The Parish (14 page)

We returned to an overflowing house where the wonderful “kitchen staff” had everything under control. It was a day of talk, crying and comforting, and if an observer had looked in the window it might have seemed like a big family
get-together
. But the heart of the family was gone and we had a long hard road ahead of us.

N
othing prepares for the ferocity of grief. You have a hard, cold pain in your gut, and where your mind was is now a black hole. You walk and talk as if you are normal and you may appear to be, but inside you are carrying around waves of knifing pain. This is the world of bereavement, a prison of desolation without walls.

Bereavement takes you on a solitary journey. Death disturbs your deepest roots and catapults you bruised, broken and unprepared on that journey. The light that normally leads you on is gone and, in that dark pit, you flounder around and grasp at nothingness. There is no escape. No easy way out. No short cut. Hurting encompasses like a shroud and grief takes hold and cripples.

Death is a cold, bleak subject. Even the very word strikes a chill into the mind. Is that why we sometimes avoid using it and prefer instead “passed away” or “gone to rest”. But no matter what handle we put on it, death cannot be clothed in a flowery language that masks its face and makes it in any way easier to handle. For most of our life we may try to ignore it,
like people walking backwards towards a cliff edge. But one day, when a loved one goes over that edge, we are forced to turn around and look death in the face.

Nothing prepares for the finality of death. Someone who was part of your life has gone and taken a chunk of you with them. The vacuum left by that chunk is a raw, bleeding hole. Death, as well as taking your loved one, has also taken part of you. You are left with a gaping wound. Grief is physical as well as mental. You have had a beloved limb amputated. But the bewildering thing is that your loved one is still part of your everyday thought pattern, and their presence is still around the house. You are living in two worlds—the before and after worlds. These two worlds are not welded together, so the ground beneath your feet is split with a deep chasm.

Into that deep hole people will throw thousands of words. If it was a sudden death, they will tell you, “At least he did not suffer.” If it came after a long illness, you will be told, “Wasn’t it a blessed relief?” And there is the sympathiser who will tell you of a far greater tragedy. As if that should make you feel better! They think by making you feel worse that you should feel better! They have no idea that bereavement is a frozen coat of mail, inside which you and all your mental anguish are completely trapped. Your pain is so intense that you have no space left into which other feelings can creep.

Friends may try to reason you out of your grief. But reason and grief have no relationship. Grief is raw emotion; reason does not come into it. When someone you love dies, deep dormant feelings escape out of a previously unquarried reservoir. Like a roaring tide let loose, they break down all barriers and sweep on, creating mental chaos. Grief has no respect for boundaries. It sweeps all before it. You are flattened
and torn along in a ferocious flood, being belted off rocks of raw pain and crashed into deeper black holes. As you search for ease, you may come on a reading that tells you, “Death is nothing at all….” Then you might well think that you are losing your mind.

Previous death experiences reawaken; their healed scab is blown off and they add their old pain to the new. Ground that you had previously thought was firm beneath your feet shifts; you become a cauldron of doubt and terror. Where is the beginning and end of anything? You wake up in the morning and for one second you think that the nightmare has not happened. But then reality crashes in. Your mind is a whirl of black cloud; your legs are rigid with some kind of restraint that you cannot even begin to describe. It is as if there are iron rods where previously you had bone and muscle; as if where your stomach was is now a revolving churn. Black shadows and monsters awake with you and begin to slither around your mind. Another day begins!

Your grief is now, but past griefs also swim underneath. If as a child you lost a sibling or carry an unmourned death, that old trauma now stirs like a monster in an underground cave. He rises, and all past griefs become part of the present eruption.

You look around at people who have survived terrible trauma and you think, “How can they keep going?” I said this to a young widowed friend of mine and she smiled sadly and told me, “No choice.” When I asked a friend, “Will I get over this?” she said wisely, “You will, because if people did not recover from grief, the world would come to a standstill.”

Nevertheless, in grief your world certainly is at a standstill. It is impossible to reach over the void that separates you from
the rest of the world. You are on an isolated island and the world is moving around outside but you have no wish to be part of it. You are cold and miserable and rendered immobile by hurt. All your energy is sapped by your grief so you are unable to distract yourself with activity. You feel like a bird whose wings have been brutally hacked off at the knuckle.

It is a time when prayer should help. But it may not do so. Your loved one has gone across that great divide into a place where all your prayers have gone. But heaven may be silent now and God may have become the God of no explanations. Your world here has been turned upside down, so how can you be comforted by a remote world? But in the dark of night, when a fierce storm rages, the deep roots of a tree hold it in the earth and the human spirit finds within it the power of amazing endurance.

As you struggle on, tiny stepping stones appear in front of you. They will be created by kindness, nature and your own inner resources, and by a source above and beyond our human understanding.

“W
hat are you doing on Dad’s anniversary?” Diarmuid asked as the date of Gabriel’s first anniversary loomed on the horizon.

“I’m trying not to think about it,” I told him bleakly; “but the mass that morning will be for Gabriel. I’ve arranged it with Fr Kingston.”

“And after that?” Diarmuid asked.

“Well, I suppose we’ll all come down here for breakfast,” I said.

“And then?” Diarmuid persisted.

“I’ve no idea,” I told him wearily. I really did not want to think about it because every day was tough but the anniversary loomed before me like a tall, black cliff.

“I’ve an idea, but I’m not sure what you’ll think about it,” Diarmuid began tentatively.

“What is it?” I asked cautiously, in case I’d be letting myself in for something that I could not handle.

“You remember when we were all small, some Sundays we’d go to West Cork for picnics. I was thinking that, on Dad’s
anniversary, you and I and any of the others who want to could do the Ring of Beara. Dad loved that drive and at least we would all be together. What do you think?”

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” I agreed slowly. “It would be better than all being miserable in different corners.”

“Say it to the rest of them anyway,” he told me.

During the weeks before the anniversary, the happenings of the previous year replayed like a tape in my head. I wished that I could press the stop button or the fast forward, but on the grief road there is no stop button or fast forward. I was very grateful to our friends and neighbours who popped in or rang, and some brought garden plants or pot plants. Some plants went into the garden and some on Gabriel’s grave. I had found throughout the year that visiting the grave had brought inexplicable comfort, and afterwards I would go in and sit in the quiet of the church where meditation quietened my chaotic mind. One evening, a neighbour whose wife had been killed in a road accident came into the church. As a teenager, his wife had worked during her holidays with us in the guesthouse, and Gabriel and herself had been good friends. Now we were both too upset for words, but words were not necessary because we were travellers on the same road.

One night when I came in home after locking up the ducks, there was a hank of beautiful wool and a pattern for a pair of socks on the kitchen table, with a note from a friend who was into knitting. I was delighted to get it and ran my fingers along the silky soft wool and studied the pattern. I am not a knitter, but the previous year when I was too distraught to read or watch television I had got the idea that I would like to knit, which came as a bit of a surprise because I had not knitted for years. So I got needles and sat by the fire in
the
seomra ciúin
and knitted a simple scarf, and I found the soothing rhythm of knitting comforting. In recent days again I had thought of knitting and the idea of making a pair of socks had come into my mind. It was a strange coincidence that here on the table was the wool and the pattern.

That night, Lena held the hank of wool between her wrists and I wound it into a large, soft ball, something that I had not done since I was a child. So, knitting the sock began, and once again the warm fire and the knitting eased me on through raw days. A close friend who is a farmer and a few years previously had walked the grief road had told me that the first thing she did every morning after milking the cows was to light the fire. “In some way,” she told me, “the fire was a comforter, and then when the summer came I stayed working in the garden every night until it was dark.” I did as she had told me and found out that she was right.

In bereavement, you need every crutch that you can grasp. One of my crutches was the support of my kind friends and neighbours. In grief, your family is grieving too and trying to cope the best way they know how, and they are able to cope with only their own sorrow. So you need the neighbours. Some wise person once said, “It takes a village to rear a child.” The same applies at the other end of life. You grieve as part of the community to which your loved one belonged. Gabriel had been part of our parish and now it was helping me to cope. The Blasket Island people were right: “We live in the shelter of each other.”

On the day before his anniversary, I planted a beech tree on the hill at the Kinsale end of the village. By choice I was on my own because the actual digging of the hole and the easing in of the tree and the shovelling of the earth around
the young roots connected me in some indefinable way with Gabriel, and made me feel better. He had planted many trees around the village, including the lovely weeping willow at the foot of the Rock, and a few weeks before he died we had planted a companion for that tree by the grotto stream. There is an age-span of about thirty years between those two trees but in the life of a tree that span is soon eroded. The day after his funeral, we had planted an oak in the grotto and on the first day of the new year another oak in the church grounds. Eileen and Paddy, who are part of our extended family, had planted an oak on their farm in Farnagow, and Gabriel’s friends, Jim and Antoinette, had selected a golden ash for the western end of the village near the Valley Rovers playing field. A golden ash is a lovely tree, and its association with the hurley made it the ideal choice. That Christmas I had given each of our children a tree to plant in memory of their father.

On the morning of the anniversary, Fr John, who had been a friend of Gabriel’s, said the mass and that made things easier, and afterwards we walked across to the grave which was glowing with flowers; there we lit an outdoor candle as we had done on Christmas night. There is something especially comforting about a glowing candle in a sea of flowers.

After breakfast, we drove out into the depths of West Cork. It was a bright clear day; the majestic Beara Peninsula was wild, and its effect on my spirits was restoring. On the road to Allihies, a Buddhist temple has been built into the rock face, and when you sit there the sea stretches out in front of you and its immensity calms your soul. Down the road an ancient ruined lakeside castle was being rebuilt into a five-star luxury hotel, and further on was a tiny wayside church where Gabriel
and I had once attended mass. We now visited and afterwards leaned over a stone wall, absorbing the beauty of the valley that sloped down into the crashing waves below.

On a visit to Kenmare a few years previously, Gabriel and I had enjoyed afternoon tea in the Sheen Falls Hotel, and besides the great food and the ceremony the staff made of the event, the view over the cascading waterfall and wood was what had really made this a memorable occasion. When we reached the hotel now, it was dusk, and the glowing fire welcomed us in; as we gathered around the table overlooking the waterfall, I came to the conclusion that Gabriel had been with us on our tour around the Beara Pensinula.

The days after the anniversary were hard, raw days, and I dreaded Christmas, but then something strange happened. One night I was alone in the house and decided to put up the crib. The crib has always held a special place in my heart; ours is a collection of Aunty Peg’s old crib figures and some of my own that the children had played with over the years, so now I had headless wise men and lame shepherds.

I have a belief that the original crib that humanity rejected was welcomed by the wild world, and over the years I have collected sheep, donkeys, cows and various other little animals and colourful birds. The result has been a menagerie of wild life. That night, I drew in the old bog deal and greenery from the garden and built the stable. When the stable was built, the lights would have to go in before the straw, the holy family and the rest of the entourage. Gabriel had always done the lighting but now I was on my own and clueless, but to my amazement every connection worked and the lights came on effortlessly. As the crib was laid out in the quietness of the empty house, a deep peace filled my heart and I felt a blanket of comfort
enfold me. The hard lump of grief eased and Christmas was no longer a problem.

After Christmas, Diarmuid’s thoughts turned to his forthcoming wedding and he asked me to write something suitable for their invitation card. I thought about it and decided that rather than write something new, I would share with them something that I had written for Gabriel many years previously.

That poem was written after a stolen weekend. At the time, Gabriel and I were bogged down with a busy shop, a guesthouse and five children. Our bank manager was not a happy man because those were the days when they loved black bank balances, and we always seemed to be building and extending, driving up our overdraft to what he considered a dangerously high level. There were times when I thought that we would never get our heads above financial water. I was in charge of accounts, and each night as I counted the tills and checked the books I ate a giant Mars bar. It was my cigarette, my glass of brandy, my tranquiliser, my soother, and it should have turned me into a large fat lady, but because I was rushed off my feet, feeding children, checking deliveries and stocking shelves, it did not happen.

Life was so hectic that we sometimes forgot each other’s birthdays, and one year it was a week after the date when we
remembered our wedding anniversary. It was a time when I thought that it would be a great luxury to be able to stay in bed when I was sick. But that had not been possible as all the balls had to be kept in the air. On one of her visits, my mother, who was calmly stirring a tapioca pudding on the Aga, said to me: “Alice, of all my children, you were the one least likely to end up with such a busy life.”

One of my less tactful sisters was more direct: “Well, there is no doubt about it,” she told me emphatically, “that until you got married you were pure useless. You dodged every job when we were all growing up together at home. You were always up in the black loft, reading books. Gabriel made a great job out of you!”

Aren’t sisters wonderful? Who else could be so brutally honest and get away with it? But whether she was right or not, we certainly had a busy schedule. There was no time or money for holidays and the only break was the All-Ireland Finals, to which we went with different children in tow.

I had cherished a hidden hope. It was that one weekend the two of us would steal away without chick or child and stay somewhere wonderful, pretending that we had no children, no dogs, no shop, no guests, no meetings. No one in the world only us! And the dream became a reality, because one warm, sunny Saturday in June we sat into the car and drove down to Kerry. When time is short, there is no time to waste on long travel and we had only until Sunday night. I think that God decided we deserved a break because it was a heavenly weekend. We had booked into the Parknasilla Hotel in Sneem, and, on the drive down, the heavy armour of work and responsibility slid off us as the Kerry mountains threw a warm blanket of relaxation around us. Our hotel room was up in an
attic—if there is such a place in these hotels—and when we looked out of the window, we felt that we were sitting on top of the world.

We spent the day wandering around the woods that surrounded the hotel and when we reached the sea, we sat on a rock and chatted. It was great! No shop bell, no phones, no problems! That night we drove over to the Park Hotel in Kenmare and because everything was meant to go right, it did. We got a window table overlooking the river and, as we ate the moon came up across the water, which reflected the blues and purples of the surrounding mountains. It was a magical night and I remember thinking that it was great to be so happy.

The following morning, we had breakfast in bed. A pair of waiters arrived, bearing two silver trays laden with cooked breakfasts surrounded by exotic fruits and juices and sending out the whiff of fresh toast. This was breakfast in bed in style—this was luxury! Afterwards we walked along by the sea, and all that day we meandered around Kerry. We even bought an oil painting from a roadside artist. The bank manager was going to be yelling, but tomorrow was another day. That night, after we had come home, I wrote “Togetherness”.

Now it was time to pass it on to the next generation.