We dwell on something a bit different this week, something that has wide effects in rural Ireland and especially in the farming world, and that is grief inside a family unit.

As people might know, I lost my father to cancer in 2021.

It was something that I always say to people, ‘You always hear about and see from the outside, but you never dream you’d be in that situation yourself’.

Recently, I was at an open meeting that Embrace FARM held in Bantry, and probably for the first time in four years, I was in a meeting where people had an understanding of where I stand, and ‘get’ that the world keeps going.

The farming world and death don’t go hand-and-hand.

Outside the farming world, you can take a few days off and go back when you feel right, but you can’t do that in the farming world: cattle need to be fed, cows need to be milked, and slurry needs to be spread. Our world keeps turning.

I remember the morning after dad passing, I milked the cows.

I remember listening to the radio in the parlour that morning, the DJ playing the latest tunes, then playing a shout-out to people who text in to the morning show.

It made me think for a minute: ‘How dare people be so happy and laughing?’, but then I snapped out of it and back to the real world again. It keeps going round and round; they don’t know what you’re going through on their side of the mic.

I always say, the days of the funeral itself are grand.

You have people in the house early in the morning til late at night, then bang.

The day after the funeral people go back to where they travelled up from.

People have go back to their own farm, because their help was finished up the evening before.

People have their own jobs, and they go back to college or school.

And then it hits you: that if the farm is quiet, that means no one is coming around the corner.

No one is liming the cubicles at their own pace, there’s no-one to leave the cows in, and no-one to close the wire to lock the cows out for the night.

No-one to talk about random stuff, and no-one to tell what you plan to do the next day.

It’s amazing, the saying that a dog is a man’s best friend because just six weeks after dad passing, the main farm dog passed.

From the day that dad passed that dog was never the same again.

He never went out with me ever to bring in the cows, or to put them back out the field again.

It was actually amazing to see a bond between a man and a dog, and when one goes the other one can’t really go on without the other

There will a part two to this in a few weeks, to show what happens when you have to navigate the world that you’re not used to, or have any experience in.