Hanging with the Elephant (7 page)

Even at her funeral, I had felt unbearably sad without understanding why.

I stood by the graveside, realising that I could have treated her far better. I could have loved her more or said something to heal the unsaid things of a lifetime. I could have even offered my heart, openly, and said, ‘Mammy, I do love you. I always have.’ I could have done kind things more often, especially at the end. Just to make her smile. And I could have done more to make her life easier. But I didn’t. And I only realised all this after she was gone.

I remember getting out of the black car just behind the hearse as it arrived at the graveyard and feeling suddenly distressed by the crowds standing around, looking at the coffin as it was slid out of the hearse. With my brother and
cousins, I put my shoulder to the grim timber box and we negotiated our way up the hill on a narrow path that led through other graves and tombstones, until we were at the place where my father had been buried forty years earlier. It was a path she had travelled well each summer to put flowers on his grave and stand bewildered with a little beret on her head as the priests blessed the graves, when hundreds of people from Cavan squashed together around their family plots to remember their dead.

A black slab declares my father’s dates of birth and death. Halfway down the smooth limestone are the words: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want’, which is what my brother and I had agreed was sufficient at the time. But our mother insisted without us knowing that a further phrase be added, so that in its entirety the slab now reads: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want – erected by his sons.’

I smiled when I saw it again as her coffin rested on a platform of crossbeams astride the empty hole in the plot where she would soon be planted.

The priest said his prayers. The relations and old friends shaded their eyes from the July sun and mumbled a decade of the rosary beneath dramatic tufts of cloud. And that was it. A blustery summer day. Strong showers and intermittent blasts of sunlight. My mother was in her grave.

An old man who had known her well grabbed me by the elbow so suddenly that I almost fell into the black hole.

‘How are you now?’ he enquired.

‘I’m fine, Mr Dolan,’ I replied, because as a child I had only known him by his surname.

‘Well, your mammy is gone to a better place,’ he declared.

Mr Dolan was old now but I remembered him from those Friday afternoons when I was six and I used to go shopping with Mother. He worked in a grocery shop on Main Street. He had long wavy blond hair back then, and a blue tie, and he was the one who had a stylish way of wrapping the ham in brown paper and then slipping the white twine around it and cutting the twine with a tug of his fingers, which always amazed me. He would present the parcel of cold ham to my mother and wink at me, or give me a mint sweet from the big jar with the image of the polar bear. But he too had grown old, and his face was skeletal. His hair had turned white, his blue tie wandered in the wind and his dentures were not firm in his gums; they floated about his mouth as he scrutinised me and leaned his enormous purple nose into my face as if he could smell my emotions. Everyone knew I had been sick. I had been depressed for a year or two, and it was no secret. But he sniffed me with an intimacy that made me feel ashamed.

‘I heard you went through a bit of a stormy patch last year,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s over now.’

‘Of course it is,’ he agreed. ‘Sure it happens to the best of us. It’s the interior weather. It’s like everything else. It’s unpredictable. One day sunshine and then a week of rain.’

He squeezed my elbow tightly once more.

‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said. ‘But you need to mind yourself now.’

And suddenly he was gone. He dashed into the crowd as the crowd crushed in for my hand and mumbled their sympathy in my ear.

I kept up a show of grim cheerfulness throughout the funeral pageantry. But inside I was numb and brittle. I felt my depression might return at any moment. I suspected Dracula was standing under the rowan trees on the edge of the graveyard waiting to embrace me when I was alone.

‘She was a big age,’ someone said of Mother.

‘She was ninety-six,’ I replied.

‘Sure it was time for her to go,’ another one said.

‘Aye.’

‘She had a good innings.’

‘She did.’

‘She was a monument.’

‘She was.’

And on it went for half an hour at the graveside. Old broken men and women huddling in a circle around the mound of clay; the last of her generation, the flowers that had bloomed when she had bloomed and were now waiting for their own time to face the dark. And me in my late fifties and no child left inside me to cry for Mammy anymore.

I tried to remember her dancing. Or at least, while I was standing at the grave, I tried not to visualise what she looked like in the coffin or to remember how gaunt and haggard she had become in the last hours of her life, inhaling every precious breath. That was too upsetting. And I tried to avoid listening to the shovels of mud clattering down on the coffin lid.

There were other things for me to consider. I was focusing on the house – Glenasmole – a semi-detached building on Farnham Road just outside Cavan town where she had lived for sixty years. A house that had been dark and stuffy for two years, since she went away to the nursing home. A house that someone now had to open up and examine and clean.

After a respectable amount of time standing at the grave, and shaking hands with friends and relatives, everyone drifted towards the Kilmore Hotel down the road from the sloping graveyard. I followed behind. But first I blessed myself and took one last look at the flowers on the grave. With my eyes closed, I bade her what I thought was a last farewell. Then I walked down the slope, reflecting to myself that she was beside her husband at last. The grave had been filled. The earth now lay in a heap of black clay, covered with a few wreaths. That was the end of it.

I went into the church to pray at the altar rails and I saw the priest in the sacristy, a boyish intellectual taking off his white vestments. I thanked him for speaking so kindly
about her life during the mass that morning and I knelt for a moment at the railings where my mother and father had knelt on their wedding day in 1950. The circle was completed. And I made a mental note to get her name onto the headstone.

The atmosphere in the Kilmore Hotel was cheerful – there’s only so much grief you can show for a woman who was almost one hundred years old when she died. It’s more a sense of relief. There is a tendency to celebrate her life, as if the day was a festival. Recalling anecdotes that summed up her character. Having a few drinks and a hearty dinner of soup and roast beef and fat puddings, and enjoying the sense of being alive without her. There is always a sense of liberation and pleasure for mourners who are, at least for the moment, still over ground and capable of enjoying the taste of good whiskey.

‘May she rest in peace,’ we all agreed after every round.

I remember gazing out the window of the dining room in the Kilmore Hotel for a long time. I could see the graveyard. She was still that close. Her nephews and nieces drank pints of ale and glasses of whiskey after the meal, and their children ate crisps and ran around the sofas in the foyer. They embraced and hugged and all agreed that Nellie was the last of her kind, the last of the great characters in Cavan town. They agreed that she had had a long and healthy life, and that she had been lucky in love, and kind to strangers, especially those in trouble, and wasn’t it a pity
that she had to go so suddenly in the end. ‘She was a saint,’ they said in all sincerity. And later they said she was a rogue – ‘a pure demon of a woman if you crossed her’. Distant relations took photographs on their phones and promised to meet again soon, and not just at the next funeral. There was a sense of relief that the day was almost over. The book was closed. Nellie Finlay was no more.

I was looking out the window at the tombstones glistening in the slanting sun and when everyone had gone away and I had paid the bill for the meal, I got into the jeep and drove in through town and out Farnham Road towards her house. Glenasmole.

There it was, just beside the General Hospital, on a hill called the Rock Cross. Four houses standing alone. There were signs of life in the other three but at Glenasmole the weeds were coming up through the tarmac. The avenue was overcome by trees and bushes on either side. I walked around the gable and entered by the back door. I suppose I still wasn’t satisfied that I had bid her a final and complete farewell from my heart, because the pageantry of the funeral didn’t allow me enough quiet reflection, and I thought her smiling face would be more intense in the house than at the graveside.

But now that she was buried, there was no meaning in the house. Her clothes didn’t mean anything and the ornaments and objects she had gathered, hoarded and loved for fifty years, and crammed onto every mantelpiece
and into every china cabinet in the house, were suddenly bereft of any further significance. There was no sense to what lay in the wardrobes upstairs or to the dishes on the drying rack beside the sink. While she was in the nursing home I had always convinced myself that it was only for a short while and that she would eventually return to her home. And everything in the house signified something to her and everything mattered to her. So I touched as little as possible.

‘She’s not dead,’ I would tell myself, as if disturbing anything might have been an unkindly act.

But now that she was dead I was forced to face the clutter and jumble of old clothes and broken delph. I put the palm of my hand on the old storage heater in the hallway, and checked that it was cold. In the drawing room, I checked another heater. The room was stuffy. The windows had not been opened for a long time and the sun had blazed into the room through June and July. But the radiators were off, so that was fine. Then I went upstairs, a solid, carpeted stairway, though it creaked in the same places as it had done years before when I was coming home from carnivals as a teenager in the middle of the night and would want to reach my bed without waking either of my parents.

There was a musty smell on the landing and in the corridor. I tried to open the bathroom window but it almost fell apart, so I left it as it was.

It was my first time in the house since she had died
two days earlier, and I didn’t want to hang around too long. But I was drawn to a chair. It was in the front room. A chair that I had bought for her five years earlier in McIntyre’s Furniture World. At the time, she could not manage to get up out of the low, soft armchairs, and this one had a high seat and a straight back. In all other respects, it was a fine, soft, upholstered throne. But she always looked rigid in it and just before she went into the nursing home, she was beginning to have difficulty getting in or out of it. I remember being terrified each week when I was saying goodbye, in case she fell. She’d stand up, escort me to the hall and close the door behind me. Then she’d walk back to the front room and throw herself in the general direction of the chair. I’d be outside the window looking in. She’d aim her body at it and all I could do was stand there gawking and hope she wouldn’t miss. If she missed and fell she’d break her hip, with me looking at her through the window.

But now I was looking at the chair. I could almost see her sitting there, and hear her speak, as she once spoke to me many years earlier, when I was in the pit of depression, and had come to her for some comfort.

‘If you want to cry, go upstairs,’ she’d said coldly, when tears threatened my face in that same room in 1979. I was twenty-six, a grown adult, and yet I craved for her to hold me. And for a moment, our eyes met and I saw in her a naked terror and I felt her helplessness. It was like a sound
coming from a closed room where she had lived alone and untouched for far too long. She could never have held me then. I could see that. She could never hold anyone again. Yes, she could still be held by other people; those who came to her door sustained her, those who met her in the supermarket and in the street, and the nurses, the doctor, the home help and all her friends, they all held her, and the world held her, and the routines of her life held her, like going to 10 a.m. mass every morning for years or making her porridge in the microwave before going to bed, so that all she had to do in the morning was press the button and reheat it. All those routines held her. It wasn’t her fault that she could not hold me. She just wasn’t able to do it. And realising that felt like some kind of intimacy.

Of course they say that men ought not to cry openly, but to me it has always seemed natural. I know men cry in public, with a kind of bravado or performance skill, at football matches and whenever they’re watching rugby in a pub, but there is a reluctance to share tears in any intimate situation. They go out to the street and cry. They leave the room. They apologise. Even I prefer to cry alone. It’s not something I like to do with someone staring me in the face, apart from my therapist. But over the years, I have certainly cried a lot, whether because of mental anguish, fear of the future or just as a result of something trivial on the television, like the sight of women in period
costumes on BBC as they rise up in rebellion against Mr Darcy or other such patriarchs, with the surprise of larks. I often wonder what women would think of me if they knew that.

And I remember one occasion when I caught my old friend the General in tears, and I had to look away. I was getting water from the tap in his yard one afternoon just before New Year, during a cold spell. I’d noticed that the snow all about me was stained with blood, where they had shot a horse on Christmas Day.

‘She slipped on the ice,’ the General had said, ‘and we could do nothing for her.’

His eyes had watered and he’d looked at the empty snow with such confusion that no one could doubt but that he had loved his mare.

And I remember the time foot and mouth swept the country and big farmers from Monaghan, Tyrone and the Cooley Peninsula had wept every evening on the television news like little boys. The camera would catch them standing in a gateway, with a stick in hand, and the field behind them full of beautiful beasts, black-and-white dairy cows, the descendants of cattle that had grazed the same fields decades earlier.