And Time Stood Still, page 6
On Christmas night after midnight Mass, Lena and I walked along the deserted village and over to the river where we leant over the bridge and watched the silent water. Silent water calms the anguish of the mind. Later that night I listened to thinker and sage John O’Donoghue’s CD on the meaning of death which is part of his ‘Beauty, the Invisible Embrace’ collection. I’d had these CDs for several weeks and had listened to all the others but had been almost afraid to play this particular one; now, in some trepidation, I put it on. I was apprehensive about what it would do to me but something drove me on to listen to it, and I found it comforting. I have since played it many times and found great solace in it.
Often, then, I dreamt of Gabriel and in the dream he was alive and with us, but in the dream too I still somehow knew that he was dead. I would ask him how he was here – I was undoubtedly exploring his absence, but his new presence too. There was a lot of crying during this time – crying going to sleep and crying on waking up during the night. I found it an ease to be able to cry in the peace and quiet of my own bedroom. It softened the pain. I find grief is a bit like the Inniscarra dam where water has to be released to ease the pressure.
I suffered big bouts of ‘if only’. If only I had been kinder to him! If only I had not always taken his kindness for granted! If only I had been a better listener! These thoughts constantly ran through me and almost strangled me with regrets. Because Gabriel had been big-hearted and generous, I had always taken his goodness for granted. He was far less selfish than I am and in our marriage he had been the giver and I the taker. Now I whipped myself with regrets.
Then one day while out for tea with a friend, I picked up a table napkin of a scene with pheasants. I love pheasants. Later I rang Lena asking her to bring home a large canvas from the Cork Art Shop. Early the following morning I began painting, and I painted all day; it was a cold day in early January and it passed in a haze of turpentine and paint. That painting brought the first release from mental misery. It was too cold to garden, I could not write and I could not motivate myself to do anything in the house. But I could paint. What a blessing that was! It was a big canvas and kept me occupied for days. I would not say that I ended up with a great painting, but that didn’t matter. It had made those cold, January days more bearable.
At the end of January the marmalade oranges came into the shops. Now, I am a marmalade maker, but that year I had to kick myself into bringing home the oranges and making a start. Ellen and I prepared the oranges and as the smell of marmalade-making filled the kitchen I felt an easing of the knot of pain that is grief. The journey through bereavement is made up of tiny steps. Creativity is one of them.
With the first breath of spring I took to the garden. The earth is the greatest healer of all. There is something in the earth that soaks into the bloodstream and eases the mind. After hours of digging I would always feel better. There is no logic to this, but it works. Then I decided to redesign the garden and spent days digging up the lawns and converting them into flower beds interlaced with stone paths. It was back-breaking, tiring work, but had the blessing that I fell into bed exhausted every night. Despite this I still woke in the early hours and watched the grey light of dawn creep in the widow. Then I would put on soothing tapes and CDs and listen again and again to John O’Donoghue’s voice. I scratched for climbing steps wherever I could find them in the hard wall of grief. It’s what we must do and somehow when we search, those steps are there.
Climbing
I claw up
The black rock
Face of grief
With grim determination
Seeking tiny footholds
Gripping each ledge
Because if I should slip
I fall into nothingness
But if I keep climbing
You will be there
In the sunshine
Of wholeness.
Cold Dawn
Grey light seeps in
And the razor edge
Of realisation cuts
Through my waking mind.
The coldness of aloneness
Chills my nakedness
Have I the courage
To reinvent myself
Because I was part
Of a whole?
My first time doing anything on my own was a huge battle and sometimes I would wonder if it was worth the effort.
The Back Yard
Yesterday I washed the back yard
With a mind full of throbbing pain.
Scalding tears joined piped water
Through hoses that you connected.
It is in the ordinary everyday
That I miss you most.
When all was clean and rearranged
I asked myself, ‘Why did I bother?’
But you were never one
To sit and moan;
You would have kept going,
And so must I.
Because savage grief
Must be worked through
And grappled with hour by hour
So that one day your memory
Becomes a glorious tub of flowers.
Going places on my own for the first time was a bleak experience.
The Gap
We had gone
There together
Now I went alone
And could not fill the space;
Wanted to go home,
To lock myself in
Where I did not
Have to hold back tears
And pretend to be normal.
A Little Healing
‘Come to Writers’ Week
It might help a little.’
I doubted it!
There we created
Fantasy worlds
And I left reality behind.
When I came home
A little healing
Had happened.
Chapter 8
Morning Has Broken
She was a real home bird who should not have flown far from the nest. Ellen never quite transplanted her roots from Ireland to her adoptive country, Canada, and initially came home every summer. As she had married a Canadian who was an only child, there was no extended Canadian family and her children, especially her only daughter, Kelly, grew up very close to her Irish cousins who regarded her as part of all our families. So it was no surprise when, after many years flying back and forth, Ellen decided to over-winter in Ireland and avoid the harsh Canadian snows. She spent her summers in Toronto and in the autumn came to Innishannon, returning in the spring to Canada. We joked that she was a swallow in reverse.
I was always glad to be one of five sisters because there is great companionship in sisters. When we were all young there was a close bond between us, but over the years as we all went our separate ways and got involved in our own families, naturally that bond eased, but when Ellen came back to Innishannon we fell straight back into the old pattern. It was like picking up the needles on a piece of knitting that you had put down a long time ago, but the stitches were still on the needles and your found your way back into the old pattern with ease. We enjoyed the same kind of books, the same TV programmes and could spend hours chatting about all kinds of everything. She had a consuming interest in politics – local, national and worldwide – and kept up to date on political agendas all over the globe. Gardening and art were shared passions and we spent hours in our upstairs studio painting and monitoring each other’s progress.
When she came to live in Innishannon she became involved in the life of the village and enjoyed all the local activities. She was always fascinated by the intricacies of living in a small community and would sometimes say in bemusement, ‘I don’t know if I would ever have survived in a small village.’ Nevertheless, she was often astonished at the lengths the people of a small community would go to in support of each other or a local cause and often remarked, ‘The people of Innishannon are amazing.’
But of all the occasions we shared, her greatest source of pleasure was the annual Rossmore Drama Festival every March which we attended nightly for ten nights. The cream of Irish amateur drama graced the stage of this little theatre in the depths of West Cork and she marvelled at the amazingly high standard of the productions of plays from the pens of the best of Irish and international writers. She got to know the other theatre goers who shared her passion, in particular Noreen and Michael who always sat in front of us – and at the interval the four of us adjudicated the play ahead of the real adjudicator who came on stage at the end of the performance. Rossmore was the highlight of Ellen’s year.
She walked with me along the grief road when time stood still for me after the deaths of our good friend, Con, and my husband, Gabriel. I was so lucky to have her. Kind and gentle by nature, she was a calming presence and a listening ear, and while I dug my grief into the garden behind the house she cooked in the kitchen and prepared great meals. I cook only when I get hungry, but Ellen loved pottering around the kitchen and trying out new recipes just for the fun of it. We were the ideal house-sharing combination, with me as gardener-cum-housekeeper and she as cook and comforter.
Every spring when we waved her off at Shannon airport we looked forward to her return in the autumn. One year after her daughter Kelly’s wedding, which we all attended in Toronto, her Canadian family all came back to Innishannon for an Irish reception. We had spent weeks getting the house and garden ready for the big event and had enjoyed the whole thing immensely. After the wedding celebrations Ellen went back to Toronto, planning to return for Christmas. It was not to be.
Just before Christmas she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and on Christmas Eve Lena and I flew to Canada to spend Christmas with her. I had never spent Christmas anywhere other than at home and if anybody had asked me where I would least like to be on Christmas Eve I would have said Heathrow airport. But there we were, late on Christmas Eve on our way to a snow-covered Canada. It was great to see Ellen and Kelly and the rest of the family. She looked well and was in good spirits, but, being a nurse, she had no illusions about what lay ahead for her.
On Christmas morning we walked down the road to Mass in the local church, treading our way carefully along the iceand snow-encrusted street. The houses along the way were festooned with dancing Santas and prancing reindeers. The Mass was leisurely and celebratory – we Irish must be the only crowd who get out our stop-watch and put a time limit on Mass! We found the slow pace of that Mass comforting because deep in all our hearts that morning we knew that this was the world from where we would need to draw strength in the months ahead.
That evening Lena, Kelly, and her husband, Rick, joined a family gathering in the home of Rick’s sister, leaving Ellen and me to share a quiet meal in her lovely home looking out over a snow-covered city. It was a peaceful time together. Then Kelly, knowing that I love ballet, had booked tickets for The Nutcracker the following evening. It was enchanting – the exquisite beauty of the performance swept us into the translucent world of make-believe. We all came home feeling that we had been transported to a glorious realm. In the headlights of approaching sadness your sensory perception is finely tuned.
Lena and I came back to Ireland hoping that the planned treatment would bring extended time for Ellen and at the beginning things went fairly well, but on subsequent visits to Toronto through the year I witnessed her become more and more frail. On one occasion she met me at the airport in a soft pale-blue coat and I felt she looked like a piece of delicate china. Just before Christmas my sister, Theresa, and I decided to go over longterm and help take care of her with her wonderful daughter, who was now pregnant with her first baby. But there was to be no longterm as she died quietly a few days after we got there.
Later that night I went down into her basement apartment and there on the side of the fridge was a smiling picture of my beloved sister with Noreen and Michael, taken the previous year at Rossmore Drama Festival where she had spent so many great nights. It was hard to absorb the fact that she would never again enjoy Rossmore.
Ellen had always said that she wanted to be cremated, considering it far more hygienic than the alternative. The day after her death, Kelly and Rick held a reception for her in their house, where their friends and Ellen’s gathered; it was in many ways similar to an Irish wake. On the morning of the actual cremation it was necessary for a family member to visit the crematorium, so Rick and I drove there. She looked so peaceful and totally natural, wrapped in a white sheet in a simple wooden box. Just as she would have wished. In beside her I slipped our mother’s well-worn rosary beads in its little crumpled leather purse and a small bottle of holy water. She had never liked fuss and wanted only simplicity in life. This was as simple as it could be. The following day her ashes, in her favourite wooden box, stood in front of the altar at Mass and we sang her favourite hymn ‘Morning Has Broken’.
With her baby due in two months, Kelly was unable to travel to Ireland but wanted her mother’s ashes brought back to Innishannon. I could not bear the idea of Ellen’s ashes being booked in with the luggage on the plane, but wished to take them on board with me. This was possible as I had a laptop which I put in with my luggage and put the ashes into my laptop bag which I carried on board over my shoulder. I felt much better being able to do this and the crematorium had provided all the necessary documentation. The airport authorities in both Pearson in Toronto and Schiphol in Amsterdam were helpful and courteous, and displayed an amazing amount of consideration and sensitivity. It restored my faith in the goodness of human nature and made me appreciate that not all officialdom is run by robots and we are not entirely hidebound by beaurocracy.
Theresa’s daughter, Eileen, met us at Cork airport but arriving back in Innishannon was not easy. Eileen’s husband, Paddy, who is a wood turner, had made a beautiful elm box for the ashes, so we placed it on a little table in the seomra ciúin, surrounded with lit candles in Aunty Peg’s brass candlesticks. That night the family gathered for the rosary and it was particularly peaceful in the following days to be able to sit there in the quietness of the house where Ellen and I had spent so many happy hours together. Some of her close friends called and we had tea by the fire and chatted. It was a quiet and spiritual time, spent in the presence of someone who had never liked big crowds and fuss.
We did not put a death notice in the paper as all those who meant most to her were aware of her death and so her funeral was just family and very close friends. She never liked our big funerals and told me once that Irish funerals were like a war. So she did not have a ‘war’, but like the gentle lady that she was, she had a gentle homecoming. Paddy and I had dug her grave which was not a big undertaking with only ashes involved. On a little table beside it we placed a beautiful blue silk shawl belonging to my daughter, Lena, and after the funeral Mass we placed the little elm box on it. When the prayers were said we sang ‘Morning Has Broken’ and then eased the blue shawl containing the elm box down into the earth beside Gabriel, Uncle Jacky and Aunty Peg.
Two months later her first grandchild was born in Toronto and when she was five months old, Kelly and Rick brought her back to Innishannon to be christened. Fr Denis did the christening and after the beautiful church ceremony we walked down to Ellen’s grave where Denis used the same holy water to bless her grandmother’s resting place. The sun shone as we sang.
Morning Has Broken
Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.
Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s resurrection of the new day.
The Shelter Belt
Chapter 9
Of Hilly Places
Our Uncle Danny did not choose his words carefully and he had a raw honesty that could sometimes make life uncomfortable, especially if you decided to outwit him in an argument – he was lucky to have lived before political correctness became the order of the day. For many years he was a bachelor farmer, living with my grandmother. You could never describe him as a measured man: he had a great heart, a volatile temper and a huge sense of occasion. He and my grandmother ran the farm and because they were both determined people there was often a resounding clash of wills. He was my mother’s only brother and where she was quiet and diplomatic, he was forthright and dogmatic.
When we were dispatched as children back the road to help my grandmother, who was a strict disciplinarian, he would help to brighten up the visit with his entertaining stories; we were usually regaled with these stories as we all sat around the table at dinner time. Uncle Danny took his place at the head of the table and he did not tell his stories quietly, but acted them out in a loud voice, sometimes pounding the table for dramatic impact. When he did this the cutlery and cups bounced off the old wooden table, and I held my breath because sometimes some of them bounced with a clatter onto the stone floor! He was a dramatist at heart and in us he had a receptive audience. His version of ‘Grace after Meals’ was: ‘I pray to the Almighty God that this feed may do me great good and that I might sleep sound tonight.’
Sometimes his colourful, descriptive phrases brought a frown to my grandmother’s face, but I loved them because what they lacked in delicacy they made up for in clarity. One day he was telling us about a woman whom he had met in town and who had insisted in telling him a long-winded story about her operation, in which he had no interest. He explained that he had tried to cut her short and move on, but had not succeeded. This to me was difficult to understand, because as far as I was concerned it would be difficult to stop Uncle Danny in his tracks.
