Country Girl: A Memoir Read Free

mother’s death was sudden. I had gone to see her in the Mater Hospital in Dublin, where she had been admitted with shingles. With a nun, Sister R., who had become her friend, she smeared a brown ointment over them; it was one she had got from a faith healer, and they both believed that it would cure her. She was due to be discharged in a week, but calling me over to the side of the bed, she said that we would have togo down home, just for the day. I was to fix it with the matron and the registrar, and hire a car to bring us there and back. It was like this. Long ago, when they were in danger of losing the place completely, my father, after one of his drinking sprees and in contrition, had signed the place over to her, as she would be a better manager of things. Two years before and after much insistence, my brother, John, had asked her to make a will, saying he and his wife would accompany her to the solicitors. She made the will, giving him Drewsboro, believing in her heart that at a later date she could make another. What she wanted now was to go down home in secret and make the second will, giving me the house and the surrounding lawn. I said there was no hurry, it could all be done in the fullness of time and openly, when she was recovered.
    To this day, no matter how I try to reconstruct it, I cannot arrive at the exact moment of my mother’s death, although I know the circumstances of it. It was in March 1977. I was in the airplane returning from New York, and, when I got home, the telephone was ringing; it was my sister, giving me the news. Later, from Sister R., I learned of the several comings and goings of that last flurried day. My mother was going home. A driver was coming to collect her. Since breakfast she had been ready, dressed for travel, sitting on her bed with a walking frame and a walking stick, which the nun had given her on the quiet, to take with her as a gift for her husband. In the days leading up to her going home she had been indiscreet, telling various nurses how proud she was of her intention of changing her will. One nurse, who boasted about being a friend of my brother’s, rang him urgently at his practice in Monasterevin to tell him of the crooked plan his mother was hatching. He arrived in an utter fury. Unluckily Sister R., signed up that day for a course at the university, was not present for the ugly confrontation, but as she told me in a letter, when she did return atlunchtime and popped in to say “Hello,” she found that between mother and son there was a ghastly tension.
    “A pity you couldn’t have come sooner,” my mother had said to her, barely able to hold back her tears, and the nun, not wishing to interfere in family grief, excused herself. My brother, it seems, left some time after, and still dressed for travel, my mother waited for the driver from home, who was already a few hours late.
    Sister R.’s letter was handed to me in the chapel by the undertaker, after the coffin was brought in and laid down on its trestle, and it was there that I read it. She described her hurried visit at lunchtime and how later she learned that my mother had not yet left and so went to see her, only to find that she was in the lavatory and could be heard calling plaintively. She was brought out, and, as she got paler and began to tremble, the cardiac arrest team was called and she was wheeled, bed and all, into the operating theater. When I read Sister R.’s words “I had to let go of her,” I realized what a deep friendship had sprung up between them in so short a time. It seems that briefly, as they waited to put in a pacemaker, my mother rallied, sat up, and, in one last desperate attempt at greatness, she asked those around her not to cry, for “death shall be no more.” I never felt closer to my mother than when I heard those words that had come from her lips, she who had found literature to be inimical had nevertheless uttered those words as a farewell.
    It was after her funeral