He didn't ask me anything

A hotel lobby in Dublin, 2007 and a small, but powerful act of kindness.

My father died in 2007. It was sudden, and I was 26.

I was desperately upset, which is what you’d expect when losing a parent. I don’t think I was thinking straight for most of that week (and probably the 12 months afterwards). After the funeral, the extended family and friends went to a hotel in Malahide, Dublin for the reception.

At some point I took myself off to the bathroom and cried. I’d cried a lot over those few days. It would just happen. At the reception I felt the need to hide it. To cry on my own.

Coming back out, I was near the hotel lobby. My uncle Brian was walking in with somebody. He saw me. He could see I’d been crying, and he stopped in front of me.

I asked him if I could talk to him. “Of course,” he said.

Truth is, Brian looked so much like my dad. As much as I’d asked to talk to him, I don’t think talking was what I wanted. Once he was standing in front of me, I had nothing to say at all. I think I wanted to be near him.

We sat down. Somebody came over to offer condolences, and he shooed them away without making anything of it. Then he sat there and didn’t press me. Didn’t ask what I’d wanted to talk about. Didn’t try to fill the silence.

I ended up apologising to him for not knowing what to say. For having asked him for a conversation in the first place. He put his arm around my shoulder, and didn’t make me feel like I owed him a sentence.

It was only years later, and I mean years, that it occurred to me. This man had lost his brother. Same week, same funeral, same everything, and I hadn’t thought about it from his side at all. Grief does that to you. You don’t think straight.

Brian died a few weeks ago. I tried to get to Ireland for the funeral, but the airline delayed the flight, then cancelled it, leaving me no time to find a replacement.

So I wasn’t there.

At the end of July, we lost Glen Hansard. I’m sure you’ve seen the videos by now. A huge talent, obviously, but it was never only the talent with him, it was how he was with people. Years ago, on stage, before playing a song for Levon Helm, he said this:

“People always say, we lost somebody great today. You don’t lose anything, you gain, because the best of that person you inherited. If you’ve got the strength and the will, you inherit the best of the person who passed.”

And then about Helm himself: “he doesn’t go. He just gets bigger.”

Brian’s life wasn’t an easy one. He had a stroke about a year after my dad died and lived with it from then on, which was hard on him and hard on his family.

None of that was in the lobby that day. He sat down next to me and said nothing. I needed that more than I knew at the time.

There’s no lesson in this, and no photography spin in it either. It was a small thing. Not quite holding a door open or making somebody a cup of tea, but sitting down beside a person and not asking them anything. Just being there.

You don’t know what one of those is worth to the person on the other end of it.

I’d have given anything to tell Brian what that did for me. Not then. In the years afterwards, when I understood it. Now I can’t.

Is there someone you could still tell?

Thanks for reading.

Paul