Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(8)

‘Do you get to visit her in heaven?’

‘Will she bring back presents?’

‘Like a Toblerone?’

‘My uncle got one in Florida.’

‘Is heaven in Florida?’

‘Is there a Disneyland in heaven?’

‘Does heaven have Toblerones?’

I answered each like a hurried politician on courthouse steps, unused to this degree of interest in my life. I was soon experiencing that first weird rush from the publicity that came with having ‘the big news’ in class. Being one of eleven had starved me of attention, and here it was being offered up to me in an undiluted and gravely significant form. My years of self-loathing were a long way away, so for now I rode that wave of attention like a piebald pony. Lacking the tact to package it any other way, my friends made it clear that my bereavement was to be rewarded.

‘Would you like my milk, because your mum died?’ offered Philo, rather sweetly. ‘Yes,’ I must have answered, because I certainly drank that milk. I also got to feed the fish, use the crap little robot no one had ever really figured out how to work and generally do all the best things before everyone else.

It’s easy to say the sadness I felt was incomprehensible, but I suppose that this was true in its most literal sense. I was incapable of comprehending what had changed, or that it had changed for ever. Death itself was too huge for me to grapple with, and my mother’s death was, to me, only questionably permanent. Just recently, she wasn’t dead; she held my hand and told me to play out in the trees by the hospital. Now she was dead, which meant she was happy and healthy, and therefore alive, but in heaven. Who knew what came next? Apart from anything else, the whole heaven thing seemed like a great deal for the time being. I have no memory of the specifics of what I imagined, I just knew that heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there. I was used to her being away, since she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me Belfast and heaven were different in that respect and several others.


Heaven became a source of fascination for me. I was ready to believe in heaven, since it seemed like a great place, and it made sense Mammy would end up there. If even eighty people in all time had made the grade, then my mother would have been one of them. The confusing thing was that people would tell me it was great that Mammy had gone there, but in a voice that didn’t seem to suggest it was great at all, and was actually very sad. People would be fighting back tears while telling me the good news, the way people now might tell you how proud they are that their child does improv comedy, or that their husband is getting his old band back together. It seemed as though these adults didn’t realise that I could see them as they spoke, since their words were so at odds with their facial expressions. As a concept, heaven always seemed to lead to conversational cul-de-sacs that were uniquely unsatisfying for any five-year-old, let alone a boy genius like myself, famed for his interrogative skills. Heaven was great news, clearly, but so much more information was needed, and it stunned me that it wasn’t forthcoming. When it comes to most positive news, people usually can’t shut up about it, and will do anything to add more detail. It’s a facile truth about people, that we like to rave about even mediocre experiences other people haven’t yet been made aware of, like when people tell you that you should watch Billions, and you think of just how many other shows you would have to watch first to justify it, or that time you tried almond milk for a week and ended up, drunk, singing its praises to your taxi driver, before never drinking it again. Yet here I was being presented with what, on the face of it, seemed like the most incredible news of all time, the literal Good News that Christians love so much – death is not the end – delivered as if it was a terrible blow.

What makes it weirder is this was not just a convenient thing to say to a child, like Santa Claus being real or eating carrots being good for my eyesight. This was, and is, Catholic dogma, something these people professed to believe. Heaven is canon, it exists. And yet adults were being strangely evasive when it came to answering my numerous questions.

‘What does she do there?’ I’d ask. ‘Does she teach?’ I still have questions about what this version of heaven comprises to this day. What would Mammy look like there: her current self, thinner and scarred but alive? Or her younger self? Does she get to pick, like can she just opt for when she felt happiest or most attractive? If you’re blind or deaf in life, can you see and hear in heaven? Wouldn’t that be confusing? What do you wear in heaven? Do you have to wear the clothes you died in for all eternity? If John the Bap Tits was run over would he have to walk around in heaven for all time dressed in a bra with burger buns on? Or can you change your clothes up there? Are there shops? If so, who works in them? Do some people live a good enough life to get to heaven, only to arrive there and end up working in a shop? Other people playing harps all day on clouds and you end up working 9 to 5 in a Primark in heaven? Does heaven have countries and cities and buildings and cars? Can all people of all languages communicate? Are there people there from Neanderthal times? Can you have pets? Or does every living thing have to have had a soul? Do dogs make it there? If you die as a child do you stay that age in heaven for ever? Can you die in heaven and go to another, further heaven? Does Mammy get to watch us? How could she be happy if she knew we were suffering? Or if she watched us die and then saw that we didn’t make it up there to see her?