Old age came to her with grace and dignity, and she had the innate ability to gently correct and pass on her wisdom without insulting the recipient. Once in a reflective moment she told me, ‘I regret now that I mourned Connie for so long.’ This remark about my little brother who had died aged six surprised me and on further discussion she told me that she now felt that she had got bogged down in grief, and that that was a big mistake. ‘Grief can suck the life out of you,’ she said, and once you have grieved for a certain amount of time she thought that you must make a big effort ‘to try to go forward because you can’t live your life looking backwards.’ The years had brought her tranquility and acceptance of his death. Later I read similar thoughts in the words of Cardinal Basil Hume when he said that ‘Grief will yield to peace – in time.’

  Having pondered on the suddenness of my father’s death, she smiled when I assured her, ‘If Dad was confined to bed for any length of time he would have eaten a hole out through the wall.’ She herself, however, was confined to bed for two years as the result of a stroke before she died. It seemed a harsh end for someone who had moved gently and calmly through life. It makes one wonder about the biblical quote: ‘As a man lives so shall he die’ – my father got out fast, she took it slowly.

  Those years after the stroke were difficult. My mother became the cared for, instead of the carer. Caring for the elderly at home is a demanding and energy-draining business and though we rotated the caring, the one who really bore the brunt of it was my sister, Phil, who proved to have sterling qualities in the field. We all went through periods of frustration and exhaustion but Phil kept us all focused and we coped because our mother would have been unhappy in any place other than her beloved Lisdangan. She who had done so much for all of us deserved that. Then, early one August morning, she closed her eyes quietly and said goodbye to the home where for decades she had been the heartbeat.

  I have never had the experience of having to fly home for a parent’s funeral but I imagine that it must be fairly difficult. By the time my sister, Ellen, flew in from Toronto our mother’s coffin was already in the church. Ellen and I went directly there from the airport and sat beside our mother for a long time; it was then I discovered that time to absorb the reality of death is very important. Then, very softly, Ellen began to sing one of our mother’s favourite hymns and together we sang many of the hymns that we had grown up with and that would have been part of our mother’s life. It was strangely comforting; I feel there is great healing in music and song. Later that day we sang them again at her funeral Mass in the church where she had been baptised, received her First Holy Communion and was married. Her journey was complete. She was laid to rest with my father and Connie.

  Afterwards we walked around the graveyard and chatted with our friends and neighbours. Taking time to visit the surrounding graves on the occasion of a family funeral in some way links the past with the present and makes us aware that we are part of a long chain of unfolding events. Old graveyards tell our story and the Taylor headstones in that graveyard date back to 1670. There are surprises too that comfort us at these times: I was pleasantly surprised to meet a friend from Innishannon who had never met my mother but years previously had actually painted her portrait. He had seen her photograph on the piano in our house and later had painted her from his memory of the photograph. It touched and comforted me that he had travelled so many miles to her funeral. It’s the unexpected acts of kindness that help at such a time. Now he said: ‘Having painted her, even though we never met, I felt that I knew her. She had a great face.’

  Her going left a gentle sadness and a feeling that home would not be home anymore. She had a long and contented life and died at harvest time when the corn was ripe. She left in us all a love of gardening and in me an inability to face a mug first thing in the morning. And beside my kitchen sink I have a little tin green soap dish with a pink flower on the cover – it had been part of her bedroom set for visitors. It is nice to remember those we have loved and who have loved us in the use of things they valued in life.

  Chapter 6

  The Listener

  The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

  Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel

  William Shakespeare

  In life we all need a listener. Con was a good listener. He was also my ‘Johnny sound all’ in that if I was undecided on a course of action I ran it past him and he invariably sorted me out, mainly, I think, because he was totally non-judgemental and fair-minded and always delivered a balanced and well-thought-out opinion. We were of the same family tree in that our great-grandmothers were sisters, and this was the reason that he came to our house.

  As a newly qualified maths and science teacher he got a job in St Brogan’s school in nearby Bandon. On hearing this an old neighbour of his told him, ‘There is one of the Taylors married up there so call in and she will look after you.’ And that is exactly what happened – only instead of us looking after him, he looked after us.

  By an odd coincidence Con had been born the year that my brother, Connie, had died and in some strange way when he came into my life he filled the shoes of the brother I had lost as a child.

  The initial arrangement was that he would stay for a week until he found a more convenient place in Bandon – but he stayed for almost thirty years and became one of us. At the time we had a summer guesthouse and over winter we had three young girls who were teaching in local schools staying with us. It was a busy household, with staff from our adjoining shop sharing our kitchen table too, and neighbours coming and going. My husband, Gabriel, was part of everything that moved in the parish so ad-hoc meetings were often held at our kitchen table or in the ‘seomra ciúin’ – the ‘quiet room’, as we called one of the front rooms which was devoid of TV and telephone. We had four small boys who added to the general mayhem, but Con, in his calm, quiet way, introduced an oasis of tranquility into our busy household.

  Then one day a swarm of bees found their way into the garden and so Con became a beekeeper. A range of hives soon stood in a row against the wall of an old hall at the top of our large garden. This old hall had once been a Wesleyian preaching hall and now its ivy clad, south-facing stone wall provided a sheltering backdrop for the hives. Con had the perfect temperament for a beekeeper in that he was patient, fastidious and had a delicate touch. During his long summer holidays he turned the back porch into a carpentry shop and made his own hives with painstaking precision. At extraction time, he gloried in the different shades of honey produced from clover, whitethorn and the other wild flowers that provided the nectar for honey of varying colours. After he had supplied all and sundry, his honey was sold in the shop and demand always outran supply.

  The same happened with the lettuces that he grew in a polytunnel at the top of the garden. He and Uncle Jacky, who lived next door and was a wonderful gardener, had long discussions in the garden about compost; and Jacky’s wife, Aunty Peg, and Con often shared a quiet drink in her little sitting room behind the shop. He was with us during the long months of home nursing that preceded both their deaths and his understanding stretched to encompass the idiosyncrasies of Peg’s sister, Aunty Min, who also lived out her last days with us – when she insisted on turning off the TV during an All-Ireland final so that everyone could focus properly on the meal she had made, he was the one who prevented war from breaking out. He was in the kitchen too when the shock announcement came of my brother-in-law Bill’s death and again when the phone call about Uncle Jacky’s death came from Dun Laoghaire. Con was part of the family scaffolding that held us all together.

  Aunty Peg always regretted the fact that we had no girl in the family so when after her death I became pregnant and a little girl duly arrived I felt that she was sent by Aunty Peg. After four boys it was great for Gabriel to have a daughter! Con became a foster parent and over the years the two of them were inseparable. She was christened Lena Síle Mairéad after her two grandmothers and Aunty Peg, but Con always called her Lindy – and as soon as she could talk he became Condy. They had a very special relationship.

  He was a great craftsman, especially in wood. When Lena was able to grasp the idea of Santa, he made her a fine big doll’s house that provided years of play; he showed it to me on the morning of that Christmas Eve when he and I went to an old cottage he was restoring outside the village where he put the finishing touches to it – it was many years before she discovered that Con was the Santa who had crafted her wonderful doll’s house. Then when our kitchen table, which I had inherited from my sister, Theresa, began to fall asunder he made us a solid wooden table that defied the assault of stampeding teenagers.

  He and Lena often went to the seaside when she could just waddle into the water and as she grew older he took her book shopping, and they shared a deep interest in the Titanic, which led to the buying of many books on the subject.

  He loved books. Fine, well-bound books were his one big extravagance in life and I enjoyed buying books with him as it was an exercise in sheer self-indulgence in one who was by nature very restrained. First, of course, the book had to be on a chosen subject, but that could be anything from ancient European history to astrology, so wide were his interests. He would open up the book and examine the binding; the stitching had to be perfect – glued books were dismissed on the spot. Then he examined the quality of the paper and he ran his finger along its spine and finally he smelt its interior. It was almost as serious an undertaking as buying a horse.

  When Lena took up horse-riding he ferried her back and forth to the stables and never objected when on the eve of a competition he had to watch television surrounded by smelly tackle as she polished it around his feet – her brothers had no such tolerance and threatened her with eviction, but Con backed her up, and if things were the other way she was always in his corner. During her secondary school years he dropped her off at her convent school on his way to St Brogan’s. They chose her school subjects together and decided on her university course. Two of the boys went to his school and as they all grew up he was the peace-maker who often sorted out family squabbles. Gabriel and he were bridge partners and sometimes held bridge sessions in the seomra ciúin. Later, my sister, Ellen, decided to join them when she first came to over-winter in Innishannon to avoid the harsh Canadian climate.

  It was on her arrival for Christmas one year that Con had what we considered a bad ’flu, but as he was on school holidays he could take it easy and we were not unduly worried. But Ellen, who was a nurse, insisted on a visit to the doctor, who sent him to the hospital for tests. We thought it was routine, but when we were summoned to meet the consultant it sent shock waves through the house.

  Con’s brother, Fr Denis, who is also a doctor, came from Dublin and together with Con we met the consultant in a little office down the corridor from Con’s room. He imparted a death sentence. The news was devastating. There was no question of the reprieve of an operation and the time was short. It was a bolt from the blue and we were shattered. Out in the corridor a doctor from the hospice waited to talk and offer hospice care, but Con opted to come home.

  Denis and I drove back to Innishannon in stunned silence and Ellen was waiting for us in the kitchen. Our faces told the story. Gabriel came in and we all discussed how best to make things as easy as possible. Denis being a doctor and Ellen a nurse, we had the medical know-how to take care of Con at home. We also needed a shower off his bedroom, and his friend Liam, who taught with him in Brogan’s, began to fit it that very evening.

  Telling Lena was a terrible ordeal. All her life, he had been her friend and mentor and was, in many ways, like a third parent. She loved him as much as she did Gabriel and myself. At the time she was a first-year student in University College Cork, his old university, which is beside the hospital, so she was able to be with him during those early days. Con was one of five brothers, who, like Con, are wise, gentle people. Two of them are Redemptorist priests – Fr Denis and Fr Pat – and over the years they had often visited and now were coming for Christmas. Ellen, Lena and I got the house ready for Christmas in the usual way – we wanted Con when he came home to find it no different from other years. So he came back to a house with the crib, the tree, and candles waiting to be lit. He sat by the fire in the seomra ciúin, his usual calm self, and his close friends from St Brogan’s came to visit him there.

  On Christmas Eve we all gathered around to light the Christmas candle and as usual we sang ‘Silent Night’. It could have been an ordinary Christmas. But it was not. We were all aware that this was Con’s last one with us. We tried to be as normal as possible because the last thing that Con would have wanted was drama. But inside all of us our hearts were bleeding. We knew that we were balancing on top of an emotional precipice. That night Denis and Pat said the midnight Mass in our village church up the hill and the word quickly got around as to why they were here. It was a night filled with grief, grace and spirituality.

  On Christmas morning Denis and Pat celebrated Mass in the kitchen and Con did one of the readings. It was a beautiful but heart-wrenching occasion when pain opened crevices in the mind and made it impossible to block our thoughts of things to come. Later, during the dinner, Con was able to take part in all that was going on and that night he held his own in our usual card game of A Hundred and Ten. You could almost convince yourself that maybe we might still have time. I got it into my head that as May was Con’s favourite month he would be there for the beginning of the bee-keeping year.

  After Christmas, Denis returned to Dublin to make arrangements to come longterm to Innishannon – but there was to be no longterm in it. The following morning Con’s breathing became problematic and he was rushed to hospital. His brothers returned and a bedside vigil began. It lasted just a few days and on the night he eased slowly out of our world Denis quietly stood by his bed and said this beautiful and meaningful death prayer:

  Go Forth, O Human Soul

  Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!

  Saints of God, come to his aid!

  Come to meet him angels of the Lord.

  Go forth upon thy journey, O faithful Christian soul,

  Go forth from this world; from your family, your friends, your home.

  In the name of God the Father who created you and gave you life,

  In the name of Jesus the Son of Mary who gave his life for you,

  In the name of the Holy Spirit of God who was poured into your heart.

  May your home this day be in paradise with the angels and saints

  And with your own people who have gone before you on the great journey.

  May you see the face of the living God.

  May you have the fullness of life and peace for ever.

  May Jesus the gentle shepherd number you among the faithful ones

  And bring you to the waters of peace.

  May you have eternal rest.

  Amen.

  It was all over. Con died as he had lived, with the minimum of fuss. The undertaker from his home village came and prepared him for the journey back from Cork to Innishannon. Just before dawn Denis and I followed the hearse out the now deserted road and Gabriel had the front door open in readiness to receive him. We placed his coffin in the corner where over the years he had played chess with Lena, corrected school examination papers and had done the Irish Times crossword.

  Some of our near neighbours gathered in. We knelt and said the rosary. The rosary at such a time is a calming, unifying prayer and its repetitive nature acts as a mantra to soothe the spirit. In the presence of death, words are meaningless and silence comes naturally in moments of deep sorrow.

  But the following day the room filled with talk and that too had its place as his teaching friends and neighbours from his home village gathered. It had all happened so quickly that most of his fellow teachers and his pupils were taken completely unawares. His young students, who had parted with him for the Christmas holidays, now looked into his coffin with stricken faces. Death takes us all by surprise, but most of all the young. That night as the lid went on his coffin sobbing filled the room. My heart bled for Lena.

  His pupils formed a guard of honour as his brothers and then our boys carried his coffin up the hill behind the house to the waiting hearse. It was a cold, starry January night as we followed it along the road back through Macroom and Carrianimma to the village of Boherbue where he had grown up. The following morning after Mass said by his brothers, he was laid to rest beside his parents. Our great-grandmothers had brought us together and over the years he had enriched our home with many blessings.

  When we came home that night and walked in the back door I looked at all of Con’s unused medicines that were stacked away neatly on a small table in the corner of the back porch. A blind rage filled me at the uselessness of all these little boxes. I threw them on the floor, crying with frustration and temper. I picked them up and banged them down on the table with venom. What a lot of useless rubbish they had proved to be! My anger had come like a burst dam. Then slowly it drained off. I sat down, exhausted, and cried for a long time.

  The days after a funeral are brutal. You are like someone after major surgery where all your insides have been carved up. Our coping skills are non-existent and it seems impossible to find the healing road. It is good then to have understanding, loving people around us – God save us from the ‘know alls’ who think that they have the answers, and the ‘wet blankets’ who just want to drown us in their own sorrows. We need a listener. Ellen and I talked for hours.

  My sister, Phil, came and brought my mother’s sewing machine. It may seem like an odd thing to do, but in some strange way it helped. We sewed together in the warm kitchen. In grief you are somehow perpetually cold. Then Phil dragged me out into the garden where we dug and pruned, and where initially I just felt like lying down on the bare earth and crying. After days of pruning I looked around at the barren garden and thought: you are just like me, cut to the bone.

 

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