Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(7)
She stalled for time. Growing up, I was fascinated by that moment you often see in American sitcoms, when popular characters would appear on stage but were unable to deliver their lines until the laughter caused by their arrival had died down. I’d always watch what they did as they stood there, silently vamping as they patted down their clothes or adjusted their hair, riding the wave of noise with eight or nine seconds of odd gestures that would have immediately marked you out as a psychopath had you acted that way in real life. I saw something of this in Mrs Devlin, who was choosing not to speak over the usual din, but waited until actual, real silence had prevailed. When it finally did, she fumbled and strained. Her mouth went slanted and she kept starting and stopping, as if her throat was a leaf-blower she couldn’t get going.
‘Class. This – Boys and girls. Séamas – This morning, Séamas has returned to class.’
She now alternated between clasping her hands in front of her and returning them to my scalp for nervous pats. I was still very much unenthused by physical affection, but had been effectively passed around like a stress toy for the preceding two weeks. Only now do I realise how hard my mother’s death had been on these adults themselves, since they obviously cared about my welfare but were also extremely fond of my mother, who had died so young and left such tragedy behind her.
‘Now, as some of you might know,’ Mrs Devlin said, ‘Séamas’s mammy has just died, and he’s very sad.’ I had been smiling nervously, but now frowned, as if I was in a school play about a sad little boy. ‘Everyone should be extra nice to him, because you wouldn’t like it if your mammy died, would you?’ I held the frown, concentrating hard on the pose, the way you do while waiting for a photograph to be taken.
I don’t know that I should have even been present for this, and wonder if they do things differently now. The whole thing felt rigid and strange. Maybe they had gone over it during the fortnight in which I was absent, and this was merely a reminder. Maybe repetition was necessary. Perhaps this public airing was itself a humane approach, a way of avoiding my mother’s death becoming one of those half-known-but-unmentioned tragedies that were common currency among kids, and Northern Irish kids in particular. ‘To save confusion in future, the following tragedies have occurred’, that sort of thing. The alternative led to misunderstandings, and having to spell it out again and again to people who weren’t aware.
‘You wouldn’t like it if your mammy died, would you?’ seemed an odd sort of a way of putting it. It would, I argue, have been preferable for this not to have been phrased as a question, one with a somewhat flimsy, glib connotation, suggesting a debate could be had on the subject. Luckily, the mood of the room seemed clear: my classmates would not like it if their mammies died.
My memories are mostly of blank, gawping faces staring back at Mrs Devlin, but also, amid the glum silence, of slowly registering the artwork that adorned every wall: painted pumpkin handprints and gory blood-effect names rendered in red acrylic paints. The room was festooned with whimsical skeletons, tombstones and wispy joke-shop cobwebs emerging from the filing cabinet beside Mrs Devlin’s desk, terminating eventually behind the long, thin poster of the alphabet that stretched just below the ceiling, at the other end of the room. Guys, you shouldn’t have, I might have thought to myself upon seeing the entire room decked out with macabre tokens of death and horror. But I didn’t, because I was five.
As I stood in front of my classmates, it occurred to me that they’d done all this decorating while I was away, and I felt that pang of melancholy one feels upon realising time has not stood still for others when it has done for you. My friends hadn’t been at chilly gravesides, or home vigils, bouncing from one relative’s knee to another while priests spoke low Latin in sing-song tones. They’d been drawing and cutting out jaunty pumpkins with their names on. This moment of transcendent solemnity, watched over by a dozen melted Homers Simpson, and malformed Sonics the Hedgehog, was broken only by heavy breathing from Philo, who then raised his hand. ‘My granny died,’ he said, in a rather touching show of solidarity-cum-one-upmanship. ‘His granny died,’ said Aoife, nodding to the room in agreement, as if this extraordinary claim required someone to vouch for it. She also said this while pointing at Philo, as if telling on him.
The room considered this exchange, and several classmates shared that their grannies had also died. Their grandas too, in some cases. Paul had suffered the loss of a turtle, some fish and three dogs, a litany of tragedy that had clearly been as painful for him as it was suspicious to us. It’s odd to recall such earnest ruminations on death and grief being carried out among small children for whom the words meant little, and who would, in roughly twenty minutes, be wearing waterproof bibs and smacking jugs around sandpits. Handed a little red car, many of us could not yet be relied upon to sort it with all the other little red cars, but here, in that moment, the garishly coloured environs of 2B of Nazareth House Primary became the unlikely setting for a seminar on grief, and the first ever conversation for many of us about bereavement and how to handle it. I became a special correspondent from grief’s remotest outpost, returning from uncharted land to tell everyone what I’d seen. Once a few questions had been asked, it was hard to stem the tide. My classmates began with solemn commiserations but, quite soon, graduated to slightly more probing queries.
‘Did she go to heaven?’