Constellations

by Sinéad Gleeson

  Towards the end of a person’s life, it’s said they become more rooted in the past, gravitating towards the beginning of their life as they approach death. In the weeks before her coronary implosion, she talked constantly of her parents. ‘I’m going home,’ she kept saying. I read about Hades as a child, and the River Styx, and whenever I think about people near the end of their lives, I am assailed by this image. I see her climbing into a small boat, sailing across the water to her parents, clutching an oar in her crabbed fist.

  Apart from holidays on the ferry and day trips to seaside towns, the only place she visited outside Ireland was England, its rain and gloom a mirror of the weather she’d always known. This sudden focus on looking backwards, the historical gaze over the shoulder, led to talk of adventure: of wanting to go somewhere, or explore a new place. So shocked were we at this sudden declaration that we never thought to ask where she might want to go. I suggested flying somewhere, anywhere, Earhart-ing it to Europe, because in her seventy-two years, she had never set foot on a plane. She did not own a passport. She liked coastal towns, but there were no Rivieras or Costas in her past. Perhaps she knew time was short, and was playing along, knowing that she wouldn’t have to fulfil any promises made.

  She always told ghost stories. Not the ones about spooks and banshees, or bogeymen who’d grab you in the dark, but the ghosts she knew. ‘You should be more afraid of the living than the dead,’ she said, in any situation, whether it called for supernatural advice or not. I knew she meant her father, but she took her time telling us the story. My mother still tells it, my aunts too.

  He worked as an insurance collector, but because of his height and demeanour, people assumed he was a G-man, a Special Branch operative working with the RIC (later the Dublin Metropolitan Police, now called the Garda Síochána). He travelled around the city on a motorbike, and one afternoon, while out on his usual rounds, he swerved to avoid a child and hit a lamppost. He was badly injured, but clung on for three weeks in a coma before dying, leaving my great-grandmother, Mary, a young widow. She had four children and was pregnant at the time of the crash. Part of the overlapping ghost stories in my family includes an oddly prophetic line her late husband often said to her: ‘I’ll never leave you with a young baby.’ Grief triggered a miscarriage, followed soon after by the death of her youngest boy. She gave birth to ten sons in her life, and only one grew up. What kind of quiet is there in a room after a baby stops breathing, or never takes a breath at all? I wondered if she ever saw their ghosts, an almost football team of infant boys, lined up in the shadows.

  Her daughter, Veronica – my grandmother – did grow up, and perhaps too fast. Hers was a fitful life, steeped in poverty and bereavement, a grief that became fear, and later, a nervous breakdown at eighteen. She was convinced her mother would die and she and her two siblings would be alone.

  No matter how nuclear or fragmented a life is, everyone fears its annihilation: the death of a parent, pre-deceasing a child, the arrival of illness. The events that are unutterable, those incomprehensible moments, the ones that happen to other people. The terror of these things, even the brief imagining of them, was enough for my grandmother. She lived with the ever-present possibility of it, and that was enough to darken her life. The family lived in the back room of a tenement in Dublin 8. To survive, my great-grandmother delivered babies and washed the dead. Ushered people into this world and out of it, souls clean as a blank page, others heavy with a lifetime’s weight. She had a second job as a weaver, spending hours on a loom, and would leave the tenement room to go to work, locking the door to keep the children safe.

  That’s when he’d appear.

  My grandmother always started the story from the key-in-the-lock moment. The sound of her mother’s footsteps retreating down the stairs, and the feeling of being left alone for the day. The first time her father appeared, my grandmother screamed until the neighbours fetched her mother back. His appearances became a regular thing: her mother would leave, and he would stand there every day until she returned. It took my grandmother a few days to realise what he was doing: standing guard, keeping watch. She got used to him, or this post-death version of him, showing up, but her siblings never saw this apparition. This ghost as protector. He looked so real she could tell the colour of his coat (a brown Crombie).

  This psychic seam is in my family, a running stitch on the matrilineal side. My great-grandmother also claimed to predict the future by looking at someone’s hand of cards in a game. In the dim light of the tenement floors, large families lived in just one room. Sanitation was hazardous, space non-existent, so young men would gather on the stairs, in a ring of huddled shoulders, to play poker. Wandering past one evening, she glanced at the hand dealt to one young man.

  ‘You going somewhere?’ she asked.

  ‘No!’ came the incredulous reply.

  ‘Your cards say that you’re sailing. You’re going on a boat.’

  He laughed in her face, and she went on up the stairs to her children.

  Because this is a story I’ve heard so many times, and this is what happens in our inexplicable world, I can tell you this: the next day, he eloped to England with a girl. His mother banged on Mary’s door. ‘Would you have believed me if I told you?’ was all she could offer the woman’s reddened face.

  On the landing below the room they lived in, my great-grandmother sometimes saw the ghost of a British army soldier. His green/brown uniform identifiable even in the lightless tenement staircase. Her husband – before the child on the road, before the coma – had served in France in World War One. He came home, but millions didn’t. Silted up in trenches, the red snow of poppies over their remains. This man on the landing was not familiar, but Mary was unfazed by him. Perhaps he was a comrade, a messenger from somewhere else to reassure her that her husband was OK.

  Púcas

   Headless horsemen

     Haunted roads

        A dancing couple near the Grand Canal

  Ghost nuns

   A red-eyed black cat

     A woman walking through a hotel wall

  (People tell me they’ve seen these.)

  Irish history and folklore is rooted in stories of spirits and malevolent beings. We don’t do voodoo or juju, but we soak up stories of haunted souls and feel the dead walking among us. We talk of keening banshees whose mournful song foretells a death, witches who transform into hares, lonesome selkies out at sea. In hard times, the Irish told stories, floated words over candlelight, passed winters going from house to house, a tale on the lips. Tales that are in every sod and brick, an ectoplasmic mortar. The old tradition of waking a dead person has been revived, and with it the idea of weaving a narrative of the departed’s life. Those mournful nights are for those who are left behind, bereft. The worlds of the dead and living inch nearer to each other. Stories are swapped as an act of resurrection, but for comfort too. Words can keep the memory of anyone alive.

  ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’

  What is said and what is felt when this question is asked are at odds. There is a fear of the answer, but no one wants it to be ‘no’; to reverse back down the conversational cul-de-sac. We crave the affirmative, a chance to suck in breath and wait for what comes next. ‘Yes’ is an opener: a signpost at the entrance to a wood, urging us to walk into the gloom of the trees. There are two questions I am often compelled to ask people: if they know their blood group or if they’ve ever seen a ghost.

  Not being able to have the life you really desire creates a spectral longing for another existence. A ghost life – of opportunities, travel, a career – running alongside the one being lived. One life of no choice and little variety predicated on economic circumstance, the other free of material constraints. Society dictated that women born in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially those not lucky enough to be middle or upper class, were allocated a very specific lot. There was little in many of these lives. Scraps of education, which st
opped at twelve, or maybe fourteen (this has happened to all the women on both sides of my family). Marriage, babies, a life in the home. In the hierarchical structure of the family, the Irish mother managed to occupy the top slot while holding the least amount of power. The central figure expected to contribute so much, but was rarely repaid. When I think of our history, these are the women I see. The unseen, rage humming in the air. Their lack of choice a collective lament.

  My older brother baulks at the intersection of the spiritual and paranormal. For him, there is no life after death; our bodies are bequeathed to subterranean creatures to feast on. But he cannot explain why he has prophetic dreams, or sees things beyond the realm of the scientific. He can see auras. Ghosts too.

  The cottage he lived in – one bedroom, outside toilet, and, in winter, frequently colder inside than out – was built in the 1890s by the Dublin Artisans’ Dwellings Company for workers at the nearby Guinness factory. The windows were small, the house always dark, the winters especially so. One night, my brother woke to find an old woman sitting on the end of his bed. He went through the motions – rubbing eyes, pinching skin, performing all the usual rituals to confirm wide-awakeness – but she was still there. When he described her to the elderly lady next door she said without hesitation, and as if this was commonplace: ‘Oh, that’s just Annie.’

  I do not know if it is possible to come back from the dead. And if it is, back from where – heaven? If we reject Judeo-Christian allocations, perhaps there is some other autonomous land in the clouds, a municipality of eternal life and good health. If such a place exists, and this journey is possible, it must be a long one. Climbing through stratospheres and exospheres, all that air and all those chemicals, clawing the way back, a mountaineer with a hammer. But is this return from some unknown realm an act of ascent or descent? Religion and philosophy and poetry have largely informed the thinking on this, cheerleading the presumption that this place is heaven, and that it is located vertically above us. If it were easy to come back, would every dead soul not attempt it, even once? For one last look at the life they are no longer a part of, to see their children’s faces once more, or walk the yellow fields of youth?

  ‘Annie’ was the previous tenant in the house before my brother. He says she looked like a real person, solid and contained, almost bemused. ‘Were you afraid?’ I ask. ‘No. She just seemed curious, about who lived here now.’

  To my grandmother, the dead were benevolent, the departed effigies of those we love. No one could dissuade her of what she’d seen. She was adamantly, devoutly Catholic, with its inherent belief in heaven, but to her, the world of spirits was just as convincing.

  She once visited me in hospital after more hip surgery. Post-anaesthetic, I vomited with the regularity of a traffic light. Red, pause, green, puke. The nurse inflated a cuff on my arm, timing my pulse and counting in her head. My grandmother, watching, took in the scene, waiting for the right moment to brazenly ask the nurse to check her blood pressure too. I don’t remember the result, or the nurse revealing its fractional outcome. Maybe it was already too high, her heart sending out early signals even then.

  In another hospital, twenty years earlier, my grandmother’s youngest son had a complicated operation on his spine. Afterwards, things were touch and go. In the murk of night, tussling with sleep, the post-op drugs entering and exiting his brain, he opened his eyes. There, impeccably dressed, stood a man beside his bed. He knew who it was by the coat, the hat. Pure hallucination from the depths of a medicated haze, perhaps, or just a trick of the light. But this was the hospital my great-grandfather was taken to after his accident, and also the same ward. In times of illness, the body and its vulnerability will take anything it can get, even a manifestation of someone long dead come to watch over us.

  Ghost stories are unheimlich; exaggerated versions of things we know. A familiar person or entity becomes something strange and frightening. A home becomes a haunted house. A keening woman is a terrorizing banshee. But to my grandmother, there was comfort in these spirits; their presence offered solace.

  I was seventeen and home alone when I found out that she had died. A friend of my mother’s called to sympathise, not realizing I hadn’t yet heard the news. The shock made the whole house feel instantly cold. Illness had not been hovering at her door; there was no family rota of hospice visits. No one had expected this. Confused and in tears, I waited for my mother to come home from the hospital, and the day slowly turned to darkness. Her heart, that windmill in her chest, had stopped turning. Her children did not want her to stay overnight in a funeral parlour, so her body was brought back to her home. The home with the scullery and dandelions; the bad couch and the bathroom off the kitchen; where she was laid out in the bedroom she’d shared with my grandfather. Candles burned and mirrors were covered in white cloth. Someone wove rosary beads into her waxy hands. This was my first encounter with a corpse. The marbled skin, the hardness of a once-soft face, the ice in the veins. Below the room where she lay hung a photo of my grandparents from not long after they were married. In the coffin, with her 1940s curls, she looked more like this younger woman. The undertaker had done a lovely job, someone said. The pink lipstick was an anomaly: I’d never seen her wear make-up. All the lines on her face were gone. The years of her father’s death and tenement life; of stillborn babies and ECT after post-natal depression. Wiped clean with the stopping of her heart. In life, there had been a brashness to her, a quick temper – but she had suffered, and her manner was a form of defence. It was hard to connect the older version of her that I knew to the nervous girl of her teens. The girl so haunted by the possibility of the death of loved ones that her mind caved in on itself.

  ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’

  I ask myself this, or you ask me. Either way the question is asked. The answer is both yes and no. But it is the wrong question. The line of enquiry should be both more accurate and broader – a contradiction:

  ‘Have you ever encountered a ghost?’

  The language of ghosts is a visual one. Floating, ethereal, see-through. Visualization as definitive proof. The I-saw-it-with-my-own-eyes validation. So I say, yes I have encountered a ghost, but I haven’t seen one. No ghostly form, no indistinct edges, but I’ve felt their hands, their weight on my skin, more than once. As though another living person with flesh-and-blood limbs was touching me. Tactility is not the same as visibility, but it has its own veracity.

  In the months after my grandmother died, my grandfather started to say things about her death to me. Very specific declarations.

  ‘If your nanny is going to appear to anyone in the family, it’ll be you.’

  The basis for these words was never explained, and I didn’t understand the logic of me as the chosen one. Not with a brother who’d already had a ghost visit, along with his aura-spotting and future-predicting dreams. It is possible my grandfather saw the same psychic potential that runs through the women in my family, even if I didn’t sense or feel it myself. And then something happened. I don’t resist this story. I don’t try to rationalise it. I try to leave my matter can neither be created nor destroyed thoughts aside, and I go with it.

  The single bed in my old bedroom in my parents’ house runs underneath the window and looks out onto a flat roof. For months after she died, before I’d go to sleep, I dived under the curtains and looked out the window into the night. Watching the stars, I’d talk to her. Possibly – because I still believed in God and heaven and saints back then – I prayed to her. Deified her, implored her as a penitent does a saint. But mostly, I chatted about missing her, about where life was at. A year after she died, I went through a low period. Lying under that dormer window, mind restless, I spiralled in the sheets most nights and spent a lot of time crying in the direction of that wall. So I talked to my grandmother, gazing up at the boxy outline of The Plough, or trying to gauge what kind of moon was up that night. I’d lie down on my side, my survey of the stars complete, and ask her to make everything better
. And one night, I felt something. A hand on my shoulder, squeezing reassuringly, and then stroking my back, as you would an ill child.

  Turn around. Turn around. Turn around.

  In my head, my voice commanded me to do so. My body felt nailed to the bed, but every part of me wanted to rotate. I opened my eyes and the room was all blue light. This dark corner of the house is immune to moonlight, and yet here it was, filled up with a cerulean shade. I did all those movie things, those things my brother did when Annie was sitting at the end of his bed – pinching, opening eyes wider, talking to myself: This is real, right? You’re not asleep are you? I was awake, I know I was, but fear trumped curiosity. I was paralysed and listened to my heart banging in my chest. To this day I regret not turning towards the blueness to find out what was there. If my grandmother was standing beside my bed, I should have had the manners to acknowledge her. To ask how she was and if she missed her life.

  Mostly though, I should have remembered her words.

  You should be more afraid of the living than the dead.

  No matter how much I have loved someone in life, or how deep my grief – when they die and are buried, I will not visit their grave. Graveyards are shrines for some, but I feel nothing there. A box in the ground buried under damp soil bears no resemblance to the person I once loved. When I die cremate me, I say. Remove my rings (good luck prising all the metal from my body) and torch my remains like a pyre. Grass now grows over my grandmother and I think of her pulling up those yellow weeds from the lawn, not knowing that the end of her life was moments away. Of taking her last breath standing on the grass, like the green hull of her final resting place.

  Before finding themselves beneath a neat, verdant rectangle, everyone should leave the place they’re from, even if just for a short while. When I think of my grandmother, I feel the small circles of her world; her linear life and its minute map, her huge losses and sleepless nights. It’s not that I wish her a bigger life, filled with broader horizons, but that there was more peace within it, a measure of ease.