As the nation bids farewell to former PM Brian Mulroney, a family says goodbye to a father

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In some ways, a funeral is always about the distance between what is public and what is private, between the different degrees of knowing, missing and remembering when someone is gone.

There are always the people to whom the dead most belonged, standing on their own island of grief in a sea of others who genuinely wish them well and mourn the deceased too, but whose purchase on the loss is a more distant one.

That space between the different versions of who someone was – and the size and shape of the hole they leave in the world as a result – is all the more vivid in a state funeral like the one that bid farewell to former prime minister Brian Mulroney in Montreal on Saturday.

The weeks of public remembrances that have flowed since he died at age 84 on Feb. 29 have all revolved around his impulse always to swing for the fences. His towering vision for the country and how he might shape it; his big gambles on transformative public policy like free trade, the GST and combatting acid rain; his capacious appetite for shiny company and the finer things in life. Then, after scathing public opinion chased him and his party from power, there was a sweeping reappraisal of his legacy.

And so, there was, fittingly, the sombre grandeur and monumental scale of the state funeral – which everyone seemed to agree Mr. Mulroney would have adored and must have hated to miss. There were the RCMP officers carrying his casket, the 19-gun salute and Notre-Dame Basilica packed with the entire power structure of the country, past and present.

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There were eulogies from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Wayne Gretzky and former Quebec premier Jean Charest. But it was a daughter’s tribute to her father that formed the emotional spine of the service and offered the most compelling portrait of an epochal politician.

Caroline Mulroney, Mr. Mulroney’s oldest child, talked about how she and her siblings gradually became aware of their father’s stature in the world, but why that was never the reason they put him on a pedestal.

The night he won the Progressive Conservative leadership, reporters asked him for comment on the significance of the win, she said, and his first response wasn’t what they expected. “‘It’s Caroline Mulroney’s ninth birthday!’ he exclaimed on national television,” she recalled. “At a moment of great achievement, he showed the country what his family meant to him.”

He carried her to bed and tucked her in, he let her wreck his impeccable shirts crying on them as a teenager, and later he became the grandfather who frolicked in the pool and spoiled the kids with “so much candy,” she told the mourners.

“He became a truly great prime minister, and a world leader,” said Ms. Mulroney, now with her own political career as President of the Treasury Board in the Ontario government. “But to us, he was more than that. He was a truly great father.” That was where her polished composure cracked.

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The official events of Mr. Mulroney’s funeral began earlier in the week when he lay in state for two days in Ottawa, watched over by sentries from the Canadian Armed Forces, the RCMP and the Parliamentary Protective Service. They stood at the four corners of the casket with their backs to it, their weapons pointed at the floor and their eyes cast down; the vigil that was long ago about protecting the deceased is now a symbolic gesture of respect from a grateful nation.

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A short distance away from that ancient-looking tableau, Ms. Mulroney stood with her mother, Mila, and her brothers Ben, Mark and Nicolas, along with two of their spouses, in a receiving line. First bold-faced names from Governor-General Mary Simon and Mr. Trudeau on down filed through to offer their condolences, and later, it was members of the public.

This lying in state was a wake written on the scale of official Ottawa. But even while TV cameras on long booms swooped above, what it looked and felt like was any grieving family receiving old friends and strangers who all feel compelled to show up for them.

There were hugs and handshakes; gracious but slightly stilted introductions; conversations about how this person or that knows your family; murmured words of kindness and condolence; expressions of gratitude accompanied by smiles that don’t quite reach exhausted eyes.

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When members of the general public began to file through, one woman sobbed audibly as she offered her condolences to Mila. Then she made that universal “I remember you when you were this big” gesture to Caroline.

Another woman paused to speak to Mark, and it seemed he was offering comfort as much as receiving it. “He’s watching right now,” he said to her, glancing up at the ceiling far above them.

Later, at the funeral, after Ms. Mulroney’s poignant eulogy, each of her brothers delivered a reading. Then, near the end of the service, Mr. Mulroney’s 18-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Theodora Lapham, stepped to a microphone in front of the basilica’s altar to sing.

“Je vais chanter …” she began in trying to introduce herself, but her words dissolved into tears.

She tried again, but again choked up. There were a few long beats of silence as she tried to gather herself, apologizing. Then the assembled mourners began to applaud in encouragement, loaning her a few moments to draw a steadying breath. Finally, she explained that she would be singing her grandfather’s favourite song, Mais qu’est-ce que j’ai?

Ms. Lapham delivered the song in a voice of astonishing beauty and depth, but then on the final line, the tears overcame her once more. The audience, weeping along with her, offered a standing ovation to accompany the last few lilting notes of the piano.

She was then joined by tenor Marc Hervieux, and they each sang a verse of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, before joining together on the chorus. Midway through that final stretch, the pair stepped back from their microphones, joined hands and just stood still.

The audience gasped as the basilica filled with Mr. Mulroney’s instantly recognizable voice picking up the tune, in a recording from the Shamrock Summit with then-president Ronald Reagan in 1985.

The voice, always that voice.

Everyone of a certain vintage and level of prominence in Ottawa has a story about Mr. Mulroney’s phone calls – deployed to cajole, gossip, debrief or comfort – when the baritone on the line would unmistakably announce the caller. But of course, the voice belongs in another way to the family in the front pews, who will hold memories of very different conversations.

When the funeral service ended, RCMP officers in red serge shouldered the former prime minister’s casket and marched slowly down the nave of the basilica, trailed by the Mulroney family – his four children and their spouses, 16 grandchildren and his adored Mila, an entire phalanx of Mulroneys, holding hands or hugging, weeping or grinning.

And one last time, Mr. Mulroney’s baritone soared to the vaults above, singing We’ll Meet Again:

“So will you please say ‘Hello’ to the folks that I know

Tell them I won’t be long

They’ll be happy to know that as you saw me go

I was singing this song.”