It was dark when I finally got to the house. When I saw all the cars parked on both sides of the road down past Malones, my mother’s death suddenly started to sink in.
Mass cards stood alongside the Christmas cards on the sideboard and the mantelpiece over the fireplace. Candles were burning on a small table and wax was already congealing on the white tablecloth. The unmistakable smell of burning wax took me back to those benediction evenings when I was a homesick boarder at St Mel’s College.
And now I was accepting condolences and shaking hands with former neighbours and relatives that I scarcely knew. Cups of tea and coffee and plates of sandwiches were brought in from the kitchen and passed around.
Everyone was remarking on what a great woman she was and what a shock that she could go so suddenly, and so soon after Christmas. And until dawn, we would take turns at sitting in the room with her so as not to leave her alone in the room.
I stood beside her coffin and touched her hand. She looked as if she’d retreated and sunk further into herself, and her skin was so cold. She was wearing her favourite outfit. It was a purple two-piece suit with a silver brooch. She had a weakness for brooches. And, of course, almost inevitably, rosary beads had been threaded through her fingers to give the impression she was praying, only of course she wasn’t.
The undertaker from over Granard way would arrive the next morning. He called me aside and quietly asked for some Fairy Liquid so that he might ease off the gold band that she’d worn for more than 50 years before he could screw down the lid of the coffin.
After he was done, my brothers and I helped him carefully carry her coffin out to his hearse, which would take her to the chapel in Finea, just a mile up the road from the house where she grew up.
For a woman who struggled for most of her life to rear 10 children with meagre resources, her final few years were cruel and overshadowed by our father’s ailing health. Of course, she wasn’t one to complain. Her generation never did.
