Ray Bugeja writes:

I wept when my father died. I walked into the ward at St Luke’s Hospital, drew the curtain for some privacy, pulled the sheet covering his face, stared at him and cried. I touched his hand; it was still warm. I had never touched a dead person before.

I wept again yesterday when a friend of mine called me at the office to inform me that Dun Vinċenz Deguara had died. He was a second father to me, indeed, to many of us my age who frequented the Paola Pageant Group long years ago.

As I grew older and left Paola to settle in Attard, I lost regular contact with the priest who, at the prime of my life, I used to meet and seek advice from more than I did with my father. He was always there for us and we learned to forecast his reaction to our wild ideas depending on the way he smiled. But he always smiled even when the reply was a definite no.

Though regular contact was lost we still occasionally exchanged e-mails or spoke briefly on the phone. I went to his house in May last year as he had accepted to officiate in my son’s wedding. He informed me that, the wedding being on a Sunday morning when he would, of course, say Mass, he had asked the parish priest to give him the day off as he wanted to be free to spend as much time as possible with us. That is what a father would want, no?

At the time of the Paola Pageant Group he made us ‘daring’ youths always see logic, assume responsibility, face difficult individuals and never take the line of least resistance. Often he did it by throwing us in the deep end of the pool, making sure he was always there to pull us out if we were drowning. But he remained in the background. Isn’t that what a loving father would do?

Yes, I wept again yesterday but these were tears of joy, happy I had the privilege of being ‘brought up’ by such a splendid man.

I cannot say I miss him. I always tell friends who lose their parents that, they may die, true, but fathers and mothers never leave us. So Dun Vinċenz is with us.

Bless us, father.