Aisling Bea: ‘My father’s death has given me a love of men, of their vulnerability and tenderness’
My father died when I
was three years old and my sister was three months. For years, we thought he
had died of some sort of back injury – a story that we had never really
investigated because we were just too busy with the Spice Girls and
which one we were (I was a Geri/Mel B mix FYI). Then, on the 10th anniversary
of his death, my mother sat us down and explained the concept of suicide. Sure,
we knew about suicide. At 13, I had already known of too many young men from
our town who had taken their own lives. Spoken about as inexplicable sadnesses
for the families, spoken about but never really talked about … “terrible
tragedy … nobody knows why he did it”. What we had not known until that day,
was that our father had, 10 years beforehand, also taken his own life.
When I was growing up,
I idolised my father. I thought his ghost followed me around the house. I had
been told how he adored me, how I was funny, just like him. Because of our
lovely Catholic upbringing, I secretly assumed that he would eventually come
back, like our good friend Jesus.
My mother, being the
wonder woman that she is, never held his death against him. When she looked
into his coffin, she felt she saw the face of the man she had married: his
stress lines had gone, he seemed free of the sadness that had been dogging him
of late. But it was still tough for her to talk about. She didn’t want to have
to explain to a stranger in the middle of a party how he was not defined by his
ending, but how loved he was, how cherished the charismatic, handsome vet in a
small town had been. She didn’t want his whole person being judged.
Once she had told us,
I did not want to talk about him. Ever again. I now hated him. He had not been
“taken” from us, he had left. His suicide felt like the opposite of parenting.
Abandonment. Selfishness. Taking us for granted. I didn’t care that he
had not been “in his right mind”, because if I had been important enough to him
I would have put him back into his “right mind” before he did it. I didn’t care
that he had been in “chronic pain” and that men in Ireland don’t talk about
their feelings, so instead die of sadness. I didn’t want him at peace. I wanted
him struggling, but alive, so he could meet my boyfriends and give them a hard
time, like in American movies. I wanted him to come to pick me up from discos,
so my mother didn’t have to go out alone in her pyjamas at night to get me.
I look like him. For
all of my teens and early 20s, I smothered my face in fake tan and bleached my
hair blond so that elderly relatives would stop looking at me like I was the ghost
of Christmas past whenever I did something funny. “You look so like your
father,” they would say. And as much as people might think a teenage girl wants
to be told that she looks like a dead man, she doesn’t…
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Yudit Kiss grew up a communist in Budapest, soaking up her father's ideology unquestioningly. As a child she is puzzled when others refer to her as Jewish; she only knows that her family doesn't believe in God.
