Fifteen Years

It was the death of his father that set a 21-year-old Al Lewis on the path to becoming a singer-songwriter. “It was a pivotal moment,” Lewis remembers. Yet it would be years before he could bring himself to put the great loss of his life into song. Indeed, it took Lewis a decade-and-a-half to even begin processing it. When his father died, Lewis had been a young man, without the emotional toolset to make sense of the feelings that were overwhelming him. Few of his friends had experience of bereavement, or any idea of how to help Lewis. During lockdown, Lewis finally decided to sort through all of his Dad’s old possessions, which he’d packed away in the attic of his father’s bungalow after his death, and which had remained there, untouched, for 15 years. Among the dusty, discarded boxes he found treasures from his Dad’s past, from before Lewis knew him; paperwork relating to his parents’ divorce and how his Dad struggled with his illness; relics that sketched out the dreams his Dad pursued in the years after his diagnosis, offering glimpses of an inner life Lewis had never known. “It was bittersweet,” Lewis says. “But it helped me sketch in the man. I felt like I knew him better afterwards.