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On the Horizon

from The Middle Ages, Vol II by Tyler Shipley

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When I was writing Candleflame I was thinking a lot about my own dad and how awful it would be to lose him. Then, in 2015, I took a holiday with my parents and we had a lot of fun and I noticed that my dad seemed older than the last time I had seen him. Just little things, but it got me thinking about his age and how, at some point, I was going to have to start preparing myself to say goodbye. I wrote On the Horizon when I got home from that trip, thinking that I probably had another ten or fifteen years to get used to the idea. As it happened, he was diagnosed with cancer about a week after I wrote the song, and died within a couple of months.

lyrics

Some nights i confront an uncomfortable truth: my father is healthy but last year he turned seventy-two and each time i see him i notice a change, just a bit less mobile and a few more aches and pains. He can't go very long without a nap; when the light turns green he's slow to react. He's really mellowed out in his old age; it's for the better I think most people would say, but he's popping six or seven pills a day and he's lost his once intimidating upper body strength. I know every single dad in the world someday has to go, but I don't want to lose a man who, in some ways, I hardly know, whose nervous ticks and tensions and flaws I see in myself, who taught me how to hold a runner on base and how to pick one off, who gave me a model of a man you could depend upon. Thanks to him, in crisis situations, I have always stayed calm. Though I see it coming on the horizon I will never be ready to say goodbye. My mother will probably move to a smaller place and she'll be okay living out her days, but she'll hate being alone through the night, it's bothered her pretty much all her life. When she talks about him over the years, one minute she'll be fine and the next she'll be in tears. My sister's reaction is hard to predict, she's a different person than when we were kids, but she loves the hell of out my dad and I'm so goddam proud of her for that. I'm lucky to say I don't yet know what happens when a family loses the centre of gravity. Dad's still got a lot of good time, I should temper all this thinking about his dying, write his story before his memory fades. It's a hell of a life he made. Though I see it coming on the horizon I will never be ready to say goodbye.

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from The Middle Ages, Vol II, released September 2, 2017

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Tyler Shipley Toronto, Ontario

Tyler Shipley was the founding member of the Consumer Goods (theconsumergoods.bandcamp.com) and now performs as a solo artist.

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