And Time Stood Still, page 9
Scaffolding
When I am gone
And you who
Go through my things
Are left to sort,
Look kindly on
What I leave behind:
Jugs, pictures, books
And my beloved garden.
Maybe nothing valuable
In worldly eyes
But these are
The remnants of a life
That was filled
With beautiful moments,
And these things
Were the scaffolding.
Take them gently now
And lay them
Where they will
Be best loved.
Chapter 13
A Restless Spirit
After her sister Peg’s death, Aunty Min became a regular visitor to our home. I was never quite sure whether I was an inadequate host or if Min was a demanding visitor, but wherever the fault lay, our house never quite measured up to her expectations. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that a husband and teenage children had never disrupted her own lifestyle. She had always been totally independent, never experiencing the restrictions of family life.
At the time we had four teenage boys and Aunty Min had no reason to know that teenagers leave the human race once they enter that zone and return only when their parents have served a long term of endurance. She was under the illusion that she could transform them into paragons of virtue, an ambition that I had long since abandoned. She regularly informed me that they were bad-mannered, badly trained and badly behaved. I had no magic formula to change them, but Aunty Min was convinced that she had, which led to an ongoing clash of opinions between her and the young males jumping with teenage hormones. Even our little girl, who insisted on taking her favourite doll to visit Aunty Min’s bedroom, was smartly evicted.
Aunty Min was a superb cook and every year, once the tourist season began, she would take up a position at a different hotel where she cooked incredible meals. Once established in the kitchen, and having made herself indispensable to the running of the hotel, she then proceeded to lock horns with the various managers. She was convinced that she knew more about the hotel business than any manager, which did not contribute to ideal industrial relations. The result was that at the end of the season she left in a blaze of recrimination, swearing never to return, and the exhausted management breathed a sigh of relief. The following year she moved into another hotel where the same saga re-enacted itself all over again, but because she was so good at her job she was always in demand.
Once she had retired from the hotel scene and began visiting us, she took over the kitchen, which suited me fine, but her belief that cooking was central to the wellbeing of the universe often brought her into conflict with our brood. As far as Aunty Min was concerned, once a meal was on the table it took precedence over all other activities – even All-Ireland finals! This was in a house where the GAA was a second religion and it sometimes caused mayhem. One year Gabriel and I had gone to Croke Park taking some of the younger ones and leaving the others at home with Con, who lived with us, and just as the game began Aunty Min promptly turned off the TV and insisted that her perfectly cooked meal must be savoured there and then! Con did his best to maintain peace, but that night we came home to a revolution – and Aunty Min, in protest, was on the bus back to Cork the following morning declaring us to be an unappreciative lot.
Even when she was in the full of her health she was a hypochondriac and this condition accelerated as the years went on. Her handbag was like a mobile pharmacy where pills she had exchanged with her friends and out-of-date medicines accumulated.
Eventually, Aunty Min came to stay permanently. No longer well enough to live alone in her house in Cork, she moved to Innishannon. Her doctor had told us that her heart was in very poor condition and she had other medical complications. At the beginning she reigned supreme in the kitchen, but slowly she deteriorated and withdrew to her bedroom. In order to keep a constant eye on her, we gave her a bedroom beside the kitchen. She hated being confined to bed, so I gave her a big brass bell that she could ring when she needed anything. And it rang non-stop! Poor Aunty Min had always been a restless spirit and now that she was stuck in one place she found it very restrictive, and, unlike Aunty Peg, she was not an easy patient. She felt the cold intensely and despite having an electric blanket and a heater on full-blast, she constantly wanted her hot-water bottle refilled with hotter water. One of the boys found his own solution and would come outside the door, hold the boiling-hot bottle for a few minutes, and then go back in pretending that he had refilled it! Some days, after hours of bell ringing, I would come into the kitchen and grasp the taps of the sink and tell myself: Alice, you had better laugh because if you don’t you’ll cry. On the shelf above the sink was a little verse called ‘Don’t Quit’ and when I was at the end of my tether I would read it and somehow it always keep me going. Caring for an old person at home can be a test of endurance and the only people who think that it is no bother are those who never did it!
Then, quite suddenly, it all came to an abrupt end. Going into her room late one Good Friday evening I sensed a sudden change: a certain quietness had descended. There was no more bell ringing and that night we sat up with her while she slowly went into a coma. Early on Easter Sunday morning she slipped quietly away. Her restless spirit was at last at peace.
Now at family celebrations I remember Aunty Min. As a wedding present she gave us a cream-coloured gilt-edged dinner service, comprising numerous plates, serving bowls and casserole dishes, and when the extended family gathers together for special occasions, out comes Aunty Min’s dinner service. As the creation of beautiful meals was one of the few things that brought joy to her life, it is fitting that she who loved food should be remembered at the table. Thank you, Aunty Min!
The
Unexpected
Chapter 14
The Motivator
The man with the violin edged his way unobtrusively through the mourners until he reached the foot of Steve’s coffin. There he slowly eased the violin from under his arm, lifted the bow and a gentle wave of haunting notes enshrouded Steve and cast a silencing veil over the entire gathering. Steve McDonagh, who had founded Brandon Books and driven it on with vision and enthusiasm, had been suddenly whisked out of all our lives. We had gathered to say farewell.
There were no reverends in black albs and white surplices, and Steve did not seem to belong in these confined quarters. But the gentle notes of the violinist opened gates into fields of unploughed spirituality and this beautiful requiem bore the spirit of Steve above and beyond the edges of our human limitations. The music encompassed liturgy, prayers and ritual, a fitting swan-song for a man who had always reached above and beyond the mundane procedures of the expected.
Later that evening as my daughter, Lena, and I drove home through the gathering dusk between the beautiful Kerry mountains where Steve had chosen to live and set up Brandon Books, I thought back over the many years that we had worked together.
Twenty-four years earlier, in the spring of 1987, I had sent him the manuscript of To School through the Fields. I had assumed because of the name Brandon, and as it was based in Kerry, that I would be dealing with a Kerryman. But after the first two sentences on the phone with Steve I knew that this was no Kerryman; he sounded more like some unusual Irish-English mix. During that first conversation, I wondered how come he was running a publishing business from the depths of Dingle. I was to discover that he had immersed himself in the heritage and traditions of Dingle, especially the annual Wren Day, which was the highlight of his year.
As a result of his phone call we arranged to meet for lunch the following day. I encountered an affable, bearded, six-footer, and he subsequently told me that he had been expecting a shawled Peig Sayers! At the time I was probably lacking a few years and stiff limbs to fit that picture, but I am catching up fast!
On that day it was obvious that he was pleased with my manuscript and I came home on winged feet because having your first manuscript accepted by a publisher is a heady experience. Steve had given me instructions for more detail and extra chapters. This posed no problem and so during that summer, when the demands of work and a busy household had been attended to, I would sneak up to the attic and carry out his instructions. I posted the manuscript back to him in the autumn.
The publishing of To School set us on a journey and over the following years Brandon published fifteen more of my books. Steve was a merciless and superb editor. I got away with nothing. His constant refrain was, ‘Do not part with your manuscript until you are completely satisfied and it is as good as it can be.’ Pursuit of excellence was his goal and Steve would hack my material back to the bone and the result would sometimes lead to a mini war between us! During one of these conflicts I sent him a poem entitled ‘The Verbal Butcher’, which caused him great amusement.
I enjoyed working with Steve, and over the years writing and publishing with Brandon never lost its sense of challenge and enjoyment. Steve was Brandon. He edited, published and did the publicity. On one of his first visits to our house, he dragged Gabriel and myself out into the garden to take a photograph. My garden at the time was an overgrown wilderness, complete with goalposts and dogs. Steve looked around in dismay and enquired acidly, ‘Is there any corner here that looks like a garden?’ Many books and years later when I had caught the gardening bug, he stood and surveyed the now transformed garden and informed me, ‘When I came here first it was all about writing and no gardening, now it’s all gardening and no writing!’
But a visit from Steve would always change that and when he left after a day of tea and chat I was hooked on another project. He was a wonderful motivator and his enthusiasm was infectious. His vision was inspirational. We did not work to deadlines but to gentle nudges, and as one book followed another Steve became a great friend and part of our extended family. Sometimes when he came to visit, my son Mike would laughingly enquire, ‘Steve, did you come to rattle the bucket?’
Over the years we worked our way from non-fiction to fiction and poetry and back to non-fiction. At first we had no book launches, and then they took place in Dublin and Cork until we found our way back home to Innishannon, and the launches took place in our local art gallery, The Private Collector, where the entire village gathered. I loved the at-home launches and Steve was always on for an Innishannon launch where we had singing, music and fun.
That last night on our way home from the final farewell in Dingle, Lena, who had known Steve since she was a child, and I talked about his life and the gathering that had just taken place. She remarked that the general consensus of the people there was that Steve had enjoyed life. That, she decided, was how anyone would wish to be remembered.
Over the past two years I have worked on this book on bereavement which was to be published by Brandon, and just before his sudden death Steve had sent me his editorial notes which I was half-way through implementing when he died.
Epilogue
A Place Called Peace
You get used to being alone. At first every fibre of my being cried out in desolation at the loneliness, but gradually the spirit calms and strengthens. You quarry into your inner being. Our inner being is strong and deep. One of the spades to do this digging is creativity – our creativity is a pathway out of desolation into wholeness. Some of us see ourselves as not having a creative bone in our body but that is not so. We are a divine creation and I am convinced that in each one of us is a creative reservoir that sometimes goes untapped and in there is the healing well for many ills.
Some perceive creativity as being confined to the worlds of art, music and poetry, but creativity stretches across endless fields of human activities – cooking, wood turning, knitting, dressmaking, gardening, bee-keeping and countless other activities that engage our creative minds. These are the things that keep us human, rejuvenate us and renew our spirit.
Working with the earth was my greatest healer. During hours of digging, something calming and enriching seeps into the human spirit. It used to be one of life’s mysteries, but a recent experiment in a New York university has discovered that working with the earth actually releases a certain soil bacterium that seeps into the body, removes confusion from the mind and increases stamina. It probably explains how our ancestors on the land survived poverty, hardship and famine. They were close to the earth and the animal world and both are sustaining.
I recently talked to a farmer whose young wife had died of cancer and he told me, ‘The cows are comforting.’ I could understand exactly what he meant. There is something solid and stable about cows. They spell out endurance and earthiness. Death exposes our fragility and vulnerability and there is no comfort in artificiality and shallowness. We need the sustenance of real people and solid routine until we have regained our equilibrium. We also need silence to soothe the mind and slowly absorb and come to terms with what has happened.
I found that visiting the grave helped and afterwards I would call into the nearby church and sit quietly for long periods. There is deep healing in the calming stillness of a quiet place. In bereavement the deep recesses of the mind need to be calmed and rested – sometimes a quiet body leads to a quiet mind.
Another coping tool I discovered is a grief journal. In the morning when a black cloud clung me to my bed, I tried writing. I didn’t plan the writing, just let my pain flow onto the page. I kept a journal by the bed or under my pillow and used it early in the morning when the grief pain is deepest.
The act of writing
Eased my compressed pain
It poured off my pen
On to the open page.
Facing another day is a constant challenge. Simply dragging oneself out of bed is a huge effort. Straight into the shower first thing was a good start for me – not for cleansing but for stimulation! Having a shower sounds like a very mundane exercise, but it gets the blood in circulation and makes one feel like a member of the human race.
I tried to avoid the ‘if only’ or ‘should have’ cul-de-sac. That corner is strewn with regrets and the more we nurse them the bigger they get. One of them with which I struggled was the feeling that I should have been able to be more present to my loved ones in their final hours. Why did I not have the ability to be a greater comfort? Why did I not do this? Why did I not say that? The list was endless! But it was a futile exercise and if possible we should post a mental ‘no entry’ sign at that door!
Relaxation tapes helped me a lot when sleep refused to come or disappeared in the early hours. I accumulated a selection of tapes and CDs to ease the countless hours of tossing and turning. Walking helped as well. One of my friends told me ‘walking releases the happy hormones.’ She was right!
We should be good to ourselves in grief. In bereavement we are in intensive care, but we are both patient and nurse. Reflexology and massages, I found, kneaded out the knots of tension that are part of grieving. One of the most thoughtful gifts that I received when I was in a bad place was a lavender eye pillow. To lie down and put it over the eyes while listing to calming instrumental music soothes the soul – instrumental rather than vocal, as words can be intrusive.
A jug of fresh flowers on the kitchen table where our eye will constantly fall on them can be comforting too as colour affects our state of mind, so vibrant flowers can ease and nurture us.
Fresh Flowers
Give me a bunch
Of dew fresh flowers,
What if they will not last?
I cannot live in the future;
The present is all I ask.
A while back I took up meditation. When people hear of meditation they often think of enclosed orders and hermitages, but meditation has a place in the lives of ordinary Joe Soaps as well. It was part of a calmer lifestyle before the Celtic Tiger growled and ran us all into a stampede. Growing up in the country you spent a lot of time on your own, and meditation calms the turmoil of the mind in a similar way and leads to a more serene approach when facing the hurdles of life. Studies have shown that where a certain percentage of a population meditates, violent behaviour decreases. I found a book by John Maine that lays out the basic steps. Meditation, I discovered, is simple but not easy: Maine says that our minds are like trees full of chattering monkeys and in order to quieten them we need silence. Instead we often try shouting louder.
In the early days of grieving, the grief groove has to be ploughed and unfortunately we cannot run away from it. Grief has a long memory and like the snake in the grass can wait years to raise its remembering head. Maybe the grief that washed over England in the days following the death of Princess Diana was partly some of the suppressed grief for years of their own unmourned dead. Every nation has its own grief culture.
