Loss of a parent: I spent 50 years preparing for my father's death, but it still came as a shock

A FORTNIGHT AGO, my father died. He was 80.

Everybody has to die sometime, but I always believed an exception would be made in my father’s case.

I’m not saying he’s Superman, but no one has ever seen Colm Gallagher and Superman in a room together. Every child believes their father is invincible, but then they grow out of that belief. But for me, the illusion persisted.

And persisted.

And persisted.

Death stalked my father from the moment he was born.

In October 1945, in a nursing home by Huband Bridge on the canal, weeks after the end of World War II, my father, Colm, was born.

“Don’t get too fond of this one,” his mother was told. “He won’t last long.”

He was given a life expectancy of two, which should have taken him to 1947 – but he defied that prediction.

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And 50 years later, in October 1997, Colm had a catastrophic stroke. I was a student in UCD at the time, and received a devastating out-of-the-blue telephone call, telling me to expect the worst. But he defied that prediction too, and even confounded the experts by learning to walk and talk again, and return to his demanding job at the top echelons of the civil service.

A fighter

In 2015, he was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer. The statistics on survivability were grim. It looked bad. And yet again, he defied the medics and pulled through.

Over the past six months, he was buffeted by multiple serious infections and sepsis, and lurched between his care home and Beaumont Hospital A&E. Each time, we were warned this might be it. It never was. He even managed to rise again on Easter Sunday, something we had an atheist chuckle about over the past few weeks.

I started calling Dad Lazarus years ago. Through his determination, a deep commitment to proving doctors wrong, and sheer bloody-mindedness, he just kept going, decades after that nurse gave him that tiny life expectancy.

But death was always looming in the backdrop. All through childhood, he would entreat our mother to have a life beyond him, a network of support ready for when he “snuffed it.”

Scarred by the loss of his own father at a very young age, and seeing how it devastated his mother, planning for his death and protecting his wife from the impact of it was foremost in his mind for the almost 50 years I have known him.

And for decades, he has had lighthearted discussions with me about wanting his body to be put out for recycling in the green bin or mischievous locations for his ashes to be scattered.

I have had conversations with him about his predicted death multiple times.

I have been brought into a family room with boxes of tissues multiple times.

I’ve had the call saying “this is probably it” multiple times.

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But two weeks ago, his luck finally ran out.

And I got the news in a New York City Uber, speeding to JFK Airport to try to make it back on time (I failed).

The doctors had said he’d probably got about three days – but Colm couldn’t resist proving the doctors wrong one last time. He lasted under three hours from that prediction.

So although this was a long goodbye, it was sudden in the end. And unexpected, for this invincible man who defied the medical odds for his entire life.

I have been caught off-guard by just how devastating it is to lose my father, despite having had half a century of worrying about it. It is a disorientating, discombobulating feeling; the world feels off-kilter. And it turns out that the anticipatory anxiety – worrying about it, thinking about it, planning for it – for all those years was utterly pointless.

The lead-in was decades in the making. But nothing could prepare me for the real thing.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is a human rights lawyer, barrister and writer. In 2023, she was awarded the President of Ireland’s Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad for her work, and in 2025, she was named Irish Tatler’s International Woman of the Year.

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