Danny Boy

My dad had a deep voice when he sang, and sometimes even deeper when he forced it lower, and his face strained like a moaning bull. To me, it was part comical when he did this, part operatic, and partly a visage to be feared. I’m sure he didn’t realize his singing face had the same eyes and mouth of the face he used to reprimand us. Either way, I bet I behaved better during singalongs. Or maybe I didn’t, and thus the face.

Yet, when my dad sang to us before bed, scratching our backs gently and singing softly, there was only a kind face. Safety and calm lofted in the sleepy air about our small heads that rested on our pillows. More often than any other song, my dad sang “Danny Boy” to us through the years. This song, and old tune from long ago, grew up in our household alongside us, and we came to sing it later to our own children. It was one of our family’s treasures.

The other week my husband, kids, and I drove from our home in northern Virginia to West Point, New York where the US Military Academy sits on a sweeping view of the Hudson River. I suppose if this is where you’ll train to protect our massive country, and perhaps even give your life in the process, it’s right and proper to have such a majestic place to rest — which is what we did with our dad’s ashes recently — laid them to rest.

The extended family drove there from around the Eastern US, plus one flew in from California — a collection of generous souls whose presence and effort made my mom, siblings, and I extremely grateful.

A lovely day for it

The day was one of those elite days of the year when temps are decent, crisp sunlight shines like a diamond, and the sky is its prettiest. How we pulled such lucky weather out of the hat that day when all before was the sticky heat of summer, who’s to know? The weather gods were being kind as we listened to the priest say his words, the guns fire their respect into the air, the butterflies flicker the place with bits of peppy life. If your fate was to bury someone that day, it sure was a lovely day to do it in.

Around the campus, young cadets were marching in formation on the great lawns. Faculty and staff were going about daily business. Families were, one by one, filing into the cemetery to take up their sought-after appointment to honor their dead. The squirrels jumping around didn’t seem connected to this military world one bit nor its burials, and I liked that juxtaposition on such a day of finality. Life continues.

But life preceded this, too, which included time spent listening to my dad sing his songs. There was Johnny Cash and Elvis. There were church hymns and Christmas songs. And there was “Danny Boy”.

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side. The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling, It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.

It’s an old ballad written in 1913 by Frederic Weatherly, an English lawyer and prolific lyricist. It’s a dear but sad song and was popular in the funeral scene. Is it still today? I couldn’t say, but it’s what my mom asked my sisters and I to sing after the military academy had finished their ceremony. We would put our father down fittingly for his long sleep as he’d done for us so many times.

Song was important

I learned that my sisters and I were singing the song at the burial ceremony on the drive up to New York. While my husband and kids discussed some such thing in the car, I practiced the song quietly under my breath while I drove. I hadn’t sung in a long time, and I’m hardly a singer to begin with — maybe you’d say not at all if you heard me. But all of us in my family can hold a tune, thankfully, as there were untold rides in the car growing up with all of us wailing a tune at the top of our lungs, mostly (marginally?) on key.

Song was important to my dad.

My youngest son had a high school friend who is a fourth-year cadet at West Point. This kind fellow met up with us after the ceremony and showed us some of the grounds, answered any possible question we had about the academy, livened our moods, gave us a peek at what it might have been like when my dad was there back in the early 1960s — or at least how different it is to go to school at a military academy versus anywhere else.

My memories of Dad singing “Danny Boy” reaches back to Indianapolis where we lived after my dad returned from Vietnam and served in the Army reserves. My sister and I slept in a set of twin beds in a bedroom with a window that looked out toward Gina’s house, the girl next door who was our age and picked her nose a lot, which I still remember vividly.

Serious things

Life then was a romping childhood — a little of this and that, with my sister, with Gina, twirling batons, playing in the yard. By nightfall it became a winding down, and then going to bed, which for active girls was a process. Danny Boy helped to that end. I recall not really understanding the lyrics, but I understood it was somber and sad but about love. I understood it was about serious things I hadn’t yet seen, though the man singing it at our bedsides had recently seen quite a bit of that seriousness, and it affected him greatly though we wouldn’t know this until he shared his stories decades later. What a lot to carry around for a guy still in his twenties.

At the burial ceremony it was finally our turn to sing. My two sisters and I stepped up to the small square vault where my dad’s ashes would now reside. There was a big bouquet of flowers at our feet that said “Class of 1964”. We began. My sisters set a brisk but reasonable pace through the song, and before I knew it, it was coming to its end. Then there was that one set of lines.

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be

The tears caught in my throat. This line always seemed like such an anomaly when I heard it as a child. A grave seemed so far away to my young mind, because it was. That day at West Point, it couldn’t have been any closer. And I hope for my dad it couldn’t have been warmer or sweeter as his family stood there to gently coax him off to sleep.

Good night, Dad. Sleep well.