[Source: BBC News]
Snow Patrol star Gary Lightbody has said he felt broken by the death of his father Jack and that writing about it was cathartic.
Lightbody’s father, who had dementia, died in a nursing home in December 2019.
He said he was “numb for a year” following his father’s death, but hopes the book will help other people who are grieving.
“I wasn’t writing it thinking people were ever going to read it, I was writing it for myself,” he told BBC News NI.
The frontman, whose hits include Chasing Cars and Run, was speaking ahead of the release of his book, The Forest is the Path.
“When I finished it I sent it to a few friends, and then started having discussions with close friends about their own grief, and their own process that they went through, and finding out that everybody’s is different,” he said.
However, the Bangor singer said love connects all grief.
“You can’t grieve someone’s passing without having loved them in the first place,” he said.
“I guess when I got to the end of the book, I was like just in case somebody else has gone through this, and felt like I did, like I was broken, I wanted to put it out there into the world even if it was just on an extended inlay card.”
Lightbody writes of his memories of the day his father died, his love for his father, and his guilt “at being absent for so much of what had passed these last years of your cognitive decline and illness“.
The singer said his father’s death had taught him “to get through anything“.
“I never imagined, you don’t imagine that happening, a parent passing,” he said.
“So I never thought about it, even when he had dementia, I was refusing to believe it and perhaps that’s what caused the numbness in the first place.
“But you have to get on with things as well.
“In the book, talking about the immediate things that need to be attended to straight after a death.
“I felt like a torch had been passed and I was the man of the family now – I was having to stand up and be that.“
Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.
