Irish author Michael Harding has written a stunning new memoir. To mark his 70th birthday, he took a holiday in Spain, walking a short part of the Camino de Santiago in the early summer of 2024. But as he set off on this pilgrimage, Harding wasn’t alone. Accompanying him was his father, who passed away when Michael was just twenty-two. A man who was distant and aloof, but who had a profound effect on the writer’s life, he tells JOHN SCALLY

 

In I Loved Him from the Day He Died Michael Harding travels back in time to the Ireland of his youth, to the Holy Wells and pubs he visited in a search for a sense of connection and he begins to unpack the long ago trauma of losing a father he never really knew. As he walks in the heat of the Spanish sun, with searing honesty and beautifully wrought prose he examines how the father shapes the son – and how the boy becomes a man in the search for that which makes us whole: belonging. When Harding arrives back home after his trip, he discovers finally how to say goodbye. Told with simple vulnerability and profound insight, I Loved Him from the Day he Died is a stunning and heartfelt examination of love, forgiveness and letting go.

The journey to Spain was also a journey inward.
“I’ve written about my mother, and my childhood, and my beloved, and the cats and the trees and wild horses, but I have never written about my father.
“So, on my 70th birthday I resolved to walk a short Camino in Spain some time during the following twelve months, from Sarria to Santiago, echoing the pilgrims of history that made the journey to hear the great bell and see the magnificent thurible swing across the sanctuary in the cathedral dedicated to the apostle James.”
There was a time he feared he would not get the opportunity.
“Four years ago, I came out of Beaumont Hospital after two operations on the spine. And the last four years were a struggle to try and get the body right. There’d be nerve damage down the leg. So the real reason that the Camino came up as a thing to do was something about having walked down corridors in hospitals barely able to walk – I would have started off with 1,000 steps four years ago and that would have been a big achievement.”
The title of the book comes from a line by Michael Hartnett in his poem about his mother, Death of an Irishwoman.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful poem. And it kind of sung out to me in the year or two after my father died. I knew what he meant. Something turns over and awakens when you realise that they’re gone. You just well up with the love and the potential that was never fulfilled.”

What was his father like?
“He was 53 when I was born in 1953. So I had an elderly father, which was a lovely thing. I thought he was a beautiful man. He didn’t have any of the young youthful testosteronic vibrancy of a patriarchal male. You’d see the young boys running after their hurley fathers. My father was smaller than me when I was a teenager.”
Harding had something of a complicated and occasionally distant relationship with his father.
“I began to really be affected by something that somebody had said to me in the previous year or two. And that was simply: ‘You remind me of your father.’ I look in the mirror and realised the kind of fragile little chicken-winged animal that he was in old age is exactly where I’m going. There’s a psalm I always quote. It says, ‘What is man’s life? Seventy years. Or 80 for those who are strong.’ Turning 70 has a profound effect on you, that you’re shifting into a new part of your life.”

He wishes he knew his father better.
“He didn’t live long enough for me to have a conversation with him really. I spent a long time gallivanting in pubs and in some way lionising the beauty and the power of masculinity. I remember the writer Tom McIntyre saying to me one time, ‘You seem to be always in the house of the fathers.’ I always liked old men. They had an aura of clarity about them. They had done their thing. For good or ill, they had played the game, and the game was over.”

Was he disappointed in his father?
“I was proud of him in a thousand ways, particularly because he was a writer. He wrote book reviews for the Irish Press, but I was ashamed of him in another thousand ways. I mentioned in the book, for example, that he just couldn’t get into a simple thing of being playful. And that’s something that you pass on, I think, because I saw the weakness in myself when I had a child. I’m so bad at playing a bit of table tennis or having a bit of fun.”
His mother too was a very formative influence in his life. So many of his memories of his childhood Christmas are tied with her. He still feels her loss keenly.
“She left a house behind her that kind of fell to me. It was in Cavan. You know the way when someone dies and you have to clean out the house? Sometimes it’s a thing you do very quickly. It can be all put in skips and given to the charity shops, gotten rid of.

“I thought it was hard to do that, so I ended up spending maybe two or three months going over and back and staying in the house, going through her stuff, very slowly and gradually. Going through her clothes, old files and boxes of stuff in drawers. I gradually began to kind of discover her as a human being.

“When you meet old people, you just think of them as old and, when your parents grow old, you forget that they were once younger than you are, that they once fell in love and had all the things that young people have. By going through her stuff very slowly, I kind of built up this picture of her.”
Not all aspects of the modern Christmas appeal to him.

“Nowadays, urban gardens are awash with reindeers, elves and characters from Roald Dahl, and while an orchestra of flashing colours outside the window has its merits, the velvet sensation of pure darkness has completely gone, and light no longer feels like something fragile or impermanent.”

Continue reading in this year’s Christmas Annual

I Loved Him From the Day He Died is in book shops now.