mother, from the truth that was so dark and deep and obvious beneath the bright surface of her smiles.
The year darkened. All autumn, Mary and Margaret kept being sent away to stay with our grandparents. The doctor and the priest became familiar visitors in the house. Father O’Mahoney would rest his great hand on my head.
“You must pray very hard,” he would tell me, and I would answer, “Yes, Father,” as he stepped out into the night.
Christmas approached, with sleet and huge dull clouds hanging over everything. Mary and Margaret dropped notes behind the gas fire, requests for presents and for Daddy to be well again. They prepared a card for him: vivid blue night, single perfect five-pointed star shining on the Holy Family. In deeper ignorance than any of us, they scanned the sky and lamented the gloom up there.
“How will he see through that?” they asked. “How will he ever find his way to us?”
All of us were asked to go to our grandparents for Christmas Day. We sat around Dad’s bed eating chocolate and taking sips of his sherry and pulling presents from stockings; then he and Mam kissed us all in turn as we went out.
Colin kept us in order as we took the short walk through the quiet streets. “They need this special day together,” he explained as we followed him. “A day of rest to keep him getting better.” We admired the girls’ new shoes, the brilliant patent shine on them. We heard distant carols pouring from radios. We smelt Christmas dinners, saw the families behind the windows. Catherine showed us the beautiful long silvery clouds, the moon still shining alongside the sun even though it was day. We entered the other house to huge embraces, pillowcases filled with gifts.
We returned at dusk, when frost glittered like starlight on the pavements. He was sleeping, Mam drowsed in the chair by the bed. The steel sick bowl lay by his pillow. He was pallid, gray-yellow; the pajama top hung loosely over his bones. He woke up for a moment as Mam whispered about their day together, how joyous he’d been, how he’d loved the food, how he’d asked what time we’d return. He stared at us in amazement, then touched Mam on her arm and asked us, “Do you understand you’re in the presence of one of God’s chosen angels?”
Then Boxing Day, and the doctor, and Mary and Margaret sent away again, and Father O’Mahoney as the light failed, blacker than ever in his suit and with the black-fringed stole hanging over his shoulders and the white host in his pocket and the darkness in his eyes. From the front living room we heard the insistent murmur of Latin, we caught the scent of the anointing oil.
When the priest left, he spanned my head with his hand again, and could say nothing, and I pressed upward to him, searching for the strength and comfort in him.
Then just Dad’s breathing, his groans, Mam’s eternal comforting.
It was Catherine who heard him die. She was in her bedroom above him. I was somewhere in the house, head ringing with prayers and appeals to God, to Jesus, His mother and all the Saints, to anything that might make things as they were again. She told me years later that she heard the final gasping of his breath below, then silence, nothing, and she knew it was over.
Their bed was removed and his coffin brought in and all the days he lay there I was unable to make myself go in to him. The house teemed with visitors: our boundless relatives; the Legion of Mary; the Knights of St. Columba; the Women’s League. Father O’Mahoney came time and again. The Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul gathered in the garden, then poured in from the dark, and the house shuddered at their chanting of the rosary. All week Mam sat white-faced, gracious, miraculously calm. Then he was taken away and Colin and I served at the funeral in white robes and we all splashed holy water into the earth after him and chanted the prayers and threw handfuls of dirt and wafted the smoke of incense over him.