Sacred day when a spear of longing pierced my world

Oggi è il mio compleanno e per festeggiarlo con i miei lettori ho pensato di condividere questa lettera, molto commovente, dello scrittore irlandese Joseph O'Connor al figlio.



Sacred day when a spear of longing pierced my world

Dear Son,

Valentine's Day can be a pain when you're young: a purgatory of false expectations. It probably doesn't matter as much as it used to in the past, but back when I was a kid, in the late 13th Century, the postman was waited for anxiously. You might think it strange that it's a day when I always think of you -- and yet it is, for it was on the feast-day of old Val, the patron saint of petrol-station flowers, that I first got to see your face.

We were living in London then, your mother and I. We'd been married a couple of years.

But for most of my adult life, I'd been sure I would never be a father. I don't know why. Fear, I suppose. It wasn't until my early thirties that I met someone who gave me cause to question my certainty. Your mother was so brave herself. It rubbed off on me.

When we realised you were on the way, we were drunk with excitement. For days I walked around in a haze of numbing cheerfulness. But for all the joy, there was an old foreboding too. Nobody ever tells you the full truth about parenthood: that it drops a stone into the stillness of the love that made it, and some of the ripples can be fierce for a while.

Now it was Valentine's Day, the morning of the second scan. In the waiting room of the clinic sat couples looking nervous.

The clinic offered fertility treatments, laparoscopy, IVF. I was painfully conscious, as we waited to be called, that many of these people would give anything to be us.

The nurse, a middle-aged Nigerian woman, moved slowly, deliberately, humming softly to herself as she worked. There was gentleness in her silence, a healing aura. Her matter-of-factness itself was healing, for it seemed to say what was happening was part of the everyday, and that similar things would be happening millions of times this morning, that there are no miracles at all, only hopes.

Your mother lay on the couch, the nurse moved slowly, and I watched as the monitor screen came on. Some of your features were clearly discernible on the screen. An arm, a spine, a ghostly white face. "You have a son," she said quietly. "He is healthy, thank God." The little creature in the glass was more like a being from some faraway planet, some spacemen unimagined by science-fiction. You turned. You rolled. You moved the twig of an arm. But even as the nurse finished making her notes and confirmed that the baby was doing well, I didn't feel what everyone had told me I should feel. It was what happened next that I found astounding.

Casually, like someone doing something long-practised in a kitchen, the nurse reached out and flicked a speaker-switch on the side of the monitor unit. There was a short crackling sound, a few watery echoes. A long moment passed. A truck went by in the London street below. And the sound of your heartbeat filled the small room.

My own heart actually seemed to stop. It was like having a spear of longing driven through me. That small pulsing rhythm that called for nothing except to be loved. It was about nothing but itself, its own aching vulnerability. It was so very ordinary, yet it felt unspeakably sacred, more than any music I had ever heard, or ever will. Unable to speak, I simply stood and listened, and the lightning out in the street seemed to flash through my nerve endings. I left that room, your father.

Every birth is a new life, but also an intimation of mortality. It says all things pass; there are seasons in our living. But lying in the darkness that night, I saw it didn't matter. This was the secret. It didn't matter. Our fears, our inadequacies, our failings, our hurts, the promises we broke, the disappointments done to us, none of it need weigh any more than we wish, and only our love weighs exactly what it will, and that weight should be carried with joy.

And I saw the only promise a father can ever hope to totally keep. I won't leave you. I will stay to the end.

Your mother stirred beside me. We listened to the night sounds. From the flats in the next street arose the alleluia of someone's car alarm, and the repeated bark of a dog. To say I began to experience a deep sense of calm and acceptance would be technically correct, but it wouldn't come close. I'm not a religious person but the language of sacrament kept suggesting itself. If there is a peace that passes understanding, I know what it is. The recollection of nothing more than a child's heartbeat: the small, persistent, puttering rhythm which proclaims that life has triumphed over death: that you can stand up and walk out of the tomb of the past. And even if that peace ever fades from my memory -- even if it were to completely disappear -- to have glimpsed it just once is miracle enough for one life.

And I owe you that Valentine gift, my dear child.

Joseph O'Connor