On The Death of My Mother

Article #11

“It don’t matter, where you bury me, I’ll be home and I’ll be free. It don’t matter, anywhere I lay, all my tears be washed away.” Ane Brun – All My Tears

Did you ever hear the one about Kisa and the Buddha?

Kisa runs around the village telling everyone her baby is sick. Yet the villagers can see the infant has died. They tell her she should bury her child in the forest.

In despair, Kisa runs to the Buddha to cure her child. The Buddha tells her he will make a potion, but first Kisa must go to each home in the village and collect mustard seeds, which are essential for the potion.

He tells her she can only get a mustard seed from those houses where no-one has lost a loved one. Frantically, Kisa begins her task, but, of course, every house she visits tells her they have lost someone they loved.

Head bowed, she returns to the Buddha. Heartbroken, Kisa must lay the body of her lifeless child to rest.

The Wait

It’s around 9pm on the last Wednesday of November and I’m sitting on a radiator in a long dimly lit corridor. Not just any corridor, but the corridor of the Maternity Ward in University Hospital Galway.

The same radiator I’ve been sitting on around this time since the previous Sunday. Expectant mothers file past me, stretching their legs, hopelessly trying to avoid the biting November air that sneaks through every crevasse. Nervous fathers pass in and out, some looking more worried than others, but usually carrying bags of takeaway food. I suppose they have to try and make themselves useful somehow.

They nod to me. A quiet nod of comradery. Maybe they assume I’m in the same boat - waiting it out.

And they’re right. I am.

A couple of corridors over, in the Corrib Ward, my mother lies in a bed. My father and I rotate between us as we keep her company, like Roman centuries manning the precious outpost that is Room 8.

And the radiator on the Maternity corridor is the spot where I come to take a break.

Where I come to sip some takeaway tea, talk to my wife on the phone and people watch. Watching people waiting for life to begin, while my father and I wait for my mother’s to end.

And then it did.

That Sunday morning, the first Sunday in December, my mother passed beyond the veil and into that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.

My father and I had been in a coffee shop across the road from the hospital, a window seat at Mr Waffle no less. I was engrossed in his stories about their early days together. A welcome reprieve from our centurial duties.

He digs his phone from his pocket - a missed call. Then my phone rings. It’s the ward nurse, telling us we should come over. I get this sickly feeling in my stomach. We cross the road and make the two-minute journey over to the ward. I can’t remember if we spoke on the way.

I glance through the ward door to see if there is anyone outside Room 8. As soon as we enter through the coded double doors, one nurse nods to another.

I remember my mother’s forehead still feeling warm as I pressed my face against it and thought: “Maybe she…?”

Walking the Walk: The maternity corridor in UHG

A Wake

Ireland has changed a lot since I left it a decade ago. In many ways the country is almost unrecognisable from the one I left behind. The majority of that change being for the better. I’m very proud of that little island on the edge of Europe. It’s where I’m from, where my people are from.

The next decade promises even more change. The one thing I hope never changes is how we do funerals. In Ireland, we bury our dead well.

As soon as my mother passed, my father and I were immediately held in this collective community embrace that wrapped around us.

That embrace held us, carried us through a number of days which involve the hardest thing any of us will do: laying to rest someone we desperately don’t want to let go of. Like Kisa.

And I’m not talking about random acts of kindness here. I’m talking about deliberate acts of kindness.

We could be here all day, but I’ll give you an example.

Death has visited our house before. The last occasion was fifteen years ago, also in December, when my older brother passed. I remember a long-standing family friend, Julianne, arriving at the back door with a tray of sandwiches.

Fifteen years later, her son Martin, one of my oldest friends, did the same thing. He arrived at the back door with a tray of sandwiches and asked the same question: “What do ye need?”

That December Sunday, chairs, teapots, cups, saucers, flowers, food, cutlery arrived at our home. The neighbours, relatives and friends carrying those same chairs and teacups came to embrace us, wrap themselves around us and ask the same question: “What do ye need?”

Later that evening, those same people huddled around a kitchen table, sharing memories of my mother, filling a bereaved house with laughter, sound and life.

Then, the funeral.

I can’t remember the last time I attended Mass. But, since the Pandemic, I have found myself frequenting the odd church every now and again. I’d light a candle and sit for a while, like an alcoholic standing inside the door of a pub just to breathe in the hum of the place one last time.

But I found the ceremony of the Funeral Mass, the ritualistic nature of it, to be deeply comforting. In a way, I surrendered myself to it. Surrendered myself to all those familiar sounds and rituals. Surrendered to the words of a priest, a man who sat with my eldest brother in a hospital room almost thirty years ago and talked as young men do.

And again, people turned out to stand with us, shake our hands, embrace us and journey with us as we laid my mother to rest.

Then, the release.

And then, the community releases you from the embrace. To allow you space. And for the next stage to begin. For the deafening sound of silence to wash over a bereaved home.

All Shook Up: My parents circa 1968

Sink or Swim

No matter how many times I lose someone I love, it’s like trying to learn to swim all over again. People often say: “It hits you in waves.” Well, I tell ya what, right now I’m up to my neck in it, my arms flailing in the deep sea, gasping for air, terrified that if I stop, I’ll be swallowed up whole by a bottomless black ocean.

Sam Keen is right: In the foreword to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Denial of Death, he pulls no punches: “Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.”

Becker and Keen aside, I feel the language around grief comes up short. And I don’t mean the time-trusted lines “sorry for your troubles”, “sorry for your loss”, “sure she’d a great run”. There’s safety in those and I’ve used them plenty myself.

But describing grief – what it is, what it does, what it’s doing to my father, what it’s doing to me, what it will do to you.

Ten days after my mother’s death, I returned to my home in Transylvania. And I felt a strange sort of relief. I could drop the mask. Walk down the street as a complete stranger, no one there knowing my mother, no one there asking how me how my father was.

I’m a ball of contradictions these days. Desperate for solace, but yearning for company. Unable to concentrate for long periods but wanting to take on the world. Drifting into a bone deep silence, but unable to cry.

I think I’ve run dry of tears. In the weeks leading up to my mother’s death, when my father and I spent our waking hours in the hospital, I could barely keep the cheeks of my face dry. I was just about keeping my head above water.

Even now, I’m asking myself if should I be writing about this. Not ten weeks have passed. Is it too soon? But if I don’t, then how do I make sense of what is happening? I could always put the mask back up and say: “Sure, I’m grand.” And 99.9% of the time, that will be the right answer, as I won’t feel like going deep and, more importantly, who wants to be on the receiving end of that?

There’s a reason why there’s a deficit in language around death. There’s a reason it’s not talked about like the weather. It cuts too close to the bone, too raw of a reminder of how precarious our place in the world is. Sure, you couldn’t be contemplating that all day, never mind talking about it.

Then, there’s the wrestling with a fistful of ghosts: wishing I was kinder to my mother, listened more, was less self-absorbed in our conversations and wishing I was more sensitive to her own loss, her own pain of watching her two beloved sons lowered into the earth before her.

All those little disagreements or differences we had seem pointless and petty now. How could I have not realised sooner her days were numbered? How could I have not better grasped that reality in the time she was here?

It’s only through her absence the true meaning of her presence dawns. How important she was and all that she takes with her. Everything that her death will deny me: the phone calls home, the chats about whether the Late Late was any good, whether anyone will ever be as good as Claire Foy was in Season 1 of The Crown. That and her wisdom, the comfort of her voice, the sense of order she put on my world. The warm blanket of love she unconditionally offered me for over four decades.

This deep feeling of yearning I have and the only person who can resolve it is gone.

How the fuck do I even begin to resolve that?

And then, this other thing: the sense that I’m stripped back to some washed out version of myself, a sense that the layers have been coiled back and what’s left is this raw state, devoid of ego or bullshit.

Or, as Nick Cave offers in Faith, Hope and Carnage:

“The person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain – you are taken to the very limits of suffering.”

Like it or not now, I have to reorder my life in the absence of my mother. Like it or not now, my father must reorder his in the absence of the woman he’s called his wife for nigh on fifty-four years.

I have to try and temper the yearning for the sight, sound and company of my mother. Or to just see her relaxing in her chair in the living room, feet up in front of the fire, cup of tea, buried in a paper, or scrolling through YouTube or the telly, but always ready to launch into a conversation about almost anything at a second’s notice.

In his podcast dedicated to the science of grief, the world’s hunkiest Neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman, points to research indicating grief is not just a state of sadness. It is also “a motivational state… a desire for something specific.”

Brain imaging studies have revealed that parts of the brain associated with the areas of motivation, such as craving and pursuit, are some of the primary brain areas and circuits that are activated when we are in a state of grief. Professor Mary Frances O’Connor’s research at the University of Arizona underlines this.

My brain is reaching for something that is no longer there. Maybe that explains it. Fuck knows.

Either way, a reimagining must begin. And the nature and shape of that will be messy, no matter how many times I’ve done it before. It certainly won’t fit into a neat flowchart of so-called phases.

It’s an internal twister of a tornado with a manic mind of its own.

Happier times: My wedding day, 2018

The Jungle

One thing’s for sure: grief might be universal but how I’m going to get through it will be singular. It will be different from my father, different from you. The same, but different.

I’ve heard Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote Moneyball, on a podcast recently. He was talking about how he was coming to terms with the sudden death of his young daughter, who died in a road accident at the age of twenty-two.

Much of what was said to him - how he would feel guilty and what not - didn’t actually apply. He didn’t feel the guilt as others said he would. He recalled a great relationship with his daughter, free of any cliché.

For him, getting through the grief of losing her was like standing outside a jungle with a machete. The guy beside you might have a path cleared and ready. And sure, that guy might have some useful pointers, but that path is no good to you – it’s not yours.

You have to hack your own way through.

One question I keep coming back to is this: “Is that it then?” As in, “Is that it for my mother?” Her light extinguished and that’s that. The priest said something at the altar that has stuck with me ever since: “Because we’re people of faith, we know that this isn’t the end.”

But it is the end, isn’t it?

Ernest Becker again: “To be sure, primitives often celebrate death… because they believe that death is the ultimate promotion, the final ritual elevation to a higher form of life, to the enjoyment of eternity in some form. Most modern Westerners have trouble believing this anymore, which is what makes the fear of death so prominent a part of our psychological make-up.”

Well, we haven’t shed that primitive part of ourselves just yet. Shane McGowan’s send off was more like a parish hall fundraiser than a funeral. There was almost a defiance in the face of death as people sang, danced and lamented next to his earthly remains, resting in a wicker basket draped in flowers.

I mean, the Pharaohs didn’t muck around either. They made sure their dead were more than ready for what was to come next.

Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s my subconscious knowing, in the Cosmic sense, I’m pretty much dead already, but I find comfort and warmth in the idea there may be something beyond. In this age of all knowing, something still undiscovered, somewhere that can’t be colonised by bored billionaires.

What’s not to like about the idea that my mother’s spirit lives on somewhere?

And in that place the air is kind. In that place, she’s found a deep resting peace. In that place, the first to welcome her, out of all that have travelled before her, were her beloved sons with arms outstretched. Forever young, unblemished by time.

Until then, back over on this side of the veil, my father and I are on the edge of the jungle yet again, machete in hand. I’ll stay as close as I can to him, but he has to hack his way through and I have to hack my way through.

There’s no easy way around it.

All I can hope for is that we meet on the other side. The same, but different.

Memory Lane

It’s the last Thursday of November around 11am. My father and I are standing outside Room 8. Mam is comfortable, but drowsy from the pain management medication. So we decide to take a walk down town for a break.

We cross the road of the hospital. Without blinking, I make in the direction of the cathedral. It’s the very cathedral where my parents were married on a rain sodden Wednesday, in February 1970.

Dad: Where are ya going?

Me: Where’d ya think I’m going?

He turns on his heels and heads in the opposite direction, making a waving gesture for me to follow.

His way or the highway. I eventually catch up and we march on, taking a left on Presentation Road, just a stone’s throw from the hospital.

Me: Scenic route, is it?

Dad: I’ll show ya where your mother went to school.

We walk the couple of minutes, over the river, past St. Joseph’s church and on the bend is the Presentation Secondary School, or “the Pres”, as it’s known, where my mother attended secondary school.

I had no idea.

Dad: Ya see, there’s a few things I can learn ya yet!

We walk on. Now we’re on Bridge Street, over the River Corrib, as it races out toward Galway Bay, that famous place where the sun goes down. A strapping young fella is approaching us on the bridge, built like an outhouse, Liam Mellows hurling wind sheeter on him, head down, buried in his phone.

Dad: Jaysus, Adrian will ya leave her alone for 5 minutes will ya!

Adrian: …[dazed at first] Ah here, stop Jim!

He laughs, we laugh. He keeps walking, we keep walking.

Me: Is that ah..?

Dad: Adrian Morrisey…

Me: Oh yeah, isn’t he…

Dad: Yeah, the brother of the fella we met during the week.

Me: He’d make a great centre back.

Dad: Sound men. Handy hurlers too.

We cross the bridge and take a swift right, along the rivers edge, coming out on Wolfe Tone Bridge, and left by what used to Jury’s Inn Hotel, but it’s called something else now. Then we’re onto the bottom of Quay Street. People coming and going, with the sight and sound of the odd tourist.

Less than a minute later, we’re at the top of Quay Street now, another family history milestone to be reckoned with.

Me: Isn’t that where Mam’s father was born?

I point toward Thomas Dillon’s shop, with the big gold Claddagh ring outside it.

Dad: The place next door I think.

Me: Was it?

Dad: Your Mother would tell ya if she was here.

There’s no confusion about the next one. We take a right on Cross St. Lower and the short skip left onto Middle Street.

We stand across the road from The Dáil Bar.

Dad: That’s the room I stayed, when I came to Galway first.

He points to the top right window, above the door. The very house where my mother grew up, now a pub. My grandmother used to keep lodgers and my father was one such lodger.

My mother comes from old Galway stock. Generations of her family were laid to rest in Forthill Cemetery, or ‘‘inside the walls’’ as they say. Apparently, you’re not real Galway stock unless you have people buried ‘‘inside the walls’’.

Anyway, inside the walls of this building, now a pub, is where my parents first clasped eyes on each other.

Beginnings: The former front door of my mother’s family home, now the Dáil Bar

Me: I remember us playing on this street as kids.

Dad crosses the road, leaning against a green barrel in front of The Dáil.

Dad: Lot of memories.

We wait a while. Watch people come and go. One of the bar staff inserts the menu for the day into a small glass case on the outside wall. He’s oblivious to us, oblivious to my father standing as a stranger in his own half-century-old past.

Before I can get too misty-eyed, or eyeball what the menu has on offer, Jim is on the move again. He’s off up Middle Street, beckoning me on with that arm gesture once more.

We walk past the Augustinian Church, or “the Augi”, the very church where my mother was baptised. We then take a left on Lower Abbeygate Street.

Me: Cup of tea Dad?

I nod toward the Food For Thought coffee shop. I stopped in there earlier in the week. They do free refills for tea or coffee. I mean, who does free refills these days? They even have rhubarb tart.

Dad: Ah…looks busy.

Me: They do rhubarb tart.

He walks straight past me through the door.

Ten minutes later, we’re enjoying the refills, crumbs the only evidence of a rhubarb tart and plain butter scone.

Our conversation is broken only by moments where we find ourselves staring at the wall, trying to stave off what we know is coming for us.

Me: Lots of history on that walk Pops.

Dad: Sure was.

Me: Fifty-four years together is a long time.

Dad: A lifetime.

Me: Goes quick.

Dad: Too quick.

Me: Would you do it all over again?

Dad: In a heartbeat.

Me: Really?

Dad: [nods]

Me: If you could go back, how far would you go?

He smiles.

Dad: Right back to the start.