Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(31)
Patricia said she thought my mum gained her calm from this place. My mother’s calm is something everyone mentions about her, the stoical resolve with which she tackled life, marriage, parenthood and her illness, and it pervades the letters she sent to Patricia, which I bring with me. ‘I am not the bearer of great news,’ she wrote in October 1988.
‘It appears the cancer has recurred, and the doctors consider the best step is to have a full mastectomy. I’m going to the Royal tomorrow Thurs 20th, for surgery Friday… Emotionally at best I’m disappointed – it was really the last thing I expected at this stage, God’s ways certainly aren’t my ways. I don’t understand what’s happening, I’m upset but I’m still hopeful. I’m banking a lot on Mr Charles – of all the legions of people recommended to me he’s the one I really feel drawn to. I know I don’t have to ask for your prayers not only for me but especially Joe – he is really devastated. We told the children last night and they were great – so practical, who’d do what for them, when and where? We told Sinead and Dara the whole situation and they were very accepting – they’ve been expecting me to go to Belvoir [a specialist cancer facility in Belfast] anyhow. Shane and Mairead would show more emotion but once they got over that they were okay. Shane is going with St Eugene’s Cathedral Choir to the National Concert Hall on Saturday 29th, but maybe the concerts competition is on Sunday I’m not sure. God bless, Sheila.’
Her religious faith is evident throughout the letters, and stretched not merely to church attendance and ancillary responsibilities but to listening to tapes of Catholic mystics like Sister Briege McKenna as she did little jobs about the place. ‘I was down seeing Daddy yesterday,’ she wrote in March 1990, ‘and on the way there and back I listened to tapes of Briege McKenna. Over and over again she repeats “come to me you who are burdened and finding life difficult and I will give you rest and refresh you”. She even goes so far as to say that many people go with their troubles to psychiatrists when they can so easily tell all their worries and heartaches to God!’ Reading these letters, it’s disarming to imagine my mother driving around these very hills, nodding along to the homespun wisdom of some nuns on tape. I suppose these were a charming early precursor to podcasts, aimed at philosophical Catholics with a lot of errands to run. My mother fitted that remit on both counts. These errands too are a constant reference point, as in the earlier missive that sees Mammy segue from surgery to my brother Shane’s choir trip to Dublin the following week.
Her faith also informed the advice she gave, including one odd moment of spontaneous scripture recommendation:
‘[B]e assured of a continuing presence in our thoughts and prayers. Don’t give up. As I was writing I was trying to pray and Matthew 14 kept coming into my head. I don’t know what’s in it and I’m not accustomed to scripture gifts like this but I’ll take a chance and tell you anyhow. I hope it brings you consolation.’
I never did think to ask Patricia if Matthew 14, the chapter Mammy appears to have conjured out of thin air as an impromptu ‘scripture gift’, offered any consolation. In the end, I thought better of it, since upon looking it up I found it tells the story of Christ feeding the five thousand, so it may merely give her unwelcome reminders of all those times Mammy, Daddy and we, their eleven tired and hungry children, had arrived to eat her out of house and home.
Granny McGullion died of cancer in 1984, a few years before the first of these letters, and her suffering had had a huge effect on my grandfather and Mammy. Neither of them ever actually admitted it was cancer at all, and Mammy and her siblings were even instructed by Granny and Granda to tell people it was glandular fever. I guess they didn’t want to give the thing power by naming it, as if saying the word ‘cancer’ out loud would make it real, somehow. It’s also true that they didn’t want to suffer the pity of outsiders or cause any fuss in their ordinary interactions with people. This last concept is the one I find easiest to believe, since fuss, in all its forms, is like kryptonite to Northern Irish people.
It’s an odd thing to realise how much of your homeland you’ve internalised, the unspoken assumptions, latent behaviours and rigid rhythms of thought that were baked into your breast before you were conscious it was happening. So it is with fuss. Fuss means different things to different people, and it has to since, where I come from, fuss is a particularly pejorative term. Watching American TV shows in which loud, self-possessed people complained about their meals, for example, was as exotic as watching people using jetpacks on Tomorrow’s World. We are, after all, a population who lived through a period in which some 10 per cent of us lost an immediate family member to political violence and saw fit to call this era the Troubles, as if it were not a brutal cycle of spiteful bloodshed but rather a period of intemperate hailstorms, or a breakdown in the country’s system of planning applications.
‘Don’t make a fuss’, ‘it’s no big deal’, ‘ah sure, lookit the horse has bolted, what good will whining do?’ These were platitudes we lived by on the micro and the macro scale, the sorts of things people would say upon being offered a cup of tea, or receiving an unsatisfactory dinner in a restaurant, but would also feel in our hearts when faced with death or trauma or the abject desolation of being alone in an unfeeling world. It could never be said that it is indulgent or improper to speak at length about grief or death; it was just roundly felt and universally known to be the case, as surely as you wouldn’t extemporise on the ugliness of someone’s spouse. Within this heuristic there was, of course, an internal spectrum, just as there are, presumably, New Yorkers who will sit happily silent with a hair in their lasagne.