‘You’re not going back, are ye?” turned out to be the last words my dad said to me. I would receive a phone call from my brother three weeks later. His heart had failed. He was gone.
I booked a flight from Florida to Dublin to come home to bury my father. He hated that I lived abroad, felt my country had failed me, knew it was with fear and apprehension that I had emigrated the first time but never grasped that I became a willing nomad.
In October 2008 I was let go from the job I loved at a small, friendly architectural firm. My boss was kind and patient, a good mentor. We had been relying on a mortgage go-ahead to start our next big project. Planning was lodged, presentations made, long hours put in. But the bank went under, and I lost my job the next day.
I got a taxi to my parents’ house, where I cried and cried. I was so angry, felt so let down. “It’s just a job,” my dad said, but we both knew this wasn’t true. My work there was part of me.
"Would you consider going abroad?" a recruitment agent asked a few days later. "I'll be honest: it's the only way you can hold on to your career." The Middle East came up, as did Australia. Half my college class were already out there, but bungee jumping and spiders are not really my thing.
So in January 2009 I headed for a new life in St Maarten, part of a small island in the Caribbean that I had never heard of until my telephone interview. It was difficult at first. I was allergic to the sun and had to have steroid shots in my buttocks for the first month. I was allergic to the mosquitoes, too, which meant more steroids.
As my skin and my blood acclimatised, so did my attitude. I was on island time within a couple of months. I spent a fantastic two years there before I decided to move home, thinking things might have improved.
I spent months sending out CVs and did a Fás course in 3D modelling. Looking around that room of educated, talented but unemployed young people made me realise we were the generation cast aside.
I decided not to wallow, so I headed for New York. I spent the summer renting a room from an eccentric, upbeat lady who I am lucky to still call a friend. I visited museums, walked in the park, caught up with friends and did some shifts at an Irish bar, where my Irishness was a commodity that earned me good tips.
I returned home and by complete accident got a part-time job at a small structural-engineering firm a few days a week, which lasted six months before the Caribbean called again – Barbados this time. I was elated to be going back to the sunshine. I spent a few months there before the company I worked for fell apart. Feeling a bit let down by architecture, I needed a break.
A friend from St Maarten worked on a megayacht that was looking for crew in Florida. It was on a quick visit back to Ireland to get my visa sorted that I unknowingly said goodbye to my father for the last time.
I got the call on a Sunday morning and flew home the next day. After all the flights I had taken, filled with excitement and butterflies, airports to me were happy places, not for mourning. I don’t travel with the same outlook any more. I look around wondering who are the unfortunate few.
I landed in Dublin at 5.30am the following day, at the airport where my dad had worked for 35 years of his life as an aircraft engineer for Aer Lingus. There in the gate next to us was an old plane, painted as it would have been in the 1960s, on display as part of Aer Lingus's 75th-birthday celebrations. I could picture him there as a much younger man, and it felt terribly poignant.
At his wake a neighbour said to me, “Sure that’s the way it is in Ireland. There is always somebody who is living away, isn’t there? Always one who has to get that terrible call to come home.”
