Almost a month ago, I received the phone call that every emigrant with elderly parents dreads.
"Mum's not well," came my brother's voice down the phone, "the doctor doubts she'll make the end of the week - you'd better make some plans."
I knew this day would come, in many ways I hoped it would be sooner rather than later. Mum had dementia and had been non-verbal for almost seven years and missing for oh so much longer than that. After my dad had died - nine years earlier - she had declined massively within a short period of time, and had been living in a nursing home since then.
To my shame, I hadn't seen her in four years.
To my shame, I hadn't seen her in four years.
A woman who up until the last decade and a half had taken great pride in her appearance, mum had taught us girls how to be ladies; she placed great importance on good manners and a groomed appearance - she didn't understand the laddish culture I grew up with at all and consequently, and apart from a brief stint as a pint drinker, I never quite embraced it myself. It sounds so quaint, so old-fashioned now, but the little rules mattered; 'never eat or smoke in the street', 'always ensure your shoes are clean and shiny - no matter how old or shabby your clothes' and the mantra which has stayed with me and which I find myself repeating to my teenage daughter (although rarely follow myself these days), ' which would you rather be - the best or worst dressed in a room?' For her, the answer to this was obvious.
She would have been horrified at the hunched little creature, shrouded in shapeless nylon and slippers, that she had become. This is the woman who once - following a day trip out in the car - refused to join the rest of us for an impromptu round of pints in the pub on the way home because she was wearing boots!
She visited the hairdresser twice a week for many years.
She visited the hairdresser twice a week for many years.
The week that she was dying I stayed near the phone and laptop, obsessively checked the cost of ferry crossings and surfing the Debenhams website for black maternity dresses (surely a most depressingly macabre item of clothing?).
"You are not seriously looking at funeral clothes while your mother is still sick?" DH demanded, appalled at such bleak insensitivity.
"Of course I am!" I shot back, "it's what mum would have done herself!"
And she would have; I had heard the story about how in the days following the death of my dad's father, many decades ago, she had gone shopping to buy funeral clothes for her children, and how shocked and appalled everyone was with her - who on earth does that at such a time? But I understood; there is enough to worry about when someone dies, without showing up looking ill-prepared and scruffy when paying one's final respects.
Always look your best.
Always look your best.
I mentioned to the children that we might need to go to Ireland for a few days and then hated that they were so excited. The grandmother they had hardly seen in the seven or eight years since we left Ireland meant little to the older children and nothing to the younger. This is one tragedy of living abroad which I deeply regret, although in truth dementia would have robbed them of her regardless of whether they'd seen her regularly or not. But still, the glee with which they asked me about this impending trip both annoyed and saddened me.
The morning she died, I had phoned my brother to ask him a banal question about a water softener. A sob came down the phone; "She's gone." was all he said.
She had slipped away with my eldest sister beside her. I'm glad it was her; although mum loved us all equally, this particular sister always had special meaning for mum. A few years before mum married my dad, she had a baby out of wedlock which she'd been forced to give up for adoption. For three months she cared and nursed this baby in a mother and baby home until one day a family showed up and took the baby away, leaving mum to wander back out into the world, childless and shattered, to resume her life. None of us could ever understand the pain, grief and sheer trauma this must have caused her, but when my sister was born a few years later, mum held on to her tight, and loved her fiercely. And who could blame her?
The following ten hours were a whirl of phone calls and emails - hotel and ferry bookings to be made, cancelled music and maths lessons, absence notes for the schools. All the seemingly vital aspects of daily life are surprisingly easy to cancel when the need arises. The trip to Ireland which we had meant to make so many times since we arrived in the UK from Australia a year earlier, was suddenly on. The money we couldn't afford for hotels and ferries was suddenly found and I packed up the funeral clothes I had bought earlier in the week, grateful I had done so; one less thing to think about now.
What is the protocol when someone close dies and you're not physically there? At a loss, I popped out to our local store to buy a bottle of wine - no idea why, mum hated wine. Selecting something expensive, which seemed only right, I stood waiting to pay as a mother I vaguely knew from school joined me in the queue.
Looking at my bump and the wine bottle, she greeted me with a confused smile. I considered telling her my mother had died that morning, then concluded it would be a meaningless comment made only to garner a little sympathy from someone I barely knew. I held up the bottle, "For my husband!" She smiled and nodded.
My sister - who lives in our home town - had commented that everywhere she went around the town she received condolences and sympathetic comments. And as annoying as this may be, there is a comfort on the shared knowledge of your grief, a sense that the community is grieving for you and will in a way take care of you. Within hours of mum's death she had people visiting with plates of sandwiches and offers to help clean windows and tidy around the driveway. People rally around you in a small community, confident you will pay it forward in the future.
Standing in that queue holding the bottle of wine, I kept thinking, 'my mother died today...that's massive really...I mean, my MOTHER died today - MUM! - who gave birth to me, and I'm standing in a queue in the Co-Op...!' I handed over my card with a fixed smile. The unreality of death is even more surreal when you are the only one who knows about it.
I hadn't seen my family in four years and to be honest had fallen out with some of them over that time. I was worried about what sort of reception I would receive from them. I vowed to be stoic and aloof, if not exactly frosty; I would embrace them but would remain at a distance, hurtful words can't be taken back and not even my mother's death could change that.
Within seconds of arriving back home all this nonsense fell away as I and my children were subsumed into the bosom of my family, together again and without tension, just unified in our blood, loss and memories. Oh how I loved them all and how petty I felt for the three odd years of silence.
When you live abroad without support, you start to see yourselves as a self-sufficient unit, without any need for extended family or any connection with home. You read the local news from time to time, but with a sense of distance; the places seem exotic and far removed from your day to day reality. You begin to think none of it matters any more.
I had even started to think I would never again live in Ireland, that our Irish identity was some silly romantic notion with no basis in reality. My kids' accents are a strange hybrid of Brit, Aussie and mid-Atlantic drawl, with little to hint at an Irish background. They don't know the Irish language, or GAA, and apart from a spattering of Irishisms such as 'ya feckin' eygit' and the Mayo jerseys they wear everywhere, there's little to hint we're Irish at all.
I didn't see this as sad, I saw it simply as the reality of living abroad but within hours of our arrival, as the children were swallowed up by cousins and uncles and aunts, all eager for hugs and questions about their travels, I realised that this can't be bought or substituted. Yes we can try; we can surround ourselves with good friends, but nothing can replace a group of people who knew you when you were small, laughed at you when you had a bad perm, who remember the time you fell over on the stage during a ballet show when you were three. Even as we sat around mum's coffin* with guitars, drinks and laughter, we snorted that mum would have hated all the noise, and would have insisted we move it into another room.
(*In Ireland we take the body home for a night or so to wake it...not as bad as it sounds!).
There is a comfort to the Irish grieving process, something I never fully understood until now. There is a pattern, a process, which removes all thought for a while, providing you with something to do with your hands, your body, your mind. The rhythmical comforting beat of, 'I'm sorry for your loss, I'm sorry for your loss,' as the congregation line up to shake your hand at the front of the church, before moving on to the next family member. You look at them and struggle for the name...'Oh it's you...I didn't recognize you!' you think, as they disappear down the line and the next person grabs your hand.
So mum is gone now, although in reality she's been gone for some time. The closing years of her life were deeply unfair to her, a woman who loved gossip and fags and cups of tea, dementia left her a human rag, bereft of speech or spark or interest, just a frightened old lady who had a permanent look of fear which said, 'what the hell happened to me?' We couldn't answer her because we didn't know either.
Dementia is a cruel and spiteful illness, robbing everyone in its path. All traces of my mother's personality had slowly dripped away over fifteen years or so; the kindness, the warmth, the humour, leaving her selfish and frightened, a stranger to herself and to us. Although, as the priest said during his wonderful eulogy at her funeral mass, while mum might have forgotten why she loved us during her final years, we never forgot why we loved her. He was so right.
I will recall her as the warm and loving mum who never left me in doubt of my importance in this world, who smothered, spoiled and fattened me with love. The mother who taught me to ride a bicycle - running along behind me - and who sang hymns to me at bedtime because she didn't like reading stories; whose face, on my first day of school, stared anxiously through the glass diamond in the door, as I wept on my teacher's knee. The woman who followed me to the shops - dodging behind trees all the way - on my first excursion out 'alone'.
I'll remember her as the mother who loved her family with the ferocity of a mother lion, caring for her cubs and her man, and who would have absolutely adored the little brood of characters I'm now raising. And although she didn't know them, nor they her, she's with us in this house every single day. She's present in my thoughts and words and actions - in my 'posh' phone-answering voice and my no-nonsense approach when it comes to my children. In my daughter's forthrightness and startling physical strength, and in her beautiful, lilting singing voice. She's present in my son's occasional self-doubt and earnestness, and in my five-year-old's head of dark curls, passing along through the generations.
She's with me now.
My sister - who lives in our home town - had commented that everywhere she went around the town she received condolences and sympathetic comments. And as annoying as this may be, there is a comfort on the shared knowledge of your grief, a sense that the community is grieving for you and will in a way take care of you. Within hours of mum's death she had people visiting with plates of sandwiches and offers to help clean windows and tidy around the driveway. People rally around you in a small community, confident you will pay it forward in the future.
Standing in that queue holding the bottle of wine, I kept thinking, 'my mother died today...that's massive really...I mean, my MOTHER died today - MUM! - who gave birth to me, and I'm standing in a queue in the Co-Op...!' I handed over my card with a fixed smile. The unreality of death is even more surreal when you are the only one who knows about it.
I hadn't seen my family in four years and to be honest had fallen out with some of them over that time. I was worried about what sort of reception I would receive from them. I vowed to be stoic and aloof, if not exactly frosty; I would embrace them but would remain at a distance, hurtful words can't be taken back and not even my mother's death could change that.
Within seconds of arriving back home all this nonsense fell away as I and my children were subsumed into the bosom of my family, together again and without tension, just unified in our blood, loss and memories. Oh how I loved them all and how petty I felt for the three odd years of silence.
When you live abroad without support, you start to see yourselves as a self-sufficient unit, without any need for extended family or any connection with home. You read the local news from time to time, but with a sense of distance; the places seem exotic and far removed from your day to day reality. You begin to think none of it matters any more.
I had even started to think I would never again live in Ireland, that our Irish identity was some silly romantic notion with no basis in reality. My kids' accents are a strange hybrid of Brit, Aussie and mid-Atlantic drawl, with little to hint at an Irish background. They don't know the Irish language, or GAA, and apart from a spattering of Irishisms such as 'ya feckin' eygit' and the Mayo jerseys they wear everywhere, there's little to hint we're Irish at all.
I didn't see this as sad, I saw it simply as the reality of living abroad but within hours of our arrival, as the children were swallowed up by cousins and uncles and aunts, all eager for hugs and questions about their travels, I realised that this can't be bought or substituted. Yes we can try; we can surround ourselves with good friends, but nothing can replace a group of people who knew you when you were small, laughed at you when you had a bad perm, who remember the time you fell over on the stage during a ballet show when you were three. Even as we sat around mum's coffin* with guitars, drinks and laughter, we snorted that mum would have hated all the noise, and would have insisted we move it into another room.
(*In Ireland we take the body home for a night or so to wake it...not as bad as it sounds!).
There is a comfort to the Irish grieving process, something I never fully understood until now. There is a pattern, a process, which removes all thought for a while, providing you with something to do with your hands, your body, your mind. The rhythmical comforting beat of, 'I'm sorry for your loss, I'm sorry for your loss,' as the congregation line up to shake your hand at the front of the church, before moving on to the next family member. You look at them and struggle for the name...'Oh it's you...I didn't recognize you!' you think, as they disappear down the line and the next person grabs your hand.
So mum is gone now, although in reality she's been gone for some time. The closing years of her life were deeply unfair to her, a woman who loved gossip and fags and cups of tea, dementia left her a human rag, bereft of speech or spark or interest, just a frightened old lady who had a permanent look of fear which said, 'what the hell happened to me?' We couldn't answer her because we didn't know either.
Dementia is a cruel and spiteful illness, robbing everyone in its path. All traces of my mother's personality had slowly dripped away over fifteen years or so; the kindness, the warmth, the humour, leaving her selfish and frightened, a stranger to herself and to us. Although, as the priest said during his wonderful eulogy at her funeral mass, while mum might have forgotten why she loved us during her final years, we never forgot why we loved her. He was so right.
I will recall her as the warm and loving mum who never left me in doubt of my importance in this world, who smothered, spoiled and fattened me with love. The mother who taught me to ride a bicycle - running along behind me - and who sang hymns to me at bedtime because she didn't like reading stories; whose face, on my first day of school, stared anxiously through the glass diamond in the door, as I wept on my teacher's knee. The woman who followed me to the shops - dodging behind trees all the way - on my first excursion out 'alone'.
I'll remember her as the mother who loved her family with the ferocity of a mother lion, caring for her cubs and her man, and who would have absolutely adored the little brood of characters I'm now raising. And although she didn't know them, nor they her, she's with us in this house every single day. She's present in my thoughts and words and actions - in my 'posh' phone-answering voice and my no-nonsense approach when it comes to my children. In my daughter's forthrightness and startling physical strength, and in her beautiful, lilting singing voice. She's present in my son's occasional self-doubt and earnestness, and in my five-year-old's head of dark curls, passing along through the generations.
She's with me now.
