by Des Bishop
Of course I cried. It is sad to see someone so close to death. Death is all over him now. His hands and arms are in the air and his eyes have a glassed-over look. He speaks to people who are not there and he always uses an Irish accent when he speaks. I think it will only be a day or two, to be honest. Today I don’t find the emotion overwhelming because I am just so glad to be home. After days of feeling so far away and having to hear news over the phone about him getting worse, the fact that I am downstairs and can actually hear his heavy breaths while I write this feels like paradise.
There is nothing left to do. There is nothing I wish we could have done. It’s all about making sure he can fly.
JOURNAL, THURSDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2011, FLUSHING, QUEENS
He is hanging around now, stuck in this near-death state. Every now and then you get a little glimpse of his old self. It usually comes when someone visits. It’s as if he is saving all his energy so that he has a little bit to give when someone comes over. At the very end the most important thing is the performance and making sure that other people are comfortable.
I feel strange saying it, but there is something quite fun about all this. It’s great to see all the people and talk to my dad’s old friends on the phone. We are in the presence of relentless and powerful praise of my father, coming at us from all angles. It seems very genuine and the circumstances bring out very strong emotions in people. I feel charged up with something very fundamental. All the things that matter are present: love, family, compassion, companionship and loyalty. When you feel them so strongly together it’s easy to feel, despite the sadness, that this is really a celebration. That we are witnessing the end of a great performance with each phone call and visit like a standing ovation or shout for an encore. People really loved my dad.
My cousin Dennis, who is the son of my mother’s sister Carol, said the most amazing thing yesterday. He said that he never saw my dad as an uncle through marriage. To him my dad was always his uncle of blood. The connection people had with him becomes so clear when you hear people speak like that.
I have also enjoyed having to call his friends. I think that is because when you put the phone to my dad’s ear and tell him who it is, he really perks up. People from his long-gone past perk him up the most, as I think that is where he spends most of his time at the moment. For two months I have been trying to get a hold of Dudley Sutton, his buddy from London. My dad really wanted to talk to him. I would have preferred to get a hold of him when my dad could really talk, but in the end it probably worked out because it was so uplifting to catch a glimpse of the old dad when I put the phone to his ear.
His accent went real London real quick. ‘Dudley, hello, mate. Hello, my son.’ Dudley said a few things in his ear and there was not much after that but I told him to say goodbye to Dudley and he said, ‘’Bye, Dudley, ’bye, my son.’ It was great because it proved that he could still hear us. It proved that in some way he still knew what was going on.
But it also proved something else: that even in the end he would always be the person he was talking to. We joked about that all our lives. Depending on who was on the phone would determine my dad’s accent. I do it myself to a certain extent and I realize that sometimes you don’t even mean to do it. But I was surprised that it was still happening on his deathbed. Tony Kearns from Midleton rang today, and straight away he was a Cork man. Everything finished with ‘boy’. ‘All right, boy! Sound out!’ No more ‘my son’ or ‘mate’. When I heard on the phone how Tony Kearns talked about my dad, I realized that these men really had been best friends. They were little divils running around Midleton together. I know that it is Ireland he is going back to in his head. It really is who he is.
JOURNAL, SATURDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2011
My dad died yesterday morning. I was there with him, along with my family. In the end, amidst the refrain of the ‘death rattle’, we all slept in the room. My mother was in the bed adjacent to my father, and my two brothers and I slept wrapped in duvets on the floor. It was such a sad but wonderful thing that we would end up together like three scared boys looking for the safety of our parents’ room to get us through the night. I was not scared, though. I was there to make sure my dad was not scared to go. I rubbed his head for two days and told him he was free to go. We all told him we would look after Mom and that he had lived a great life. I told him he would be leaving this world surrounded in love.
Most importantly, I repeated over and over that he was a good person. I know he left this world sure of that.
It’s tough to listen to the final grasp on life. You just wish you could clear his throat for him and then it happens. You can look up the process online if you like. My dad followed the stages by the book. But you can’t look up what that moment is like for you.
The power of the victory.
The end of a life well lived.
There is a sense of being as close as you can be to the essence of humanity. In the end there is death and the legacy of your life. But when you take that last breath with the awe and wonder of your children praising you intensely right in your eyes, it must be the ultimate end to your humanity. These are the things that really matter.
You did it, man. That’s what we shouted at him. You did it. We actually thought he was gone already when twenty seconds later he had one last gasp. We were already crying, so we got a fright and then we laughed for about thirty seconds. It was the funniest thing. I then rubbed his head and felt the sweat and the warmth still there. He is not gone straight away. It is too immediate for you to feel that way. So we enjoyed that time. We cried and we joked and we even had some jokes with him. Why would we not take the piss out of him in the end? We had done so all our lives.
I washed him up a little bit and tried to get his face sitting a bit straighter, in case people came by. He would have wanted it that way. We then waited for the logistics of death to help us say goodbye.
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After my dad died we had asked Tom Brick to organize everything for us. Tom is a local man from St Kevin’s who is in the funeral game. He also lost his son, a fireman who died in a factory fire in the Bronx. It was a big story in our area because he was the first fireman to die after 9/11. I felt comforted, knowing that someone who had dealt with death on such a tragic level was helping us to deal with our loss.
While we were waiting for the funeral home guys to load up my dad in the van, Mr Brick said to me that nobody does death better than the Irish. Now you have to remember that in America we are Irish. There is no Irish-American label thrown around in everyday conversation. I feel he is right, though. I think death shows off Irish people’s ability to deal with tragedy and crisis. It definitely shows off their ability to be funny about it.
My dad had that sense of humour about death always. A few months before he died he asked me if I would continue to do the show after he died. I really did not know if I would be able to as I was clueless about how grief would affect me. I should have known that he was not too worried about me being able to do the show or not; this was just his way of letting me know that he had a funny idea about what I could do at the end of the show after he had died.
He suggested that I film in a graveyard. He had a very detailed picture in his mind. He said: ‘I want you to do a wide shot over the entire graveyard to establish where you are. Then I want you to pan down and zoom in on my gravestone. Now there won’t be one because I am being cremated, so you will have to make one up. On the gravestone it should say,
MIKE BISHOP
1936–201X
HE STORMED IT
‘I want you to hold that shot for about five or six seconds and then I want you to pan down and Black Bob will be lying on top of the grave, missing his master.’
I thought that was flipping hilarious. I loved it because he had totally grasped the concept of the call-back in comedy. It’s such a simple trick, but to use it about your own death is bloody genius. I may have said this before but it’s wort
h repeating: my dad impressed me so much throughout the whole process. I had thought of him as a fool for most of my life, but, boy, when he stepped up was he a warrior.
His other great moment of funeral humour came after the bitter-sweet occasion of Kathleen Kearney dying. Kathleen was the wife of my dad’s best friend, Jim. Even writing his name down now makes me sad, because so much of my grief is triggered by how close I realized those two men were at the end of my dad’s life. Their friendship was such a wonderful thing. Jim actually got up at my dad’s wake and said the most beautifully simple thing. ‘Mike was the best friend I ever had.’ When you hear that coming from a strong man like Jim Kearney, who once played hurling for County Clare in the 1950s, you know it comes from the heart. He sat for a few hours a day at the end, just looking at my dad and wanting to be near him. I suppose he was watching a lot of people disappear around him.
Anyway, Jim’s wife died and it was a sad and joyful day because she had suffered with Alzheimer’s for many years. They had really said goodbye to her years earlier, but it was a sad occasion. It was a big song-and-dance getting my dad ready, because he was insistent on dressing up properly for it. I told him people would understand if he just wore his black sweatpants and a sweater, but he was having none of it. He was so puffed up from all the drugs and his feet were swollen, so it took us ages to get him ready. There was not a hope that he was going to get his trousers shut, so he had to leave them open and close his pants with a belt. Eventually he was ready, and once he got his breath back he said, ‘This is like a dress rehearsal!’
My mother hated that joke because she still did not like to contemplate the inevitable, but I thought it was brilliant.
I think my favourite joke in the circumstances came from Aidan on the morning of my dad’s funeral. We were at the funeral home, getting ready to say goodbye to my dad for the last time before they closed the casket before the funeral Mass. It is one of the tougher moments and I remembered from my nan’s funeral that when you have to say goodbye everybody breaks down. You also have to be told about the logistics of what is going to happen and asked if there is anything you want to put in the coffin. My Aunt Mary insisted, with my mother’s support, that my dad have rosary beads. We put in flowers from my nephew Kieran and we draped him in his Cork hurling jersey that he had requested be near him when he was laid out.
During this discussion I asked Mr Brick if they took off my dad’s suit before the cremation. He said that we should take off his ring and anything else we wanted to keep before we left, that everything else would go for incineration with him. So Aidan said, ‘They burn everything. Damn, if I’d known that I would have brought a few bags of garbage to throw in there.’ It was funny anyway, but it was doubly funny because my dad in New York and Aidan in Dublin both obsessed about garbage day. They were father and son on that front: a fitting joke for them to share together in the end.
Mr Brick told us that an entire new chapter in his professional life had been written as a result of his experience dealing with us through the whole process – such a nice thing to say. He was really amazing. The pall that draped my dad’s coffin in the church had actually been donated by Mr Brick to the church and had been the pall that draped his son Tom’s coffin. Tom’s name is on it. There was so much community strength in all that. Another dad impressed me that day.
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My dad’s death was very public in the end. He died eight days after the documentary came out, so the Irish press charted the days from when I had to cancel shows to come home, to the news that he had passed away. We did not mind that because, being the man he was, we knew that he would have been delighted with the press attention. It would have been especially satisfying for my dad if he had seen the article in the Examiner with the headline, ‘Cork Comedian’s Father Dies’. The Examiner might not have realized how much that meant to me either.
My mother was adamant that I get back to performing the show as soon as possible. I am not sure why she thought that was the right thing to do, but she was of the firm belief that everyone should try to get back to their normal routine. That is good advice, but it’s tough when your normal routine is doing a stand-up show about your dying father who has now just died. I flew back to Ireland still very much on the strange buzz you feel after the funeral. From the moment I got on the plane I was dealing with the strange phenomenon of everyone knowing that my dad had died because it had been all over the news. ‘Really sorry to hear about your dad.’ ‘My condolences.’ It is kind of like being stuck in the funeral for an extended period because you have to thank a load of people you don’t know over and over and over.
I had only one night at home in Dublin, and suddenly I was in Galway, getting ready to do the show, not even a week after my dad had died. The adrenalin of the funeral was still pumping through me. I did not think much about things until the moment when I was standing backstage. The James Bond ski film-clips that I always show as the crowd was coming in were playing. ‘Goldfinger’ was blaring over the clips and then we got clearance. As soon as I heard the hum of Zulu warriors rising from the opening clip of the show, which is my dad’s small scene from Zulu, it hit me. This young man on the screen is my dad and he is now dead. The enormity of life and death smacked me in the face. The nerves of performing and the grief were pulsating through me. As the clip played I had only one thought: ‘All this time I have been preparing for death and now that it is here I am unprepared.’ I really wasn’t preparing for death, I was trying to make the most of life.
I had no time to dwell on it. My next thought was, ‘This is going to be really tough.’ I announced myself and walked out on to the stage. The applause was deafening. I had done the show many times, but this was a special welcome. I could feel it strongly and it was not helping. I bowed and stayed down for an extra few seconds. The show must go on, Dad!
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Years ago, when I first started talking to my dad about the original version of My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, I was drilling him pretty hard about how true the whole story was. I still had a lot of doubts about my dad’s stories and I couldn’t bring all this to the public and then find out he had been making it up all along. He reminded me of the celebrated article that someone was supposed to have in Midleton about how he was in the running for the Bond role. The heading of the mythical piece was something like, ‘The Irish Man Who Was Nearly James Bond’ (to be honest, it was most likely my inspiration for the show title). I must have heard people describing this story for years in Midleton. It was part of the legend that had grown up around my dad. But no one ever produced it. My dad said it had been written by an Irish actor and journalist, Vass Anderson. Vass had been in the production of Sive that the Bond people had allegedly attended to see my father.
When I decided to do the show in the UK I tried to get more background from my dad about Vass Anderson, particularly after he got sick, so I needed to be sure this story was not complete bullshit. I looked him up on the internet and saw his name mentioned in passing in an article or two about Irish writers. He had parts in plenty of movies and TV shows, but I could not get a contact. I put it out on Twitter and on Facebook, but nobody got back to me about him. Nobody in Midleton could even remember who had the original article or where it had appeared. At some stage I gave up trying to find Vass Anderson and the article. It was not integral to the story, but it just would have been great to see it in print.
In May 2011 I brought the show to the Soho Theatre in London for two weeks. It felt wonderful to bring it back to London, and in particular to the West End. My father’s journey with me began in London and it was nice to take our journey together back there for a little encore. I was sad he had not been able to come back with me, but in a way that is what we were doing with the show. The run went great.
One night I arrived back in the dressing room to find a letter that had been posted to me at the venue. The letter had a London address at the top and it was typed on an old-fash
ioned typewriter. It was from Vass Anderson.
He said he was delighted to read the review of the show in the Evening Standard but very sad to hear of my dad’s passing. He said he knew my dad well and did a show with him in a theatre on St Martin’s Lane when my dad was trying to get acting experience. He said that he wrote an article about him for the Irish Post as a result of him being part-Irish and how he was nearly James Bond. He said he remembered my dad as a very gentle man and described going to the opening of his then wife’s shop in Chelsea.
I did not pay much attention to the wife bit. I knew that for a time my father had a serious girlfriend called Valerie, that she had been back to Midleton with him a few times and that they had a hairdressing salon together in Chelsea. He was annoyed that the business wasn’t a success, but I always got the impression that there was something not quite right with that part of his entrepreneurial history. His recollections definitely came across as being sourced from the regret part of his brain.
I thought it was great that I had finally found Vass and that the story of the newspaper article was true. I was sad, though, that he had to find out about my father the way he did. I was sad too because of how he described my father: ‘a gentle man’. That really touched me. That was quite a specific thing to remember about him, and it was definitely true. The fact that the letter was typed on an old typewriter only added to the quaintness of it and it was an incredible letter to get.
I told my mother about it and she kind of remembered his name. She could not remember if it was from the newspaper piece or from actually meeting him.
What I did not anticipate was her shock at him mentioning Dad’s wife. It turned out that my father had indeed been married before and he had told my mother he never wanted us to know. The marriage did not last very long, but Valerie had been his wife. My father was separated from her but still married when he met my mother. When he decided he wanted to marry my mother, he had to get Valerie to agree to the divorce, but she would not agree unless he signed over his half of the shop to her. I got the impression from my mother that this really pissed him off because I assume it was money from his modelling success that had funded it from the beginning. But he signed it over to her so he could move on with his life and marry my mother.
