone by;
of when I was young
and saw a world
so sparkling and fresh
that in that morning
standing by the shore
I saw Him rise and say:
My beloved come to me,
give me your heart,
for I will keep you
through all the day
till night comes down
and troubles fade away.
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