When I arrived at the cottage, I parked the jeep and I said hello to the cat, who was flinging insults at me for abandoning her overnight, and I went inside and shovelled out the ashes and put a flaming firelighter under six briquettes. I was lucky. There were only three matches left in the box.
I checked Facebook a few times to see if she was online. There were a few new additions; pictures of Warsaw taken from inside a train and one of her friends smiling at an art exhibition. So, I concluded that she had access to wifi. I tried messaging her, but the icon beside her name on Facebook said she was offline.
Well, OK. That was fine. By now, the fire was blazing and I sat back on the sofa with the cat to watch the two last episodes of Breaking Bad although I kept one eye on my Facebook page in case any signal came in from Warsaw.
Eventually I couldn’t resist a text.
I’m back in the house. The cat is happy. All seems fine.
I sent it twice. But it didn’t deliver. She had turned off her phone.
When I woke the following morning, I had forgotten her. It was 8 a.m. and the sun had just then risen above the slope of the mountain and was like an orange ball of fire in the chilly grey sky.
My first emotion was one of surprise that the sun was orange, and that it was shining through the cream curtains. I felt like a child long ago who had been allowed to stay home from school. I could lie there all day just watching the clouds being pushed across the sky and be happy in myself thinking of how far I had come in life. When I was a child, I used to see Warsaw on the dial of the old radio and when I twirled the knob so that the needle pointed to it I could hear the sound of a man talking in a strange language behind the crackling static, though I didn’t know what the word ‘Warsaw’ meant. And now I had ended up married to a wonderful artist who was at that very moment walking the streets of that extraordinary city. I thought about the BBC too, and the splendid gift it is to live in a world where I can press the app on my iPhone and hear the soft fluttering violas of unnamed musicians in a London studio being broadcast on Breakfast on Radio 3. It would have all been perfect if she had been beside me.
But there were obstacles too. When I got up and went to the kitchen, I realised that I had forgotten to get milk in the shop. In fact, I had forgotten to get bread, coffee, marmalade and even tablets for the dishwasher. She had actually said it in the hotel – ‘Don’t forget milk on your way home.’ It’s one of the great gifts women have. They can anticipate what you might need in a domestic situation. And men hate that. They don’t like being told things that make them feel incompetent. Of course they are incompetent. It’s just they don’t like to admit it. And it’s staggering how irritated a man can get when a woman says those simple words: ‘Don’t forget the milk.’
Of course I won’t forget the milk, he thinks. Does she suppose I’m stupid? Does she think I’m incapable of keeping the kitchen organised?
‘I’m a modern man,’ he insists. ‘Some of my best friends are feminists.’ And he stares around the kitchen convinced that if he ever bothered doing the housework, he would of course do it far better than her. But I’m not that bloated with hubris. It’s just that we live five miles from a shop and so it’s not funny to forget. And I was going around from one press to another muttering, ‘Where did she leave the sugar?’
No.
‘Where did she hide the sugar?’
No.
‘For fuck’s sake, where is the fucking sugar?’
The bottom line was that there didn’t seem to be any sugar. I had no choice but to drink a bitter black coffee, and skip the refinements of porridge, toast or marmalade. It wasn’t a great start. But it reminded me that there were other issues. Like which bin was due to go out on Friday. I couldn’t remember if it was the blue one or the black one that had gone out last time.
I knew that with the dishwasher not functioning because we were out of tablets, the kitchen would soon back up with dirty plates and cups. And I wasn’t going to start hand-washing them all. And then I couldn’t find the mop to clean up the cold coffee that had spilled straight out on the floor when I opened the lid of the coffee pot because I didn’t think there was any coffee in it. How was I to know that the pot was still half full of cold coffee? Doesn’t someone usually clean it before they go to bed? Yes? Well, there you go. So I made a note of that for future reference.
But I was still looking for the mop. I tried the scullery, the shed, outside the back door, behind the fridge. Where the fuck is the mop? I wondered. I was getting exhausted and it was only 8.30 a.m.
Maybe I need to relax, I thought. Go out to my room and chill. Leave everything as it is for the moment. Go to town at lunch and pick up stuff. I could make a list of ‘stuff’. That’s the trick. That’s what women do. They make a list. That’s what my mother used to do. She’d have a list every Friday for me. Even if her mind was dissolving when she was in her late eighties, she always had her list.
So I made another coffee and took it out to my studio. I crossed the back yard with the laptop in one hand and the coffee and my keys in the other. It was raining and the rain splashed into the mug. I ran to the patio door, fiddled with the keys, almost dropped the computer, opened the door, and then spilled half the coffee as I went inside. And for fuck’s sake, what was sitting on the desk from two days earlier? The sugar bowl.
At least now I was getting into better form because I was in my refuge. My shed. My isolated study where no one bothers me. And there were two firelighters left in the packet. The lake stretched before me. I cleaned out the ashes from the stove, placed the firelighters between two turf briquettes and set them on fire. Then I settled into a swivel chair to contemplate the day.
It’s not just a phrase I picked up from some cheap self-help book about Buddhism. It’s what Pabongka Rinpoche said in his book Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. And he’s the real deal. He’s the bee’s knees. You won’t find him on YouTube. He didn’t waste his time doing videos for the internet. Of course he’s long dead but the book is still out there.
The mind is like an elephant, he said.
He would have heard the same phrase from his teachers when he was a young student in some remote Tibetan monastery. It’s an image commonly used for the unruly mind in lots of Tibetan texts on mind training. The elephant goes where it wants. And there’s no telling when an elephant will change its mood. There’s no guiding it or tying it down, unless you use the ropes of meditation and mind training at which Pabongka Rinpoche was apparently such an adept.
My mind is like a particularly dysfunctional elephant. My mind is like an elephant that has escaped from traumas in a circus. My mind is like an elephant that might drag me off a cliff at any moment in a sudden fit of rage. Such is the state of my mental disequilibrium that I am a victim every morning to what rises up in my mind, and I have utterly no control over it; as my teacher once said to me when we were in Mongolia together, ‘Always something arising – but never what you expect.’
I couldn’t have expected what came into my mind that morning when I knelt down on the floor of my studio to meditate. It wasn’t the beloved. It wasn’t the episodes of Breaking Bad I had watched the night before. It wasn’t what food I planned to put on the list before going to town. It wasn’t even the cat, though she was at the window, screaming to be allowed in (and just by the way, I was out of cat food as well). But none of these things disturbed me.
It was my mother who came, like a ghost flitting in and out of my mind, like something in the distance, like a small moth in the corner of my eye at first, or in the back of my mind, as they say. She was in the back of my mind but I certainly noticed her there.
This is how it happens. Sometimes we live through moments of intensity like a death, and it’s so overwhelming that we replay the moment over and over again. We can smell it and touch it repeatedly in our mind. And then one day, the event arises as usual, but it’s different. We see it in a new light. And there is no reason for this. It just happens.
I had replayed that moment over and over again in the two years since she died. I can still remember sitting on an armchair at the wall just inside the door of her room in the nursing home. Sometimes I would get up and stand at the foot of the bed. I remember a radio in the distance, out on the corridor, and what music was playing in the very moments when she stopped breathing. But what never occurred to me until that morning, sitting in a swivel chair in my studio, the cat outside the window, the beloved in Poland, two years after my mother had died, what had never occurred to me until that moment was that I had not held her. And it horrified me, like a letter that announces some terrible debt you owe and just falls through the letterbox and lands on the floor at your feet. I never held her. OK, there might have been a moment when I engaged her in a chilly embrace akin to what the pope might offer another fully vested bishop during the sign of peace at mass; a fumbling formality without much passion. But that is not the way I held the beloved. Not the way I held the cat. Not the way I held my own child when first I took her from the cot in the hospital delivery room. Not that way. I never held my mother like that. And she was obliged to go, to leave, to head down along the long, dark tunnel of death without a human hug from me. My brother was there and he treated her beautifully. He hugged and held and blessed and kissed her. But I just watched. From me she went away empty-handed, empty-armed. And there is nothing so empty as the beginning of a journey when you have not been fortified by the assuring hug of someone you love.
Even at her funeral, I had felt unbearably sad without understanding why.
I stood by the graveside, realising that I could have treated her far better. I could have loved her more or said something to heal the unsaid things of a lifetime. I could have even offered my heart, openly, and said, ‘Mammy, I do love you. I always have.’ I could have done kind things more often, especially at the end. Just to make her smile. And I could have done more to make her life easier. But I didn’t. And I only realised all this after she was gone.
I remember getting out of the black car just behind the hearse as it arrived at the graveyard and feeling suddenly distressed by the crowds standing around, looking at the coffin as it was slid out of the hearse. With my brother and cousins, I put my shoulder to the grim timber box and we negotiated our way up the hill on a narrow path that led through other graves and tombstones, until we were at the place where my father had been buried forty years earlier. It was a path she had travelled well each summer to put flowers on his grave and stand bewildered with a little beret on her head as the priests blessed the graves, when hundreds of people from Cavan squashed together around their family plots to remember their dead.
A black slab declares my father’s dates of birth and death. Halfway down the smooth limestone are the words: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want’, which is what my brother and I had agreed was sufficient at the time. But our mother insisted without us knowing that a further phrase be added, so that in its entirety the slab now reads: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want – erected by his sons.’
I smiled when I saw it again as her coffin rested on a platform of crossbeams astride the empty hole in the plot where she would soon be planted.
The priest said his prayers. The relations and old friends shaded their eyes from the July sun and mumbled a decade of the rosary beneath dramatic tufts of cloud. And that was it. A blustery summer day. Strong showers and intermittent blasts of sunlight. My mother was in her grave.
An old man who had known her well grabbed me by the elbow so suddenly that I almost fell into the black hole.
‘How are you now?’ he enquired.
‘I’m fine, Mr Dolan,’ I replied, because as a child I had only known him by his surname.
‘Well, your mammy is gone to a better place,’ he declared.
Mr Dolan was old now but I remembered him from those Friday afternoons when I was six and I used to go shopping with Mother. He worked in a grocery shop on Main Street. He had long wavy blond hair back then, and a blue tie, and he was the one who had a stylish way of wrapping the ham in brown paper and then slipping the white twine around it and cutting the twine with a tug of his fingers, which always amazed me. He would present the parcel of cold ham to my mother and wink at me, or give me a mint sweet from the big jar with the image of the polar bear. But he too had grown old, and his face was skeletal. His hair had turned white, his blue tie wandered in the wind and his dentures were not firm in his gums; they floated about his mouth as he scrutinised me and leaned his enormous purple nose into my face as if he could smell my emotions. Everyone knew I had been sick. I had been depressed for a year or two, and it was no secret. But he sniffed me with an intimacy that made me feel ashamed.
‘I heard you went through a bit of a stormy patch last year,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s over now.’
‘Of course it is,’ he agreed. ‘Sure it happens to the best of us. It’s the interior weather. It’s like everything else. It’s unpredictable. One day sunshine and then a week of rain.’
He squeezed my elbow tightly once more.
‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said. ‘But you need to mind yourself now.’
And suddenly he was gone. He dashed into the crowd as the crowd crushed in for my hand and mumbled their sympathy in my ear.
I kept up a show of grim cheerfulness throughout the funeral pageantry. But inside I was numb and brittle. I felt my depression might return at any moment. I suspected Dracula was standing under the rowan trees on the edge of the graveyard waiting to embrace me when I was alone.
‘She was a big age,’ someone said of Mother.
‘She was ninety-six,’ I replied.
‘Sure it was time for her to go,’ another one said.
‘Aye.’
‘She had a good innings.’
‘She did.’
‘She was a monument.’
‘She was.’
And on it went for half an hour at the graveside. Old broken men and women huddling in a circle around the mound of clay; the last of her generation, the flowers that had bloomed when she had bloomed and were now waiting for their own time to face the dark. And me in my late fifties and no child left inside me to cry for Mammy anymore.
I tried to remember her dancing. Or at least, while I was standing at the grave, I tried not to visualise what she looked like in the coffin or to remember how gaunt and haggard she had become in the last hours of her life, inhaling every precious breath. That was too upsetting. And I tried to avoid listening to the shovels of mud clattering down on the coffin lid.
There were other things for me to consider. I was focusing on the house – Glenasmole – a semi-detached building on Farnham Road just outside Cavan town where she had lived for sixty years. A house that had been dark and stuffy for two years, since she went away to the nursing home. A house that someone now had to open up and examine and clean.
After a respectable amount of time standing at the grave, and shaking hands with friends and relatives, everyone drifted towards the Kilmore Hotel down the road from the sloping graveyard. I followed behind. But first I blessed myself and took one last look at the flowers on the grave. With my eyes closed, I bade her what I thought was a last farewell. Then I walked down the slope, reflecting to myself that she was beside her husband at last. The grave had been filled. The earth now lay in a heap of black clay, covered with a few wreaths. That was the end of it.
I went into the church to pray at the altar rails and I saw the priest in the sacristy, a boyish intellectual taking off his white vestments. I thanked him for speaking so kindly about her life during the mass that morning and I knelt for a moment at the railings where my mother and father had knelt on their wedding
day in 1950. The circle was completed. And I made a mental note to get her name onto the headstone.
The atmosphere in the Kilmore Hotel was cheerful – there’s only so much grief you can show for a woman who was almost one hundred years old when she died. It’s more a sense of relief. There is a tendency to celebrate her life, as if the day was a festival. Recalling anecdotes that summed up her character. Having a few drinks and a hearty dinner of soup and roast beef and fat puddings, and enjoying the sense of being alive without her. There is always a sense of liberation and pleasure for mourners who are, at least for the moment, still over ground and capable of enjoying the taste of good whiskey.
‘May she rest in peace,’ we all agreed after every round.
I remember gazing out the window of the dining room in the Kilmore Hotel for a long time. I could see the graveyard. She was still that close. Her nephews and nieces drank pints of ale and glasses of whiskey after the meal, and their children ate crisps and ran around the sofas in the foyer. They embraced and hugged and all agreed that Nellie was the last of her kind, the last of the great characters in Cavan town. They agreed that she had had a long and healthy life, and that she had been lucky in love, and kind to strangers, especially those in trouble, and wasn’t it a pity that she had to go so suddenly in the end. ‘She was a saint,’ they said in all sincerity. And later they said she was a rogue – ‘a pure demon of a woman if you crossed her’. Distant relations took photographs on their phones and promised to meet again soon, and not just at the next funeral. There was a sense of relief that the day was almost over. The book was closed. Nellie Finlay was no more.
I was looking out the window at the tombstones glistening in the slanting sun and when everyone had gone away and I had paid the bill for the meal, I got into the jeep and drove in through town and out Farnham Road towards her house. Glenasmole.
Hanging with the Elephant Page 5