What’s Irish for ‘I Love You’?
What says all the things you cannot say?
‘You’re a right looking eejit,’ I said to my mother.
She was in London. In hospital. She was dying.
Her face was pale and still. I was reading The Country Girls to her. I put on the Irish accent I learned from summers spent in my mother’s hometown of Belfast. Now and then, O’Brien’s words caused my mother’s mouth to twitch.
There’s nothing like a familiar poem, or voice, or character to comfort. Mind, I was not sad. I was relieved. And I was curious. I had never been so close to death.
When the consultant came into the room, I asked him, ‘What causes a person to die? What tips the scales into death?’
He was silent.
Then he said, ‘It’s complicated.’
Which surprised me. I imagined one cell dying and that cell causing the entire process of life, of breathing, of excreting to stop — the proverbial straw. But perhaps it was more a symphony of cells, dying together, orchestrated by a silent understanding that it was the end.
This woman who read me Tikki Tikki Tembo till my toes tingled, who stuffed Enid Blytons in my Christmas stocking, who recited Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, who put a bookcase filled with books in…
