by Andy Halpin
Then as Joan finished she said something that at the time just did not register with me at all. Maybe because I was still in a state of wonderment at the things I was hearing, a lot of which I could relate to, the car, the inscription, the photograph, the poem and the quick and peaceful way Annette had passed over. Joan finished by saying that Annette said I used to have problems with my knees but she had: “fixed it for me.”
When I got on the bus to go home I wrote down everything about the session, I did not want to forget anything so I wrote it all of down as soon as I could. As I read over my notes the following day it hit me that my knees, which had indeed been a problem, especially when climbing stairs or sitting down for a period of time, were now working perfectly. It had been a number of weeks since I had last had problems climbing stairs, certainly six or seven. In fact I had forgotten about it. When Annette was alive, and I was struggling to get up or down the stairs, holding tight to the banister as my knees stiffened, she used to tell me to go and see about my knees or I was liable to end up a cripple. Unlike Mike Cabazon, I did not heed her warning, so she took action herself and now my knees are fine.
When Annette said: “She was happy about the car,” this refers to her car. I do not drive, and after Annette passed away David and Gina urged me to learn. They wanted me to use Annette’s car which was lying outside in the driveway, but I had no real interest in cars or driving. To please them I said I would take some driving lessons and see if I wanted to drive. In May I took a series of driving lessons, but I just was not interested. The car, an o3 Citroën in good condition, was just lying outside unused. When I decided I did not want to drive I asked David, Gina and Robert if any of them wanted it. They were all happy with the cars they had and declined the offer. All of Annette’s sisters, with the exception of Marie and her youngest sister Louise had cars. Marie’s husband, Maurice, drives her anywhere she wants to go but Annette had often commented on the fact that Louise had to bring her daughters, Shannon and Ceilie, to camogie, and anywhere else they had to go, by bus, and Annette wished Louise had a car of her own to get around. I told David, Robert and Gina if they did not want Mam’s car I was going to offer it to Louise. They all thought that was a good idea, so that’s what I did, I gave Louise Annette’s car. When Joan Glennon said that Annette was “very happy about the car” I was flabbergasted. There was no way Joan could have known what that meant. She did not know if I had a car or not as I had come by bus.
Likewise with my knees, if I had been stumbling down the road or walked with the aid of a stick she might have had reason to suspect that I had problems with my legs, but I was walking smartly towards her when she came to meet me. She had also referred specifically to my knees which was my problem, not in general terms to my legs.
Concerning the inscription I had indeed changed the wording on the headstone. I had told the sculptors I wanted the words “Memories never die” to be inscribed, but I had changed my mind. Instead I asked for “As long as there are memories, love lives on” to be set on the top of the head stone and “All is well.” to be put on the bottom. It was a phrase Annette was fond of using in times of stress. I asked for this to be done the day before the work was due to start. Again there was no way Joan could have known this.
Likewise with the reference to the photograph and me “making the right choice” how did she know if there was a photograph on the headstone at all?
The poem that she said Annette loves can only be the one I wrote for her memorial card.
I did not comment on any of the things Joan said until she was finished. Then I told her the significance of everything she had said.
Joan did say other things which made no sense to me. She also failed to mention a word I had asked Annette to say when I told her I was going to see Joan. It was a word whose meaning was known only to the two of us. I would have been convinced beyond all doubt that Annette was still around if she had spoken that word, but over all I was impressed. I could directly relate to about eighty per cent of what Joan had said, and while I did not understand the rest, who is to say time will not bring forth its meaning.
It’s now over nine months since the night in the Plaza Hotel when all this started, over four months since Annette passed away, and events are still happening. Only last week I was in the cemetery with Gina and as I tended to Annette’s grave Gina was walking around looking at other graves. I happened to look up at her and she had a stunned look on her face. I asked her what was the matter and she said she had “heard” Mam saying to her: “Is it me you came to see or what?”
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
It’s Wednesday, 2nd of September, 2009.
Last night I came back from Dingle having spent the weekend there. I was relinquishing our ownership of the old mobile that had played such a big part in our life for the past eleven years. It was a particularly sad time for me giving up the old mobile, but all things must come to an end and Dingle without Annette was just unthinkable. David, Ciara and Mina came with me and we spent Friday and Saturday night in the Dingle Skellig Hotel. When they left on Sunday they dropped me down to the mobile. I spent Sunday and Monday nights there. I wanted to do this. I wanted to sleep in the little bedroom again, before giving it up. I brought down Annette’s CD so I could hear her voice one more time in the mobile, but for the first time ever the CD player would not work.
I walked around Dingle visiting all the places Annette used to love to go to. I went into the church, which she always made a point of visiting, and I lit a few candles. I also arranged to have a Mass said for her, which I’m sure she would be very happy about. I walked along the harbour and looked at the Fungi statue. I imagined Annette sitting on it, as she is in the picture on her headstone. I sat on Bin Bann beach on Monday and wept as I looked at the text messages we had sent each other during her illness.
On Monday night I went to John Benny’s bar and had a meal alone. After it I said my goodbyes to Yvonne, the girl who had served us many times in the past, and to John. Then I headed up the road to the Global Village restaurant to tell Nuala the sad news about Annette and to say goodbye but the restaurant was closed. I went to the Droichead Beag where we had spent many happy nights together, listening to the music. I had one pint in the Droichead and then phoned Kathleen Curran, the lady with the taxi who had driven us home at the end of many happy nights in the past. Kathleen did not know Annette had passed away and she was surprised to see me standing on the bridge waiting for her on my own. When I got into the car I told Kathleen about Annette and she, like everyone else, was shocked and saddened by the news.
When I got back to the mobile I said my goodbyes to Paul and Eileen Scanlon and finished the bottle of wine I had brought with me. I packed a few items I wanted to keep from the mobile, and for the last time, I went to sleep in the little bed alone. In the past I had so often snuggled close to Annette in it as we slept a contented sleep after a night out in Dingle, but that night I only had my memories to cling to.
Kathleen drove me to the bus the next morning and after eleven very happy years in Dingle it was all over.
Everything I have written and recorded in this memoir is true, all I have related about Annette, the night in the Plaza, her passing and the things that happened after her passing happened just as I have written them. From time to time I go over the events in my mind as I sit alone in the house. I question everyone of them, forensically querying what exactly happened on each occasion. I am always left with the startling knowledge and certainty that each incident did indeed happen.
This is very comforting to me as I am now sure that Annette is in a place where she is happy and contented, and from where, every once in a while, she can still keep in touch with those she has left behind. But I am still sleeping alone in the big empty bed, still eating alone and still very lonely for Annette’s company. I still crave her physical presence, her touch, her voice, but most of all her company. I still wake up each morning knowing I will not see or touch my wife today.
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sp; My life has changed completely since Annette’s passing. We did everything together, we were one and now there is a huge part of me missing. I find it strange now going places on my own. Even going to visit the children is not the same as it once was. I’m on my own now with no one to bounce remarks or ideas off or crack a joke with about something or other. Walking around the Square in Tallaght brings back all kinds of memories. I can “see” Annette everywhere in it, as she acknowledged greetings and stopped to talk to the many friends she always met as we went around the shops.
One of the hardest things to do since Annette went out of my life is to come back to the house alone and enter an empty, cold house. Whenever we went out socially we always had a glass of wine and a chat about the night when we came home, and I miss that very much now. Earlier I wrote about the freedom I now have to do whatever I want, whenever I want around the house, but it’s very strange having the run of the house, and to be free to live among my clutter knowing Annette is not going to be on to me about it. I still think of the house as Annette’s and the things in it as belonging to her. Even though she is no longer here I’m still very careful of ‘her’ delph, ‘her’ glasses, ‘her’ cosmetics in the bathroom, and even of the few clothes of hers I have kept in the wardrobe. I am careful to see they are not creased. Although I know it’s foolish and will not happen, I still half expect her to come walking in the door with a big smile on her face, and if she does I want the place to be as she would want it to be.
I have taken off the last sheets Annette and I lay on in the bed. I have replaced them with fresh sheets, but I have not washed them, nor do I intend to do so. They are folded carefully on a shelf of the bookcase in the bedroom, and that’s where they will stay as long as I am in the house. They contain the only part of Annette not in the grave, her smell. I intend to keep that smell in the bedroom with me until I die.
Without Annette I am only half alive and although I go through the motions of day-to-day living my heart is not in it. I’ve resumed work on my Frank Sinatra show, but quite honestly I don’t care if it comes to fruition or not. The only thing I am putting any effort into is this memoir as I believe Annette is still with me while I’m working on it.
I try to remind myself as I wake up each morning without Annette that it’s not one day longer since I last saw and held her, but one day nearer the time I will do so again. My beliefs on what happens after passing from this life have changed. I am now convinced that death is not the end, but just a passing into another plane of existence, where the soul or spirit, or whatever name you like to put on it, continues to exist.
I was a very sceptical person before November 2008 and did not have any beliefs or cares at all about what happened after death, but I cannot ignore all that has happened, nor can I put it down to coincidence or chance. The things said to me by Joan Glennon were too personal and too true not to have been told to her by anyone other than Annette. No one else had that knowledge, certainly not Joan Glennon.
I go to the cemetery most evenings and talk to Annette. I talk to her about the things that have happened that day, about the family, about this memoir that I continually remind her she is writing with me, after all she did say she would be “my ghost writer”. I tell her how far we are with it and continue to ask for her help and guidance in writing it. I tell her that I am hearing her prompts as I try to remember the details of our forty four years together. I tell her how much I love her and how lonely it is without her.
Most times I get no response, but now and again I ‘hear’ Annette responding to my words, and I know that “all is well.”
EPILOGUE
It is over two years now since Joan Glennon approached me in the Plaza Hotel and related to me a message from my mother that I did not at the time understand. I still do not understand why I was singled out to be given that message when I was incapable and powerless to do anything about the consequences.
It has been a very strange and sad time for me and the family since then, life without Annette is lonely beyond explanation. My life has changed profoundly. I cannot begin to put into words how desolate and lonely I feel at times and how, as hard as I try to convey otherwise, meaningless and empty my life is now without Annette’s presence in my life. For almost forty-four years Annette was my companion and best friend. She was beside me in everything I did and I was beside her. Now it feels as if more than half of me is missing; I am incomplete without her.
Two years ago our forty-four years together began to unravel and it was over in less than six months. All we had and all we had done in those forty-four years is now just a series of ghostly memories. I keep trying to conjure them up in my mind and relive them again, but try as I might that is not possible. The best I can do is to bring to mind visions of places we visited together and imagine Annette’s smiling face looking at me. To help me in this task, since Annette’s passing I have filled the walls of the staircase and landing with pictures taken of her in the places we visited during the many holidays we took. I have also hung up many pictures of Annette, taken during her year as Tallaght Person of the Year, back in 1991. It’s really remarkable how little Annette changed or aged, apart from the colour of her hair, in those eighteen years.
Annette’s physical presence is gone from my life for ever. All the things we once did together I now have to do alone, I eat alone, I watch TV alone, I visit friends and family alone, and saddest of all, I climb the stairs to the big empty bedroom alone each night and wake up each morning to the silence of an empty house, alone. This is the hardest and saddest part of my life now. I heard Mary O’Rourke, the T.D speaking on the radio some time ago of her loneliness in the early morning and at bedtime. I know exactly what she means, I endure this ordeal every day, and it does not get any easier.
It is now November and the long dark evenings are upon us again and Christmas beckons. It is a Christmas I am dreading and even at this remove I wish it was over. It will be the second time in forty-five years I will not go shopping for a Christmas present for Annette, the second time in forty-two years that Annette and I will not share a drink and a cuddle on Christmas Eve and sample the just cooked turkey and ham on fresh bread sandwiches with liberal amounts of Coleman’s Mustard, and then, tired and happy, climb the stairs to bed and wake up in each others arms on Christmas morning.
Christmas was a favourite time of the year for us, we both loved all the festivities, meeting our friends and family, buying the Christmas tree and decorating the house with lights and tinsel. In later years we loved having our children and their partners up to the house for Christmas dinner. In the last few years we had begun to bring our grandchildren to the panto, just as we had done when our own children were young.
But all that is changed and will be forever more. Annette was such a lively and vibrant person, even in the early stages of her illness, that it is still so hard to believe she is gone, I find it hard to say the word dead because I still cannot think of Annette as being “dead” but she is gone. Last year when Gina and I attended the Mass of All Souls in St. Mark’s church to remember all who died in the parish in the past year, when Annette’s name was called it was proof positive that my beloved wife had left my side in this life for good.
During the course of the Mass the priest spoke about our loved ones passing over to a new life and us being reunited with them again when we died. Two years ago I would have scoffed at this, but what I have experienced since Annette passed away has changed my thinking completely. I am totally convinced that Annette or her spirit, her consciousness, her soul, call it what you will, is still alive and is still out there somewhere, and, from time to time, is able to communicate across whatever dimensions or divisions separate us.
It is this knowledge that now sustains me in my days of loneliness, the knowledge that I will be with, and will see, Annette again.
In the two years since Annette’s passing I have gone back to visit Bray where we first met on a sunny August Sunday in 1965 and stood at the spot where we
met. From there I gazed across the expanse of sea to where the Khyber Pass Hotel once stood in Dalkey, where we held our wedding reception. I tried to visualise Bullock Harbour and the Shangri-La restaurant where we danced away many a night when we were a young and carefree courting couple, but my tears obstructed the view. I attempted to have a drink in the Bray Head Hotel, where we had our first meal and drink as husband and wife, but the day I was there renovations were going on and the bar was closed.
In my mind I have relived our life together, over and over again. It torments me that it all ended so suddenly, so quickly and so unexpectedly, that when the cancer came it came so quietly that it ambushed us and caught us completely off guard. Cancer was something that happened to other people, not to us. I feel cheated that our time together was extinguished just when we were so happy and had the time and the money to begin to do and see many of the things that had eluded us earlier in our lives. I feel that the golden years we should have had together were stolen, the memories that had yet to be created and stored away for reminiscing in our old age with our grandchildren will now never be. I feel so sad that Annette will not be with her grandchildren as they grow into adulthood. I grieve for them that they have lost and will not have the love, wisdom and guidance Annette, their Nana, would have given them as they grew into young adults. For our children, David Gina and Robert, I am so sorry they will not have their mother’s shoulder for comfort, when, as is inevitable, they are confronted with life’s troubles. Annette’s passing has been a cross for us all that we will have to carry for the rest of our lives. She was such a huge and powerful presence in our lives, a gigantic source of love and compassion for all, which I know can never be replaced.