In memory of my mother – Frank McNally on a painful epiphany

I don’t believe in an interventionist God, as Nick Cave sang. But my late mother did and spent much of her life petitioning Him.

After becoming a widow in 1995, she and her prayerbook took over my father’s old power seat in the corner of the kitchen, beside the press where for decades he kept a cube-shaped biscuit tin full of pension applications and other forms a Fianna Fáil county councillor was always being asked to fill in.

In a way, as I joked in her funeral eulogy, my mother took over his role of public representative. Except that she was interceding with no mere local authority. It was widely believed in our neighbourhood that she had a direct line to ultimate power.

Those with problems often subcontracted their own prayer jobs out to her, although she usually didn’t need to be asked.

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In memory of my mother – Frank McNally on a painful epiphany

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She was a compassionate woman, easily moved by the plight of others. This also made her a soft touch for charities of all kinds.

My mother and I had a troubled relationship, alas. The teenage me disappointed her and she disappointed him back. I never doubted her love. But by the time I left home, there was a damaged distance between us we never completely bridged afterwards.

It was partly the religion. I couldn’t pretend to believe what she did and she couldn’t accept my scepticism.

I know it pained her, but it pained me too that she invested so much faith and energy in something I feared was an illusion.

This made for a dilemma when I was asked to give the eulogy. I says “asked”, but actually I was ordered to give it by my sisters (there are five of them and you don’t say no to those women). So I eulogised away, erring for the day on the side of my mother’s beliefs. It was her funeral, after all.

Altitude was a running theme. I recalled that she had born in a townland whose name translates as “the hill of the saints”. But that, through marriage, it had been her fate to come down in the world – physically (her new home was nearer sea level) and in other ways (she got mixed up with Fianna Fáil).

Now she had now gone back in the direction she came from, I concluded. And I hoped that, hereafter, we would all have a friend in high places. It was a bit corny, perhaps, but sincere in its own way.

I never got around to crying at her death, somehow. Maybe it was the excitement of the wake, which had a couple of thousand people visiting the house over 48 hours.

Or perhaps I just postponed grieving. That might explain why, even today, I still occasionally have the guilty thought that I should ring my mother and find out who’s dead. Then I remember she’s been dead herself for 13 years.

Anyway, there I was reading my Irish Times last Saturday when I saw that Q & A with Áine Kerr, “entrepreneur, broadcaster, journalist” and newly appointed chair of Gaisce, the President’s Award.

And, well, the funny thing is, that along with being an entrepreneur, broadcaster, journalist, and chair of Gaisce, Áine also happens to be my niece.

Years ago, when she was still a schoolteacher, she sought my advice on getting into journalism. As usual, I felt inadequate to answer, because my own path was so long-drawn-out, I couldn’t honestly recommend it.

But Áine didn’t need advice really. She went on to achieve great success in a succession of jobs by being (a) very smart and (b) working like a dog. I’m in awe of her these days. And because she’s too busy ever to meet me for coffee, I catch up with her mainly though the papers.

So the Q & A was like reading about a public person. Until it came to the question: “What do you expect to happen when you die?”

To which Áine responded: “Feel a sense of reconnecting with my Granny McNally who embodied the sense of kindness and goodness I can only ever aspire to.”

She went on to say that at the funeral, “I put a note in her coffin saying I’d try to do good things in her name.” Then she added: “On the days I feel overwhelmed, I imagine her saying a prayer one very slow delayed beat behind the priest. That long beat always made me giggle in church ... my Gran always had the last word.”

Well, you don’t expect to read about your mother in The Irish Times. And that detail about her praying technique – true but long forgotten – hit my hard.

Suffice to say, last Saturday in a Dublin café, the thing about me not crying at her funeral was embarrassingly redressed.

I don’t know where my mother is now. I still can’t quite believe in an afterlife where we meet again. But Áine’s piece was a reminder that people live on in the lives of those who knew them, at least. And that, whatever about the Gods they prayed to for success or consolation, the beloved dead themselves still have great powers of intervention.