5 February 2021.
I was chatting to Keara.
We feel confused, sad and a little isolated in a sense, with the deteriorating news of Nana’s condition over in Donegal in Ireland.
It’s not just the distance of isolation, which we’re used to overcoming.
It’s the era we’re in today.
Not being able to join Dad and his brothers and sisters – our big, very big family reunited en masse – not happening thanks to a virus from a bat in a corner of China.
Life is odd all over again, in a different way to our last Donegal days together in Mum’s fading days in October 2019.
If God was a software programmer, I’m quite certain that one of the logic weaknesses in his java script might be the snips dealing with processing emotions around death.
How we process someone being there one day, and gone the next.
An empty chair, and conversations and hugs and kisses turn from live in 3D, to a memory.
And the confusion that you are left in, knowing you’re not getting that again.
I just don’t know how to think about that. Do you?
It’s a jumble of feelings in a jigsaw of confusion.
It’s different from “loss”, it’s more “hang on, what just happened”…perhaps because our heads hang on patterns.
I am picturing Nana in the hospital bed, frail all the more, ashen I fear. Pulling at aching breaths.
And I think to Mum then too.
A blend of images, though with poor Mum so much younger in my mind. Mum’s life was dissolved more quickly into the frailty of cancer. A slap of brutally accelerated time.
If I am confused in thinking through death again, then putting on the shoes of empathy with Dad is…well, it’s out of reach.
But this is life, we know. It’s obvious, it plays out this way for all of us.
And I know so many who have had the record of life played worse than we have.
As I said in short speech at the gathering following Mum’s funeral, all we can do – in some way – is take the dark days as rich days. The emotions and confusion painting dark but vibrant colors where being alive has more to it than the a quiet ‘regular’ day taken for granted.
So, here is what I wrote on learning of Nana’s death, to our ‘N and Ns’ cousins Whatsapp group :)*
*hat tip to Uncle Manus: so creative, the name, the initiative! to pull us together this way…
—
I had to jot some of my memories of Nana.
Nana has been the mother at the top of the tree of our family through seven decades, marrying young and having eight children.
What a thread across generations, a voyeur of times enormously changed. It’s the end of an era, and you can feel it.
Sipping a glass of wine, deliberately paired to take all this in, I drifted into some early memories…
I picture the thick head of fading red hair in my very first memories of standing on a golf tee, down in Ballina.
And then can see myself on the putting green with Nana too. Or, no doubt we were on the putting green first. Nana was wearing green, and looked athletic and elegant at the same time.
And then I get the smell of scones in the back room and kitchen in Ballina, clashing with odours of wet soil and grass as you opened the door of the kitchen to the rising garden behind.
Grandad would sit in the corner reading a paper, a smile in tight lips, a smirk in the line-of-sight from the upper edge of reading glasses…across the top of the stiffly-held newspaper…to your respectful stare back.
I can picture the thickness of the butter on the scone.
And then the front room there in Ballina, a quiet solace full of crystal, trophies and glassware and portraits and a view. I would sit there and read, to take a break from playing with Pete, and the inquisitive conversations with Grandad, and eating.
I remember the closet in the hallway for some reason. I think we’d hide in it. Or was it just that you’d open it and there was not much to picture? Except playing with toy soldiers in its dimness once, bought from a small shop down in Ballina after Mass.
The bathroom at the top of the stairs had a light damp smell to it, and Fergus’ door was always closed across from there. I would open Uncle Fergus’ door and had a curious look around once. I remember feeling it odd that Fergus was an Uncle, because he didn’t feel old. And he had a guitar amplifier in there, I’m quite sure. There was admiration.
I was homesick one year, when Pete and I were in Ballina while Mum was in labor with Keara. And another summer I remember missing my second girlfriend called Tessa – in the dark heaviness of the back spare room – and listening to Elton John on my Sony Walkman with headphones on in the soft-mattressed bed to indulge in the missing. That would have been the summer of 1988 or 1989.
I don’t remember ever opening the door to Nana and Grandpa’s bedroom. Funny that.
Nana took me to a dance one night.
Me and her. 60 and 13?
Taught me the waltz. I remember gazing on her feet for a whole song, the odd feeling of Nana leading and being “the man”. And, enjoying the lilting geometry of her movement, making triangles with our feet. Years later, on London dance floors to nightclub music (!), a flashbulb memory of those triangles would appear in my drunken feet moving, faster 🙂 The snap of memory would be momentarily cherished, like all good snapshot memories.
I remember Grandpa teaching me to fish on the river bank of the Moy behind the Ballina town centre. And how I would always enjoy the long walk into town. I remember being stung by a bee, running my hands along the walls on the way into town.
And, one summer’s night, I remember playing with cousin Liam out front, and the cigarettes coming out. (Coming out of Liam, to be clear).
That was my first, out there in front across from the driveway, behind a pile of something.
In more recent years, it’s special to have the memories of one Christmas after another where I worried it might be the last. Nana getting stiffer – more worrisome for us – getting out of the car. Her one wrist helping lift the other to bring another sip of white wine to her lips.
Our sparring on bachelordom.
Nana’s wisdom and advice and hope, against my listless updates. Standing alone in the dock, accused of hedonism and lacking responsibility. And always feeling weak in my defense. Because part of me agreed with her. The routine enquiry in our last conversation ran against trend, which feels nice now that Nana is fading from us.
From somewhere, supportive and patient words came out of Nana in a mood that was positive and energetic. For her years and frailty, Nana had a wonderful color that October day, even though her eyes were deeper set than ever.
On the topic of being late single, I’ll take it that Nana was probably right all along, and definitely all along in her mind. For all the rounds of sparring, Nana’s absoluteness always made me think. But, I’m absolute too 🙂
I am happy to remember her that way, and I’ll keep reporting back on progress.
For all the Donegal times, it is those Ballina years, where Nana and her scones and salmon and smile and hugs, and swathe of red hair, were the fullest picture of a grandmother you respected and adored. And her love for us was always clear.
Donegal will feel so different now, with any empty house in The Glebe.
But I feel more grateful for Donegal tonight than at any time before. How lucky are we – how lucky I feel – to be of this huge family that Nana started.
We’ll have good days yet ahead.
—
Nana passed away three days later on Monday 8 February.
