ON THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER: 1 YEAR LATER

Article #20: The Continuing Complex Re-Ordering of Life after Death.

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Niall**

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This is a follow up article to the original which you can read here

“What on earth is goin' on in my heart?/Has it turned as cold as stone?/Seems these days I don't feel anythin'/'Less it cuts me right down to the bone/What on earth is goin' on in my heart?” David Gray, My Oh My

I always thought wardrobes were like treasure troves.

A gateway to a hidden place. If you step inside, close the door behind you, some other land might reveal itself. Maybe even Narnia.

As I prize open the doors in front of me, I see clothes neatly hangered from one side to the other. Clothes that are pristine, wrinkle-free and smell like the first hint of summer. They languish effortlessly, draped one after the other in neat formation, like a squadron waiting for their marching orders.

Beneath the clothes are carefully placed shoes resting on a neat carpet base. A pair of sandals, a pair of beige trainers, non-descript, but with a comfy sole to name but two. I like the beige trainer. It’s the kind of trainer you could walk all day in. The kind of trainer that has yet to see a lot of road, such is their out-of-the-box condition. I also spy a dapper pair of brown shoes with a modest heel at the back, rounded off with a lovely subtle little gold trim. Similar to its near neighbour, these shoes also seem to have more miles ahead of them than behind them.

It’s almost as if once any shard of light enters the wardrobe, everything in there stands to attention. Presenting the very best version of themselves, like an orphan child looking up at a shiny new stranger.

And in a way they are orphans. Their owner chose them above all others, carried them home, but has now abandoned them. The shoulders and feet they caressed have disappeared from view. Their owner has done something she never did in her many decades on this mortal soil. She left for a final journey – the journey of journeys – without packing a single thing.

As I leaf through my mother’s last wardrobe, I am reminded of a cold, hard truth. We take nothing with us. Nothing.

The Passing

In a hospital room on a Sunday morning in early December, exactly fourteen months ago, my mother sighed her last.

I wrote about her death not two months after she passed. I wrote about it as I wanted to try and capture the rawness of the state I was neck deep in. The state I was stripped down to after we laid her to rest. I’m not one hundred percent sure why I wrote it and I’m not all that interested in getting to the bottom of why either. But I did sense that as time went on, I would rationalise her death. I would build a familiar narrative around it along the tried and trusted lines of: “Sure we all have to bury our parents, don’t we?” or “Sure it’s the natural way of things, isn’t it?”

And those words have a ring of truth, for sure. Yet, there is a brutal blackness at play here, a darkness on the edge of town. My mother’s sudden passing brought with it a searing pain that I refused to ride rough shot over. Refuting my misguided eagerness to present myself as strong – like some stoic conqueror of suffering. That state of grief is something else, resides somewhere else and I wanted to try and pin it down. Sit in it even. I simply didn’t have a sinew of energy for anything else.

In that piece I wrote, I referred to Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote Moneyball, talking about losing his daughter. And the analogy he used really stuck with me. For him, getting through the grief of losing her was like standing outside a jungle with a machete. You have to hack your own way through. There’s no other way around it.

And that’s exactly what my father and I are doing now. Hacking our way through the overgrown jungle of grief. I have a sense for where he is, but I can’t see him. All I can do is hack at the prickly thorn trees of doubt that forever seem to spring up in front of me. I have the bandwidth for fuck all else.

Home Not Alone

“Your mother was always home.”

Over the last fourteen months, my father and I have sat across from each other trying to describe the indescribable, trying to catch a June butterfly in a jar. In the short space between us sits a world of grief and my mother’s favourite chair. Both of us half expecting her to arrive at the living room door any minute, making a beeline for the kettle before settling down for a chat.

And my father is right. My mother was always home.

As soon as I would come through the back door, into the kitchen, straight ahead of me I would see her perched in her favourite chair. And whatever was going on in the world behind me, in that space, in that time, all was well once more. In that house, my parents were together, as they had always been for over half a century. Their tried and tested fellowship offered order in a world where the old boundaries seem to be crumbling one by one.

But once I landed in that kitchen, the outside world couldn’t lay a fickle finger on me. The kettle would go on, I would sit down and my mother would remind me she’d seen and heard it all before and that all would indeed be well. And why wouldn’t it be well? My mother was home.

This was underlined to me all the more in a bar in Transylvania on a dark December evening. A friend and I decided to have a quick drink after a comedy gig. And we got to talking. In a nutshell, he shared the distant relationship he had with his parents. How he would spend this coming Christmas alone, as he had done for many years. In his words I could hear a man who never knew what I had known. And in that moment, I felt a realisation. A realisation of how lucky, how blessed I had been. To have that blanket of love that I could return to. That reassuring, life-affirming connection nestled on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

And the realisation too that while my mother will never sit in her favourite chair again, the depth of all that she had given her husband, my brothers and I, was passed but not gone. It lingered still. So much so, I could feel it well up in me as I listened to the words of my friend in that boozer in Transylvania. There’s a name for that. It’s like magic. It’s a word Keith Duggan used in trying to capture what my old St. Vincent’s team-mate left behind him in Croke Park. He coined it as a unique streak of phosphorescence lingering in the Jones’ Road sky, long after the same fella exited stage left.

Maybe it was the two and three-quarter pints in me, down on top of a rumbling stomach, that allowed my mind to hold the idea of Dermo and death in one singular thought. But that’s grief for you, my mucker.

The unique phosphorescence of my mother’s memory. The sheer utter power of it had transcended time and space.

A Fork in the Road: My mother, circa 1969

So, machete in hand, where am I exactly in this jungle of grief ?

To be straight with you, I’m not sure. You see, that’s the thing. Doubt and uncertainty creep in. The tricky thorn tree of doubt, scraping away at me.

In the last fourteen months, I’ve found myself questioning everything. My choice of work: Is it just a complete and utter waste of fucking time or what? The country I’m in: Do I drop anchor here? The people I love: who might I lose next? My own death: How much time have I got left and what am I actually doing with it? And my mother: How the fuck did I not see it coming sooner?

Nick Cave is right. Death is a complex reordering. A very complex reordering. The fellowship that was my parents, a fellowship that endured a half century of life was now splintered for good. So I have to reorder the world as I know it. Re-assemble it in some way that makes some sort of sense.

Horseman, Pass By

It’s a cold, grey day in December 2008.

The trees are brutally bare and there’s a wind out that would cut the face off you, like a rusty razor. The remains of my brother are in the living room and the house is full of friends, some family and neighbours. I’m on door and tea making duty. And like a pair of terrible twins, as soon as I attend to one the other screams out.

Anyway, ding dong it goes once more. I hastily delegate the kettle filling duties and make my way to the front door. There’s a guy standing outside that I’ve never seen before. He’s the wiry type, gaunt face, dark hair and maybe a few years older than my twenty-nine years, but I can’t be sure exactly.

Me: Hello, won’t you come in?

Him: I won’t.

Me: You sure?

Him: You know, if you could only get 5 minutes with them.

Me: I’m sorry?

Him: I lost one of my own. And… you know… if you could only get 5 minutes with them, just to know they’re alright.

Me: …

Him: Tell your parents I’m awful sorry.

And with that he turned and walked. Out the gate and gone.

I have never laid eyes on the man since. I wouldn’t back myself to pick him out in a line-up either. I mentioned him to my parents a few times since that day and they couldn’t place him.

But I’ll tell you one thing: in the seventeen Decembers since, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a truer word spoken.

The Stranger

With that thorn bush of doubt scraping on my back once more, perhaps I was in search for those words once more. Something I could hold onto. Now, I’ll be honest with you: Put me on a stage, or in front of a lens, give me some lines to say and I’ll make a decent stab of convincing you I’m saying those words for the first time. I’ll make a decent stab at masking the tricks of my trade. But ask me to deliver a lie and I am stone cold useless.

It’s an icy mid-Saturday morning in an East Galway town.

I’m trying to convince my father I have a physio appointment. I’m also trying to convince him he should go for a cup of tea while I’m in there, “Since when did you have a bad back?” He half smiles at me. Actually, not even a half smile. It was more of a glint of a look I’ve seen a thousand times before. A look that more than suggests he knows I’m trying to sell him a turkey and there isn’t a jingle bell in sight.

He saunters up the town and I cross the street and into a small front office come reception area. I sit down and try to not look conspicuous, praying to sweet Jesus I won’t bump into anyone I know. I’m one of those guys: random weirdos sit beside me on an empty bus, screaming children sit in front of me on a packed plane and some bloke I half knew for five minutes almost always crosses my path when I’m up to no good.

Five minutes in the waiting room and I think the coast might be clear. No weirdos, no screaming infants, no bloke from the past blast. The vibe in the place almost defies easy explanation. It’s got the ambience of somewhere between a cash-strapped internet café and a three-star Thai massage parlor.

The complete stranger I have arrived to see had been recommended to me by a mate of mine. My mate is not the spiritual type, or at least not openly, but I know him long enough to trust him. So, I did.

Ushered into a small room behind the reception, I sit across from this guy I met a not ten seconds ago and answer some general questions. And then I listen. I listen to a complete stranger tell me my mother is at peace. That she was welcomed home by a welcome wagon of those she had loved and lost. He told me that I shouldn’t worry and to look after my father.

He told me some other things. Some were over my head, some obvious and one or two things that made me think maybe, just maybe, this guy can see what I can’t. Maybe this guy is tuned into a frequency that the rest of us walk around and through but rarely stop to try and hear. Or maybe it’s like that Simpson’s fortune cookie scene.

Either way, I had knocked on the door of a stranger, laced his palm with silver and asked him to tell me that everything was going to be alright. And he did.

I guess that’s grief for you, my friend.

Like the Desert

Stephen Colbert once asked: “What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?” Reeves replied “I know the ones that love us will miss us.”

And he’s not wrong is Keanu. I am in my fourth decade. If I am granted another four, you can be sure this won’t be the last time I’ll miss someone I love. That’s the tax you and I will pay for a long life - we will end up missing many.

Over the last year or so, the things I’ve found most refuge in don’t involve a waiting room or a fist full of dollars. I have found refuge in the company of friends, people whom I have known for decades, others not so long. In a way, their easy company reminds me that all is not lost. I also found I’m not the only one. Others I know have lost those they love, making their own way through the jungle of grief. While I had conversations with some whom I thought would be long clear of the jungle, only to learn they are still wading their way through.

Grief stirs in me a want for meaning as well as a yearning for solitude. Last Christmas, I took long walks on my own, more than I ever had before. I’ve always thought talk was overrated as a means of healing. I’ve always got more out of a walk. A long, quiet walk.

I have found myself returning to old movies, old albums, old books I love. Anything that had even a tenuous connection to my mother’s lifetime. Like the TV show, Endeavour, which always reminds me of the time when my parents were young and starting out. Every time, within ninety minutes, Endeavour Morse will crack the case and return order to Oxford before the re-assuring theme music kicks in once more.

Perhaps what I have found the most refuge in is conversations with my father. We sit across from one another and we talk. Other times we just sit. In the last fourteen months he has shared some stories of their time together, their younger days. Stories about my mother that I never knew. When I hear those, I’m all of a sudden desperate to get her version, sure to be laced with intricate detail, not to mention a contrary view or two.

My father and I sit across from each other knowing that we mourn one and the same woman, but our experiences of that loss are drastically different. One of the themes we keep coming back to is the searing regret that we couldn’t have held onto her for a wee while longer. The desperate realisation that the end of her life came so quickly and we didn’t get one more chance to stem the tide. One more chance to enjoy the sheer utter pleasure of her company. One more cup of tea.

So I find a welcome solace in my father. Solace in knowing that he remains as reliable as oak. And most importantly, still here, sitting in his chair. I can still enjoy the sheer utter pleasure of his company. Still enjoy one more cup of tea.

The End

It’s God knows what o’clock in late November, 2023.

My father and I are returning after a long day. We’ve left my mother behind for yet another night alone in a hospital room. It’s so dark outside the window of the car I feel like it’s going to swallow us whole any minute. We slow down as we approach the gate of the house.

As we near it, we utter our first words since we left her:

Me: It’s hard to believe we won’t see her back here again.

Dad: She’ll always be here. She’ll always be with us.

……..

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