All Souls Day
We met my cousin’s hearse, by accident and design, on the M6 across to Galway.
Dad flew in ahead a few days and met me after some struggle at the airport. Me, 37 and no driving licence, qualified only to lead a wheelie suitcase (with L plates) through departures pick-up, dodging airport taxis and shuttle buses, lost and doubling back on myself, sending and receiving accusatory phone calls while looking for his jeep. It was surely now burning more in red diesel than the cost of arrivals parking four times over. Pops plays by his own rules. We are definitely going to be late for the wake.
Then out of somewhere he sounded the horn once, twice, three times, four times—yes, I can see you, Dad—sandwiched between a Bus Éireann terminal and a Bus Éireann bus. We made our way out with the shuttle buses and taxis, and as we commented on how easy the traffic was going out of Dublin, I remembered fully why I was here.
“There she is,” and it was her, though her coffin had no pictures or flowers; we saw our Dublin family two or three cars behind. So, for a time, we joined the cavalcade across to Galway. And I remembered as a boy standing at the top of Teeling Street waiting for her to arrive with her sister and her sister and her brother and her brother, to Grandma’s house to visit and hopefully to play. But now we travelled with her, though she wasn’t even 40.
We lost the hearse outside Athlone, and as we went past Athenry and through the centre of Galway, the sun was on the ocean near Spiddal, like crystal. With Clare visible and appearing like a nearby island but really a part of the same island. And is it like that with the communion of saints? The church on earth as in heaven, seemingly separate but a part of the same body of Christ. And though I never sent the letter to her when I heard she got sick, and how I wanted to tell her how I waited for her on the benches outside the courthouse as a boy at the top of Teeling Street—can she read it after Mass by the candle I lit for her? And is dogma then the answer to grief?
The Atlantic Ocean laps my aunt’s back garden, and outside the bungalow her youngest son was stood in the driveway to meet his sister. Him and I sat in our grandmother’s house as boys at our uncle’s funeral (how did he die?). In a moment of cheek, he lifted the tablecloth with a grin to reveal cases of beer stacked underneath, and we had no idea what was going on. And his brother followed later, and my father’s sister before I was born. Natural evil. The space where loved ones were taken too soon has always been with my kin, the spaces filled with pictures but no conversations aside from the quiet utterance of prayers moving both ways.
My aunt sat in the kitchen in dark glasses, anaesthetized to receive the body of her second child, surrounded by relatives and mourners eating sandwiches and drinking tea. And I shook hands with some and talked about the journey down, and how we drove behind her hearse for a while.
And when my cousin’s body arrived in the front door, the whole house was still and quiet save for her brother and the undertaker deciding how to get her into the house, as if there were ever a time to be having the conversation. And as she passed into the hall I stepped into the bathroom and wept, because I didn’t know what was going on. I checked my eyes in the mirror before leaving, and then walked round the coffin in the living room. I caught my father’s eye and it was red too. My mum was doing the first reading at Mass, and she took me aside and asked me how to pronounce Ecclesiastes—“eck-lee-zee-AS-teez,” I said, but not completely sure myself. Though it was time for me to help her.
I carried the coffin with her brother and my father and some family from Dublin and Sligo up to the church, to the funeral Mass. And during the eulogy my aunt spoke of how she would walk with her out to the car, dragging herself from her hospital bed, her agony a pure act of devotion. What excuse do I have? Later, as we lowered her into the ground, someone had lined the bottom with a bed of roses.