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.
There it was, just beside the General Hospital, on a hill called the Rock Cross. Four houses standing alone. There were signs of life in the other three but at Glenasmole the weeds were coming up through the tarmac. The avenue was overcome by trees and bushes on either side. I walked around the gable and entered by the back door. I suppose I still wasn’t satisfied that I had bid her a final and complete farewell from my heart, because the pageantry of the funeral didn’t allow me enough quiet reflection, and I thought her smiling face would be more intense in the house than at the graveside.
But now that she was buried, there was no meaning in the house. Her clothes didn’t mean anything and the ornaments and objects she had gathered, hoarded and loved for fifty years, and crammed onto every mantelpiece and into every china cabinet in the house, were suddenly bereft of any further significance. There was no sense to what lay in the wardrobes upstairs or to the dishes on the drying rack beside the sink. While she was in the nursing home I had always convinced myself that it was only for a short while and that she would eventually return to her home. And everything in the house signified something to her and everything mattered to her. So I touched as little as possible.
‘She’s not dead,’ I would tell myself, as if disturbing anything might have been an unkindly act.
But now that she was dead I was forced to face the clutter and jumble of old clothes and broken delph. I put the palm of my hand on the old storage heater in the hallway, and checked that it was cold. In the drawing room, I checked another heater. The room was stuffy. The windows had not been opened for a long time and the sun had blazed into the room through June and July. But the radiators were off, so that was fine. Then I went upstairs, a solid, carpeted stairway, though it creaked in the same places as it had done years before when I was coming home from carnivals as a teenager in the middle of the night and would want to reach my bed without waking either of my parents.
There was a musty smell on the landing and in the corridor. I tried to open the bathroom window but it almost fell apart, so I left it as it was.
It was my first time in the house since she had died two days earlier, and I didn’t want to hang around too long. But I was drawn to a chair. It was in the front room. A chair that I had bought for her five years earlier in McIntyre’s Furniture World. At the time, she could not manage to get up out of the low, soft armchairs, and this one had a high seat and a straight back. In all other respects, it was a fine, soft, upholstered throne. But she always looked rigid in it and just before she went into the nursing home, she was beginning to have difficulty getting in or out of it. I remember being terrified each week when I was saying goodbye, in case she fell. She’d stand up, escort me to the hall and close the door behind me. Then she’d walk back to the front room and throw herself in the general direction of the chair. I’d be outside the window looking in. She’d aim her body at it and all I could do was stand there gawking and hope she wouldn’t miss. If she missed and fell she’d break her hip, with me looking at her through the window.
But now I was looking at the chair. I could almost see her sitting there, and hear her speak, as she once spoke to me many years earlier, when I was in the pit of depression, and had come to her for some comfort.
‘If you want to cry, go upstairs,’ she’d said coldly, when tears threatened my face in that same room in 1979. I was twenty-six, a grown adult, and yet I craved for her to hold me. And for a moment, our eyes met and I saw in her a naked terror and I felt her helplessness. It was like a sound coming from a closed room where she had lived alone and untouched for far too long. She could never have held me then. I could see that. She could never hold anyone again. Yes, she could still be held by other people; those who came to her door sustained her, those who met her in the supermarket and in the street, and the nurses, the doctor, the home help and all her friends, they all held her, and the world held her, and the routines of her life held her, like going to 10 a.m. mass every morning for years or making her porridge in the microwave before going to bed, so that all she had to do in the morning was press the button and reheat it. All those routines held her. It wasn’t her fault that she could not hold me. She just wasn’t able to do it. And realising that felt like some kind of intimacy.
Of course they say that men ought not to cry openly, but to me it has always seemed natural. I know men cry in public, with a kind of bravado or performance skill, at football matches and whenever they’re watching rugby in a pub, but there is a reluctance to share tears in any intimate situation. They go out to the street and cry. They leave the room. They apologise. Even I prefer to cry alone. It’s not something I like to do with someone staring me in the face, apart from my therapist. But over the years, I have certainly cried a lot, whether because of mental anguish, fear of the future or just as a result of something trivial on the television, like the sight of women in period costumes on BBC as they rise up in rebellion against Mr Darcy or other such patriarchs, with the surprise of larks. I often wonder what women would think of me if they knew that.
And I remember one occasion when I caught my old friend the General in tears, and I had to look away. I was getting water from the tap in his yard one afternoon just before New Year, during a cold spell. I’d noticed that the snow all about me was stained with blood, where they had shot a horse on Christmas Day.
‘She slipped on the ice,’ the General had said, ‘and we could do nothing for her.’
His eyes had watered and he’d looked at the empty snow with such confusion that no one could doubt but that he had loved his mare.
And I remember the time foot and mouth swept the country and big farmers from Monaghan, Tyrone and the Cooley Peninsula had wept every evening on the television news like little boys. The camera would catch them standing in a gateway, with a stick in hand, and the field behind them full of beautiful beasts, black-and-white dairy cows, the descendants of cattle that had grazed the same fields decades earlier.
‘My father had this herd, and his father before him,’ the farmer would be saying. And then he would turn to take a glance at the field and he’d be broken. ‘They’ll all have to go,’ he’d say, the words whispered and the tears welling and overflowing in his eyes. And their crying often made me cry.
I spent years wrapped in sorrowful lament, posing as a melancholic poet in my college days, affecting the airs of a devout saint in various churches in later years, and when alone I released myself with tears that would fill a lake. But as I gazed at my mother’s chair, I felt like I had a stone in my chest and no matter what I touched I couldn’t cry.
FOR THE FIRST month after my mother died in July 2012, I walked about the world with a new lightness. It’s not something I admitted to anyone, but I felt a sense of exhilaration to be above ground when someone so solid and enduring as Mother was now no more. Then after a certain time, issues began to arise. Letters started coming in the door. There were all sorts of institutions that needed forms to be filled in and evidence submitted to establish that this person was now legally dead. Most importantly, her death certificate needed to be completed. And then I needed to fill in forms in order to close her bank account and to close down her social welfare file and to repay the two weeks’ pension that had inadvertently gone into her account on the day of her death and to close the account with the nursing home. And the solicitor wanted to know what was going to happen to the house. There were forms surfacing everywhere. But the house was the most important issue.
My mother had left the house to my brother and me in equal parts, but my brother intimated to me that he wanted to give me his share as a gift. I was moved by his generosity, and I accepted. But the house didn’t feel like mine. Or his. It was still hers; a dark enclosure where she had brooded in silence for fort
y years.
The solicitor phoned and asked if I could deliver the death certificate as soon as possible so that they could sort out probate on her estate. I should pick it up at the register office, he said, which was in a small building at the gates of Cavan General Hospital and happened to be just across the road from Glenasmole. So a week after the funeral, I returned to Cavan, drove past the wrought-iron front gate, rusting at the sides and at all the joints, and saw the nameplate on which ‘Glenasmole’ was hardly visible because of the moss and green slime. In the register office, I spoke to a woman behind the counter and filled in the forms and got the certificate. Then I brought it to the solicitor’s office, and that was an end of it.
But on the way home, driving past the house again and seeing its closed gate and vacant upstairs windows, I decided to go inside for no particular reason. It was my first visit since the day of the funeral and this time I decided to examine things in more detail.
From the sunroom at the back of the house I passed through the kitchen, a room she had insisted on carpeting about ten years before she died, because her feet got cold on the bare tiles. The Sacred Heart picture on the wall was faded and the ink scrawl that marked her husband’s, her own and her children’s names had been erased by time. A round tin of Roses chocolates sat on the table. But none of these things disturbed me.
In the drawing room, Pope Benedict XVI stared at me from a postcard on the mantelpiece; the German theologian leered out of the frame with eyes that my daughter had once observed were very creepy. But that didn’t disturb me either.
His photograph was flanked by long-legged African birds, like herons, carved in black ebony. They had been brought from Nigeria in 1966 by Father Pat, a distant cousin.
There were pictures of ‘the two boys’, as she called me and my brother, in First Communion suits beside the birds. A bland landscape painting of an English meadow hung over the mantelpiece. An electric heater with fake flames behind dark glass was tucked into the fire grate. A small television sat on the coffee table in the opposite corner. A cream nightdress hung across the back of the high armchair. A bundle of Sunday newspapers lay on the floor, yellowed by two years of sunlight. The standard lamp under which my father had once read his books was still plugged in and a bookcase in which he had locked away his precious books stood in the corner. I peered through the glass and wondered where the key might be; not that there was much of interest in there apart from old Catholic apologists from the 1930s and a few accountancy volumes that he had read for his examinations many years earlier – and a long brown envelope containing his will. The sofa that no one had sat on for years was piled high with pillows, bed linen and nightdresses. The card table was dusty. It had come originally from my grandmother’s house, a dull, broken antique that spent some years in a shed. Mother had had it restored by the Robinson brothers in Killeshandra and when she brought it home, she glowed with happiness to have such a memento of her own mother.
It was made of polished mahogany, a central stem branching into four delicate legs. The table itself was square, but could be folded to half its size, with drawers underneath for the cards. The drawers had eventually filled up with bottles of cough mixture, tablets, tubes of ointment for her legs, a white raincoat, a pack of cards and some rosary beads. And the table too had gathered dust for two years. The cream wallpaper was falling off the walls behind a drinks cabinet in the opposite corner, which she had taken from her brother Oliver’s house when he died – though Oliver never drank in his entire life and I always thought it was an unusual memento by which to remember him. But he was an enormous figure in my mother’s little world, and he had achieved great success as a civil servant, eventually becoming the secretary to three presidents. When I was a child, he was the benchmark of dignity, success and ethical standards in our family. He had lived alone in a semi-detached house on Croagh Patrick Road in Dublin, and I had marvelled at the timer on his cooker, which could trigger the hot plates at the stroke of noon to heat potatoes, and have them ready for his lunch when he walked in the door to the red Formica table in his little kitchen, a stone’s throw from the president’s residence.
Every summer, he had holidayed on the Aran Islands, speaking Irish and reading books. His feet had spread in his sandals and he found it difficult to get them back into the stiff shoe leather when his holiday was over and his presence was once again required on the lush carpets of Áras an Uachtaráin. Now he sleeps, enfolded in the arms of his own mother and beside his father on a slope in Cullies graveyard, side by side with girls who died in the Poor Clare Orphanage fire, and all the other remembered and unremembered heroes of Cavan town. I often drove Mother out to put flowers on his grave, close to where a new road has been cut through the drumlins and which shortens the journey to Enniskillen and on which the traffic flows day and night, and trucks honk their horns and the noise is carried in the wind into the graveyard and across the tombstones of the resting dead.
In the hallway of Mother’s house, the wallpaper was also in tatters from the dampness that had inched up behind it from year to year, and the floor, where I remember red and cream tiles in my childhood, had been carpeted with a dizzy paisley design on a cream background. A yellow two-bar electric heater sat idle at the first step of the stairs, sitting there since a care worker had noticed that the flex was frayed and had insisted on taking it away, so that it wouldn’t cause a fire. Mother had thought she was robbing it, so the care worker had left it alone, where it remained for years. But none of that upset me.
I was uneasy about opening the dining-room door because, for two years, Mother had slept in there, when she could no longer negotiate the stairs, before finally surrendering to the prospect of ending her days in a nursing home.
The sideboard on the left was cluttered with wedding gifts from that sunny day in late August 1950 – although nothing had been polished for years and a film of dust clung to the little spouts and delicate handles of the teapot and the gravy boat, the salt and pepper canisters, the sugar bowls and little trays for fish knives. On the mantelpiece, there were more photos of her sons and two vases with plastic snowdrops and a machine for making espresso coffee, which she got from someone in Saudi Arabia but which she had remained convinced was no more than an ornament. An enormous mound of old clothes was piled in the far corner. It was like a refuse heap in a charity shop, and it was impossible to get into that part of the room. Behind all the rags was a hi-fi black box record player, which had been my father’s pride and joy when he was in the gramophone society in the 1950s. The members would meet in the Farnham Arms Hotel every fortnight and, at each meeting, a different member would play a selection of their favourite records while the others listened. I heard my father once say that he particularly enjoyed the evenings when the local doctor was in charge, because he loved opera and brought recordings of many famous arias, and he could bring La Traviata or La Bohème to life. The librarian was fond of music too and she would often tell me how wonderful the previous night’s recital had been, describing the music in detail, while she stamped my copy of Treasure Island or Kidnapped when I went in for a new book after school. How anyone could describe a movement of classical music in terms of mountains, valleys and soft breezes astonished me, and her enthusiastic descriptions inspired me to take out my father’s records sometimes from the shelves beneath the black box and listen to Gilbert and Sullivan or the piano music of Chopin.
On top of the black box there was a photo of Uncle Oliver in a tuxedo, black overcoat and white scarf. It would have infuriated my father if he had seen Oliver smiling on top of his precious black box, but Father was long dead when the photo was put there, and by then Mother had forgotten what the black box was for. Oliver is beaming with joy in the photograph as he holds his arm around a young woman in an evening gown. He looks surprised and pleased at the camera, though he never married or spoke of any woman in romantic terms, which made it another strange memento by which to remember him.
Another television
set had been placed in the corner of this room on a rickety wicker stool, so Mother could view it from the bed. Not that she needed high definition at that stage. She had lost interest in the material world. But I think she still needed images out there in the room to distract her from the things in her own mind. Two rolls of toilet paper and a bottle of air freshener sat on top of the television, within reach if she was sitting on the commode next to it.
Saint Bernadette viewed all this from a picture above the commode. It was a framed picture I had owned when I was a priest in Fermanagh, given to me by a woman who had been to Lourdes hoping to find relief from cancer or at least serenity on her deathbed.
In the centre of the room was a single bed, with a mattress which I had bought the same day as the chair. The electric blanket was off, but still plugged in. The sheets were crumpled, and the duvet was half rolled down. I pressed my hand into the pillow, making a dent, and then I could really imagine she had just moved the duvet away and got out of bed a few moments earlier. I suppose I should have sorted all this out when she first went into the nursing home, but I didn’t.
On top of the little locker beside the bed there were various bottles of tablets, and empty Maalox bottles and an unopened naggin of brandy, and more handbags and a rosary of gaudy purple beads and a glass beaker that had once held Mother’s teeth while she slept. There were prayer leaflets honouring saints, and memorial cards for various relations and friends, and three pictures of Padre Pio praying with his wounded hands joined before his face.
Inside the locker at the very back, behind more bed linen, my fingers found another rosary; old black beads with a gigantic crucifix which had been woven around my grandmother’s fingers as she lay dying in a house on Bridge Street in 1963, and which my mother had cherished after that funeral.
Hanging with the Elephant: A Story of Love, Loss and Meditation Page 6