He did more than all right.
A remembrance of Dad, by Paul.
It’s been 10 years since Dad was diagnosed. It’s been a long, sad and painful goodbye. But it has given me the space and permission to consider not dad’s death, but his life. And it has made me wonder, how do you summarize a life?
Is it the sum of our actions? Our impact on the world? Our creations, our karma points?
In some sort of grand judgement, do we add up all our positives and subtract a few minuses? The answer, of course, is that a eulogy can’t summarize or judge a person’s life, it simply helps us celebrate all of the many qualities that made Michael Joyce his own, wonderfully unique person.
My father led a remarkable life. Not in the traditional sense of remarkable. It wasn’t full of big accomplishments, but it positively sparkled with quiet achievements. He wasn’t particularly well known, nor rich, nor a leader. But he taught me what a life well-lived could look like. He lived with humour, tenacity and determination, and always an optimism. His glass was always more than half-full, and endlessly refilled. He was kind and straightforward and reasonable and all together decent.
For 50 years as a carpenter, he built, and installed and fixed both houses and offices in Ireland, Australia and here in Toronto. Tens of thousands of people have walked through his doorways, sat at his desks, lived in his houses, used his furniture, all without ever knowing his name. But they’ve benefitted from his talent, his strength, and his dedication. And in that, my father lives on. Waking up in the cold of a 6am morning. And getting up and going. Day in and day out. Then coming home, dusty and sore and never complaining. Never complaining. Always with a quick smile and ready to put you at ease. These are qualities to admire.
Here are a few of the milestones that marked Dad’s 79 years with us…
Michael Joseph Joyce was the first born child, and first son of Mick Joyce of Fermoy, and Susan Heaney of Bellaghy. He was born on Friday, May 2nd, 1941 in Mossbawn, up the Toome Road, near Castledawson. That week was a momentous one in history. Cheerios were first introduced. Europe was in the middle of the 2nd World War. In that first week of Dad’s life, Belfast was bombed by the Germans, damaging half the homes in the city. Mick Joyce was a bricklayer, and stone mason. Tall, strong, with a shock of white hair and moustache. He didn’t say very much, in the way that men those days tended not to. He was born in 1914, the first year of the first World War, and 25 years later was called up and served as a medical orderly in the Second World War, in London.
When Dad was 14, Mick Joyce took him to get a haircut. While sitting there, in this small Bellaghy barbershop, he noticed a photograph tucked into the edge of the barber’s mirror. It was a photo of a house, a farmer, a dog and water barrel. Underneath the photo was scrawled “New South Wales, Australia.” Years later Dad said that for some reason this photo stuck in this mind, planting a seed. By 1956 had Dad graduated from The Tech in Magherafelt, with distinctions in Woodwork and Metalwork, and credits in English, Physics and Algebra. Dad got his first job at 16. This job was to make buckets of tea at 9 am, noon, and 3 pm for the workers who were building the new Aldergrove International airport in Antrim. For this he earned $6 a week, which he dutifully brought home and gave to his mam for food for his now 6 sisters: Pat, Biddy, Jane, Mary, Veronica, and Siobhan.
One of the larger tragedies of Dad’s life was losing his younger brother Brendan in December 1960. They were just 16 months apart, and were great brothers, the two of them battling for space and food and to get a word in edgeways in a small house with those 6 sisters. Brendan died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage while out playing Gaelic football. He was 18.
Dad served as an apprentice Joiner with Tommy Clarke of Portglenone from 1958 to 1962. At that point he didn’t have a car, but he did have Mick’s old bicycle for the 10km ride there and back every day. While working with the Clarke brothers he learned how to become a carpenter, helping build a hardware store, a pharmacy, a grocery delivery van and house after house. In his reference letter, Tommy noted that Dad was “honest and trustworthy, a good timekeeper and a conscientious worker”.
He worked all across Northern Ireland, zipping from job to job on his bicycle, then on a Lambretta scooter, and then finally his first car, a Morris Oxford. As one of the few of his friends with a car, he became the designated driver to all the dances, ceili’s, football matches and socials of the area. It was here that he finally met “this wee girl called Mary Diamond from Killyberry”. He helped build a new cigarette factory in Carrickfergus, and was then sent down to the Belfast shipyard to help finish a frigate for the Australian navy. This project again sparked thoughts in Dad’s mind about starting an adventure in the land Down Under. But his parents and aunts had other plans. In 1966, they swooped in and put down a deposit on a fixer-upper semi-detached in Belfast for dad and his about-to-be married bride. They were married in 1967.
But in just a few years, The Troubles erupted and Belfast was the epicentre. Over 3,500 people were killed in this civil war between 1969 and 1998. But 1972 was the worst of it, with almost 500 people being shot, mostly in west and north Belfast. If you’ve heard of ‘Bloody Sunday’, well that was January 1972 - when 28 unarmed protesters where shot by British soldiers. A few months later, in July, The IRA retaliated by exploding 20 bombs across Belfast, injuring 130. Mum and Dad decided that this war zone was no place to raise me, who was 5 and Andrea, who was then 3. Dad’s yearning to emigrate became real. As a now well-experienced carpenter, Dad was fast-tracked for this move ‘To The Colonies’, and for 200 pound we were all flown to Adelaide, South Australia. Dad found work immediately, building homes for a company called Alpine Constructions. He worked with them until the day we left for Canada, some 15 years later. They were good to him, and he enjoyed the work, despite the blistering heat, dust, asbestos, snakes, spiders, and all of the other things that will kill you in Australia.
Dad never stopped working. When we finally moved into our own home in a suburb called Ingle Farm, Dad handbuilt a luxurious shed for our dog Shandy. It was about 3 feet wide by 10 feet long, with a sloping corrugated roof for the rain to run off, and even a clever little wooden window for those hot Australian nights. He built out our back patio with brick, trellis, and plant holders. He built a brick BBQ, and eventually even added a living room extension to the house over part of the driveway. The garage was his workshop and happy place. From the two wooden shipping containers that carried our clothes and toys and wedding china from Ireland to Australia, he built fridge-sized tool chests. He built shelves and stacked them with marmalade jars of carefully sorted nails, screws, washers and bolts. He built a bench to work on, and when Shandy was too old for his own large kennel, he ingeniously blocked off the bottom of the bench and turned it into a smaller kennel, complete with a separate dog-sized entrance to the garden.
Inside this garage he built a full size table tennis table, perfectly joined, with carefully painted white edges and a dark green top. I can’t tell you how many hours I’d spend there with him, and how much I relished those late night games. When I got older, I rigged up an intercom from the kitchen to the garage so mum could call us in for dinner. Inside our house, he created a full-length, wall-sized built-in wardrobe in his bedroom, complete with dressing table and mirror. He custom-built desks and wardrobes for both Andrea and I. All beautifully finished, with inlaid wood panelling, and the very fashionable mustard yellow formica of the 1970s. Every screw and nail hole was puttied over, sanded and stained. I never became much of a handyman myself, but as a carpenter, Dad did teach me that most useful piece of advice: measure twice, cut once.
Eventually, Dad ran out of things to build or fix at home. So we bought a cottage (or ‘the shack’) in Edithburgh, a sleepy seaside town about 2 hours drive away. Dad loved it there. It was a town with 2 pubs about 40 feet apart, a grocery store that sold worms for fishing, a post office, and a gas station that made the best fish and chips. Although he never actually learned to swim, and was rarely even seen in shorts, Dad loved the small-town friendliness and quiet of Edithburgh. He liked to fish from the jetty, take Shandy to the beach and, of course, slowly rebuild our cottage room by room. Throughout high school, Dad would get up early Saturday mornings to drive me the half hour into town, to play cricket for the school team. Sometimes he would even umpire the games, showing (frustratingly) absolutely no favouritism when I would get out Leg Before Wicket.
As mum worked night shift for many years, it was up to Dad to keep us entertained on the weekends, which he did without fail, and without ever complaining. We would go to the beach, ride around a nearby bike track, play endless games of cricket with the front driveway as our pitch, walk the aisles of Lloyd’s hardware store, eat lots of freezies and try to not get sunburned again. If this all sounds like a happy household to grow up in, well… it was. There was food on the table, space to play, good friends to enjoy, and, being good Irish Catholics, mum and dad kept their stresses to themselves. There was never a lot of money, but we never felt its lack. Dad was never the life of the party, but was always keen to be at one. He and mum hosted or attended weekly card nights with their circle of Irish friends in Adelaide. Smoking, drinking, laughing, arguing, listening to The Dubliners, Chieftans and Dire Straits, and eating mum’s delicious soda bread, shepherd’s pie and world famous apple tarts. He liked a drink and a story, but never too much of either.
In 1973, Dad had made a huge leap by bringing his young family to the other side of the planet. Then in 1988, we did it all again. Andrea had just finished high school and I had just graduated from University. Canada was calling. And with the help of Mum’s brothers, Gerald and Peter, we moved once more to another entirely different climate. Dad threw himself into working again and soon enough we had moved out of Gerald’s basement and into our own apartment. Over the next 18 years, Dad would pile his toolbox onto the subway and criss-cross the city fixing and building and managing job sites for Diamond Brothers Carpentry.
Dad was never a writer, but he loved to tell stories. As the demon of dementia was starting to close in on him in 2009, Dad sat down and patiently started writing his life story. I had the privilege of helping him finish and print it, and it was an amazing experience. In doing so, Dad left us with a true gift - a record of his joys, his fears, his memories and experiences growing up and becoming the man he was. When I think of these last 10 heart-breaking years, it’s easy to dwell on the sadness and suffering and injustice of where we have ended up. But that’s only the smallest, and least significant part of Dad’s journey. He built houses. He built kitchens. He built table tennis tables. He built doors and desks. And he helped build me and Andrea into who we are today, and hopefully I can pass some of his greatness on to Tristan and Daria, and they will pass it on to their children. I love the last words that dad wrote in his book. It goes like this…
“Them were called ‘the good old days’, but they were hard and all work. But looking back, we were well looked after and well fed. We’re not half wise, but we did all right.”
Thank you Dad. You were a good man, with a good soul, who lived a remarkable life. You did a whole lot more than all right.
