Robbie Meredith and Ross McKee
BBC News NI
Gary Lightbody was ‘broken’ by father’s death
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.”
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After forming at the University of Dundee in 1994, Snow Patrol released their first album in 1998
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.”
‘Version of myself’
Lightbody has previously opened up about his struggle with depression, saying he reached a turning point in 2016, when he was diagnosed with infections in his sinuses, eyes and ears – a result of sustained drug and alcohol abuse.
Getting sober then compelled him to focus on his mental health.
Lightbody said he felt “less fragile now” and was determined not to waste any days.
“A lot of the times I am writing in the book about a version of myself that is now extinct,” he said.
“But it is a version that did exist, it was a me that interacted with the world that was drunk or on drugs or in some kind of fugue state and now I feel that I am awake and present and feel much stronger for it.”
The book is a companion to the Snow Patrol album, also entitled The Forest is the Path, which was released last year.
Lightbody writes of the connection between the two: “While you don’t have to read this book to understand the album, a listen to the album might help some parts of this book make sense.”
