Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(9)

People were kind to me, but couldn’t answer any of these questions, and just the fact I’d asked these things appeared to be upsetting for them, as if they’d done something wrong in telling me about heaven in the first place. It was a lot like other times I’d ask awkward questions, like when I heard negligible nineties UK RnB hit ‘Horny’ by Mark Morrison and kept asking my dad – a man who may never have said the word out loud in his life – what horny meant, and whether he was himself horny. Another time I followed our housekeeper Anne around and asked her why someone would become a prostitute – a question I’d just heard Richard Madeley ask a guest on This Morning. Because I was just copying his vocal inflections, she took it for granted that I, despite being four, knew what I was asking, and tried her best to walk me through it.

Before long, though, I went back to my usual conversational fare: long-winded descriptions of dinosaurs, or the differences between various types of trees. At the end of my first full day back at school, Philo presented me with a picture of his granny and my mother in heaven together, surrounded by clouds. I thought it was great, and his inclusion of Paul’s menagerie of expired pets was a beautiful touch.


I don’t have very many memories of my mother. I do know that I dreamt about her a lot after she died. And those dreams were of us in heaven. The dreams were all the same, pretty much. They always took the form of a mundane visitation; she wouldn’t be bathed in light or descending from the clouds. She would be normal, unheralded and domestic. In the dreams, she was never just there, in heaven; I would have to find her. I would know that she was gone, but hear her voice and know that she’d returned. This was never a big fanfare, but rather a commonplace discovery; hearing her voice speaking quietly from the kitchen, in the facsimile of our house that God had arranged for us to live in. Following her voice from the utility room into the back hall to turn the door and find her there, sitting at the table.

In the dream, she looks up but doesn’t look at me, as if there will be plenty of time to look at me for ever now that we’re reunited, and anyway she’s doing something, mending a shirt or wetting a cloth to wipe away a smudge on a tiny little trouser leg. She’s listening to something on the radio that I can’t quite make out, but which she is enjoying because she’s smiling, or perhaps humming along. They get BBC Radio Ulster in heaven. Of course they do. She, too, is hard to make out, since she is there and not there, as if seen through a fluttering sheet, and the room is swimming with the disjointed, various noise of dreams: the radio and the dishwasher; the dog just below us, where hot pipes warm the cold floor under our kitchen table. I can hear slow breathing, from the dog not my mother, and the light scrape of nails on linoleum. There might be other people in the room, but I can’t see them through the fluttering sheet, and in any case they’re not taking much notice of her. She just is, and I can tell she’s in no hurry, because she’s so busy with what she’s doing. She’s humming and mending and fiddling with ordinary things. She’s not bestowed with cosmic grace and ready to give me koans from the afterlife. She’s reading a magazine, or putting some Mass cards in a box, or sticking her tongue out ever so slightly as she threads a needle. She’s doing the sorts of things that living people, living mammies, do.

Sometimes the dream ends with me deciding to go to some other room and fetch her something, something to get her attention, something that will make her remember me. The second I leave, the second even that I look away, she’s gone. I’ve torn my mother from myself by taking my eye off her. By taking her for granted, again. I threw her away, and it’s my fault. Other times, dream logic is suspended and I’m fully aware of the precariousness of my situation. I must steadfastly keep her in sight without breaking concentration. And these times, something else, some ineffable paralysis, still manages to get in the way. I’m not scared, I know that everything is fine, but I also know that she’s dead, and this moment is finite. I know and I don’t know. As I come closer it’s as if the sheet in front of my face flutters even more frantically, as if my brain is buffering from the emotional load of gazing at her head-on. My mother is no longer someone I can look at directly, but peripherally only, like the sun, or one of those fences that have backward slats so you can only see through into the garden beyond if you’re walking past quite quickly.

From what I can see of her, she’s happy, and I can tell that getting to see me again is a kindness to her. She speaks, but the things she says are too quiet for me to hear above the radio and the dog and the dishwasher. I strain my ears and try to focus on her lips, but I can’t hear her properly and I can’t go to her, I can’t be with her, because there’s something holding me back, as if I’m wading, shin-height, through fruitcake mix. I decide I don’t even need to hear her speak; I just want to reach her so I can be held, and so I can tell her I wish she was back, whether she hears me or not, whether she’s real or not; I want to tell her that I’m sad and I don’t understand, and that none of this makes any sense. I want to tell her how sad we all are, and how sad it makes each of us to know how sad the rest of us are. We don’t know what to do, and we don’t even know if we’re making each other worse.

But I also don’t want to say a thing, I don’t want her to be sad, I don’t even want her to know that she’s dead and how sad that makes me. I just want her to hold me in the normal way of living people. The sheet is fluttering, and the noise continues, and my feet are moving so slowly, too slowly, I’m just trying to get to her, trying to make it to the point where she can pick me up, where I can sit on her lap and feel her close and know again how it is to be held by someone whose heart isn’t breaking.