The moth and the outsider

How my late father found belonging in death.

While following my father’s hearse through the fishing town of Kinsale in West Cork, Ireland, I noticed the ripple effect we seemed to have on the bystanders we passed by. As our convoy crept up behind them, engines rumbling forward at a recognisably funerary pace, they glanced back. Recognising the glossy black vanguard of a funeral procession, with casket and flower bouquet on full display at the helm, many stopped in their tracks. Some dipped their heads in reverential silence. Most crossed themselves, a gesture which in Ireland lies somewhere between benediction, respect and superstition. An eerie feeling passed over those in the car. To us they were strangers. Since moving to Ireland, Dad had struggled to find acceptance in a community to which he was foreign, and among whom he had never quite managed to establish roots. And yet here he was, in receipt of their distinctly Irish honours on his final journey, facilitated perhaps by the anonymising cloak of death. I couldn’t help but consider the somewhat tragic irony. Had he found the belonging that eluded him throughout his life by dying here?

Haydn Shaughnessy was born in Cheshire, England in 1956 to a second-generation Irish father and a Welsh mother, along with four siblings. From the outset, my grandparents’ union was dogged by ostracisation. My grandfather, Jim, was an Irish Catholic; my grandmother, Gwyneth, a Welsh Methodist (by background if not by faith). Jim’s family disowned him. His civil marriage to a Protestant led to his excommunication from the Catholic church. A proud journeyman plasterer and not-so-proud veteran of the Second World War, he was also a drinker of some distinction and a chronic gambler. My father idolised him. This adulation was amplified by Jim’s sudden death in my father’s early twenties. It is likely that the traits my father idolised included those that Jim had acquired through life as an outcast, and that he went so far as to adopt those traits as his own.

Those who knew Dad as a child are usually quick to mention his extreme competitiveness. He could never stand being second best and developed an obsessiveness with excelling in everything he did — school, rugby, gymnastics, athletics. I suspect that his inability to ‘belong’ sprouted there. Dad needed to be ahead of the pack, in a league of his own — alone. All agree that he was exceptionally gifted at school, breezing through the entrance exams for a local grammar school at age 11. However, there was a pathological side to his deep-rooted need for distinction. As a teenager, he found himself — or rather placed himself — on the wrong side of the law. He either dropped out of school or was expelled (he was never too clear on which, not that it matters) and spent eight years living what he called a semi-institutionalised life (again, he was never too clear on what kind of institution, suffice to say it was incarceration of some form).

Having suffered enough at the hands of Britain’s carceral system, education became his escape. He focused his attention on completing his A-levels and, to the surprise of everyone but himself, won a scholarship to attend the London School of Economics. Here, he outperformed those around him, already achieving two honours by his second year. He won a place to read for a Master’s degree, and later a PhD, at Oxford University. He abandoned his doctorate to work at the BBC, following which he enjoyed success as an economic journalist there, at Channel 4 and Granada Television. Despite his success, however, he was uneasy. My father held grudges. I have no doubt that finding success and recognition among the social elite of a country that had put him behind bars gnawed at him. He began to develop an interest in his Irishness, inspired in no small way by the adoration he had for his father.

Eventually, he left England and never returned for more than a brief visit. He landed first in Brussels, where he worked as an expert advisor for the European Commission. After several years there, in which time he met my mother and added two new children to his collection (my elder brother, Jim, had been born in England to a different mother), he turned his attention again to Ireland. I was too young to remember it, but I’m told he had become obsessed with ‘returning’ to his (paternal) ancestral home. He fantasised about how he would be received there — welcomed with open arms, he imagined. In 1998, he made a leap of faith, dragging my not-so-convinced mother and their children along with him.

If you were asked to define belonging, how would you go about it? As a central theme in this essay, it is important to try and pin it down somehow. But, much like a raw egg when you pick it up with a fork, it evades a tidy capture. Even if you do manage to pick it up, bits of it droop away and are left behind on the plate. Belonging seems to describe an emotional state of being, a contentment that you are where you should be, or perhaps where you feel at home. But it is more than that — it demands mutual recognition and acceptance from those among whom you purport to belong. Immigrants, particularly those who are visibly different from the ‘natives’, are too often reminded where it is that they don’t belong. This naturally inhibits the development of belonging.

What, then, might serve as a basis for belonging that would be mutually acceptable for the two parties — Self and Other? A Nativist point of view may regard belonging as a strict matter of birthright, perhaps even emphasising the concept of autochthony. As with any good word that is referenced to elevate perceptions of its utterer’s intelligence, autochthony can be rooted back to Ancient Greece. Autochthones were described as an area’s indigenous people — distinct from settlers and those of mixed origin. They featured heavily in Greek mythology, in which autochthones were described to have literally sprung from the soil. They were of the land, earthborn, ‘sons of the soil’. The Athenians prided themselves on having always been from, and therefore never having had to settle in, Attica.

Being a son of the soil is an express ticket to belonging. But it is clearly not the only one, and one that applies to very few. Since the earliest humans learned to mobilise their lower limbs in forward motion, we have always moved and settled elsewhere. So where else might we derive belonging? Continuing with the theme of land and soil, many cultures emphasise the importance of working the land in some way. For Australian indigenous cultures, one becomes connected to the land by walking along the dreaming tracks; routes across the land that were followed by creator-beings during the Dreaming and are conveyed in traditional song cycles. For some East African cultures, it is said that one achieves recognition and belonging by taming the wilderness and rendering it productive through the sweat of labour. This chimes with one very nativist Irish conception of belonging, expressed by John B. Keane’s Bull McCabe in his popular play The Field: ‘It’s my field. It’s my child. I nursed it. I nourished it. I saw to its every want. I dug the rocks out of it with my bare hands and I made a living thing of it!’

When we moved to Ireland, Dad went to work on the land in his own rather peculiar way. For several years, he wrote freelance for the Irish Times. His topics of choice — food, lifestyle, health — brought him close to the land, interviewing farmers, producers, artisans, and natural health mavericks whose products and innovations were rooted in West Cork. Travelling the length and breadth of the country in search of new stories, he followed the dreaming tracks of ancestors long lost (he often dragged me along, but I was less enthused about sitting in a car for three hours to sample a block of sheep’s cheese). And yet, he never seemed to find what he was searching for. The Irish, he felt, never warmed to him as one of their own. Perhaps his Cheshire accent (dulled to some extent through service at the BBC) had betrayed him. Or perhaps he never gave them enough of a reason to do so.

If the basis of belonging is a mutual recognition between oneself and those around you, then being earthborn or learning the contours of the land is insufficient. The crux of belonging is, of course, how you engage with those other people. Perhaps this is an obvious point, but I think it offers a way forward for those who find themselves struggling to find acceptance in a new community. As a PhD student, I spent several years studying this rather fundamental societal phenomenon, in the distant context of Maasai communities in northern Kenya. Contrary to Western understandings of the ‘tribe’, intermarriage and migration have long been common in these communities, hampered for a brief interlude by the colonial impulse to divide and rule. For someone wishing to find belonging in a Maasai community, the method boils down to something rather simple: sacrifice. Not in the ritualistic sense of the word, but rather giving something of oneself to others — a cow, goat or money, for instance. Giving freely of one’s own volition (although often prompted by someone in need) establishes a bond of obligation. The person to whom you give is, to some extent, in your debt. But that debt need not be repaid in kind, the relationship established by debt is valued in its own right. In Maa, this kind of relationship has its own word, osotua, which translates to ‘umbilical cord’. Like an umbilical cord, the relationship is life-giving. One can always depend on one’s osotua partner in times of need. It is, aside from relationships of blood, marriage or those established through specific rituals, the closest bond one can enjoy with another person.

There is nothing exotic or unusual about this, to my mind. If we reduce the osotua relationship to its core — the giving up of something for others — we arrive at the nub of belonging. For my father to have found true belonging in Ireland, he would have needed to sacrifice something of himself. For the Irish, the price to pay is often conformity, if nothing else. But for Dad, this was always too high a price. As he had been since childhood, he had to be in a league of his own. An upstart. A maverick. Try as he might, he was never ‘one of the lads’ down in the village pub.

Dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late April 2021. By all accounts, he had been sick for some time. As soon as I heard the news, I booked flights from London (where I live) to Cork. I hadn’t seen him in over 16 months. The contrast between the skinny man I met then, almost geriatric in his movements and mannerisms, and the stocky, vibrant Dad I had always known, was heart-rendering. Over a period of 5 weeks, I lived by his side as the cancer consumed his vitality. I sat with him as he contemplated his life and his illness, often late at night. I stood by him as he pleaded with doctors for treatment, desperate that the medical profession didn’t give up on him. As far as they were concerned, it was too late for chemo. Dad, of course, didn’t agree.

Setting aside just how difficult it must have been to process the suddenness with which he was forced to confront his impending mortality and the rapidness with which his illness stole his energy and strength, Dad refused to accept his doctors’ prognosis. A medical prognosis is not a prediction, but an estimation based on averages. Comparing Dad’s prospects to a statistical average produced the same effect as speaking to him in Korean. Dad was not average. He was exceptional. He was always an anomaly and would prove it once again. But cancer has no respect for one’s self-perception. Cancer does not heed stubbornness, commitment, bravery, stoicism — qualities which defined Dad’s mental and physical battles with his illness. It just kills you. And in death, nobody is exceptional.

As my Dad weakened and slowly began to withdraw from a world for which he had much fascination (he was an avid walker, photographer and student of societal trends), his community stepped in. Friends and neighbours turned up at his doorstep and offered to drive him to the hospital or take him for walks on the beach. They brought him food and medicines. The community nurses went to great lengths to bring him comfort, all indulging his need for positivity, optimism and hope. When he finally passed away on May 28, condolences flooded in from all quarters of the county, and further afield. Towards the end, Dad had found belonging, even if he refused to see it. Perhaps he had become too weak to fight whatever impulse he had that kept people away — the need to be an outlier. Or perhaps he had finally made a sacrifice worthy enough to win him the recognition of his tribe.

Indeed, it does seem that Dad found belonging in death. This struck me as we followed his hearse through his home village of Kinsale. As locals and casual day visitors alike bowed their heads as we passed by, I reflected on the lyrics of a song (John O’Dreams) that our celebrant had sung at the funeral home before our departure:

Death knows no natives or foreigners. Death anonymises us, but it does not render us strangers. The dead herald a moment in time and a realm of untimely, silent permanence that we are all destined to join. There is something familiar in the anonymity of the dead. In our imaginations, we occupy their coffins with our own sentiments and memories of those we have lost and those we will one day lose. They remind us of what we all have in common — not just death itself, but also loss and grief. As the dead are interred or cremated, their remains become part of the land, the air and the water upon which we rely. If the indigenous are ‘earthborn’ then what of the ‘earthdead’?

After my father’s cremation, as I stepped outside the crematorium — a former gunpowder storage room on a serene island in Cork Harbour — my eyes were drawn immediately to a vibrant red and black moth sitting before the entrance. I had never seen one like it before. Almost everyone in attendance noticed it and remarked upon it. Through some later research, I discovered that it was a Cinnabar moth, known for consuming a genus of plant called Senecio. In Latin, Senecio translates to “old man”. In Irish folklore, moths were regarded to be the souls of deceased loved ones, returning to visit the bereaved. This was thought to be particularly true if they appeared close to the corpse of the deceased. Children were often reprimanded for chasing moths out of homes, or doing harm to them, lest they be visiting ancestral souls. Perhaps this is just the fantasy of a bereaved son, but that my father should possibly appear in the guise of something so idiomatically Irish suggested that in death he really had found belonging. Even the land, and the ancestral energies with which it is imbued, had recognised him as one of their own, offering him a reincarnated form drawn from the land itself. In death, finally, our Dad was home.

Dedicated to Haydn Shaughnessy (17/02/1956–28/05/2021)

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