Miss You

THREE Tess

September1997

On Hope’s first day of school, she was surprisingly amenable to getting dressed in her little grey skirt, white polo top and blue sweatshirt. She ran into Mum’s room to get a goodbye kiss.

“Take a picture, Tess,” Mum said.

We’d decided that Mum wouldn’t even try to come, because then it would become one of Hope’s routines. Hope seemed to accept that I would be the one to go with her. Perhaps it seemed natural to her, as it wasn’t long since I’d been the one going off to school every morning. I’d been bracing myself for screaming and crying, but as we left the house, and Mum called down, “Bye then!” it was her little voice that was feeble with tears.

Mum and Hope were inseparable. Mum was forty-three when she had her. “An afterthought,” was the way she put it, because she would never have said Hope was an accident. With all the rest of us practically grown up, Mum had had the time to do things like reading library books and baking fairy cakes together. Most people considered Hope spoiled. She’d been a pretty little baby, with a froth of blonde curls, and, with five big people in the house, six if you included Brendan’s girlfriend Tracy, she’d got a lot of attention. We all loved holding her and jiggling her to make her smile. People said that’s why she was a bit late with walking and things, because everything was done for her. Mum had tried taking her to nursery school but Hope wouldn’t be left. She could count to a thousand by the time she was four and could sing all the nursery rhymes, which was probably more than most children of that age.

She walked with me happily enough and marched over to stand in line with the other tiny children in the playground. I waited by the gate with my fingers firmly crossed, praying that everything would be fine, and that school would be her protection from everything that was about to happen.

The perfect silence of those first few seconds after the whistle blew felt like a gift, a miraculous gift from God who I should not have abandoned. Then a familiar sound tore it apart.

Mum used to say Hope’s carrying-on was what drove my brothers away. I was never sure whether she was joking, because she’d always add that it was about time they spread their wings. Mum had a sharp sense of humor. I think it was because of her being intelligent but not very confident, so she’d put something out there, then make out she was joking if she got the wrong reaction.

Kevin was the first to go, to London when he got his scholarship, then America. He and Dad had never seen eye to eye, especially when Kevin refused to go into construction. So it made things easier at home, really. Then Tracy got pregnant, and Brendan dropped the bombshell that they were emigrating to Australia. He’d always felt in Kev’s shadow; this was going one better. So Hope had got her own room, instead of sleeping in mine, but it was still noisy. I used to spend as long as I could in the library at school. Dad used to spend as long as he could at the pub. People said Mum had the patience of a saint.

It was natural for a child to be unsettled, Mrs.Corcoran, the head teacher at St.Cuthbert’s, told me, when there was so much worry at home. She thought the best idea would be if I came along to school with Hope to reassure her. I could help out with the little ones. The Reception class’s teaching assistant was on maternity leave, so they could do with an extra pair of hands.

I welcomed the distraction. With a class of thirty small children, there was no time to think about anything except getting coats, hats, gloves, painting aprons and gym clothes on and off, tracking lost shoes, monitoring trips to the toilet, making sure hands were clean, and handing out slices of apple at break time.

At home, Mum was sleeping a lot because of the morphine. You’d think that if you knew someone was going to die in a few weeks, or days, you’d try to say everything there was to say, but it wasn’t like that. It was almost like we didn’t want to make it over before it was over and were afraid of getting everything ready and then having nothing to do except wait.

I did tell Mum that I loved her. I told her every day, and then I started saying it every time she went to sleep, or I had to leave the room to cook Hope’s tea or something, until it started sounding a bit silly. You wouldn’t think “I love you” could become meaningless, would you?

Course, I said other things too, like, “You mustn’t worry about us, because we will cope.”

To which Mum replied, “I know you will.”

We never really talked about what that coping would entail, because I didn’t want it to sound like I was the one with the problem.

On one occasion, Mum held my hand and said, staring me out to show she meant it, “You must go to university.”

“I will, don’t worry.” Leaving it vague meant that neither of us had to confront the glaring question of how.

I helped Mum make a memory box for Hope. It was a shoebox that we covered with pink gingham remnants from the curtains Mum had made when the boys’ bedroom was turned into Hope’s. Mum embroidered “Hope” on the rectangle we cut for the top with yellow silk thread from her sewing box. I pasted and stapled the fabric on. The box looked really good; the difficulty was knowing what to put into it. There wasn’t a lot of physical evidence of Mum’s time with Hope. Parents take a lot of pictures of their firstborn, but the novelty seems to wear off with the subsequent children. We did find a lovely photo of her with Hope as a smiling baby. And Mum dictated her recipe for Hope’s favorite trifle. Using the microphone and Hope’s Fisher Price cassette recorder, Mum recorded a message for her. Finally, she took off the gold cross she always wore and asked me to put that in.

“You wouldn’t want it, would you, Tess?”

I wasn’t sure whether it would make her happier if I said yes, or if she had the consolation of it going to Hope. The cross went in the box. But then Hope noticed Mum wasn’t wearing it and Mum wasn’t going to tell her why before she needed to know, so the cross came out again, and the box went back in its hiding place under the bed. On a couple of occasions, Mum said, “Can we think of anything more for the box? How about a CD? ABBA’s Greatest Hits? She loves that one with the children singing...”

I wished in a way that we’d never started on it, or chosen a smaller box, because the few items rattling around were such inadequate tokens of Mum’s love.

One of the questions I did ask, while we were stitching and stapling—like Victorian ladies, Mum said—when it was easier to talk because we were both engaged in another activity, was this: if there was an afterlife, could Mum please find a way of giving me some kind of sign, so I’d know.

That made her laugh.

“I can’t give you faith, Tess,” she said. “It’s a step you have to take yourself, and then everything follows.”

“But could you try, please? Just a little sign?”

“If you’d put the imagination you spend doubting into believing...,” she said, in that mildly exasperated way she had that made criticism sound like a compliment.

Brendan and Kevin arrived from different ends of the world in suits. Brendan, hefty with success and lurching between the show-off swagger of a prodigal son and the crumpling confusion of imminent disaster; Kevin, toned and dapper, in light brown pointy brogues and tight grey trousers showing his calf muscles through the slightly shiny fabric, and a lot of talk about issues—his own, that is, not Mum’s.

After visiting Mum at the hospice, Dad took them down the pub, and there was something strangely jolly about the three of them rolling back home late and smelling of beer.

“Like the old days,” Dad said, with an arm draped around each son, recalling a happy tradition that he’d have enjoyed, but had never actually happened.

It was just me by the bed with Mum at the end. I don’t know if she wanted it like that, or if she ran out of time to do all the individual goodbyes. It was almost like she’d waited to see all her children, then was in a hurry to go. Perhaps she was thinking about the boys needing to get back to their jobs. Mum always put others before herself.

The curtains around the bed gave a false sense of privacy and we could hear everything the others were saying just on the other side.

Brendan’s “Have I time for a coffee, do you think?”

I should probably be grateful to him for the gift of her last flash of smile, conspiratorial—would you listen to him!

One moment she was there, then the light in her eyes went out.

I thought I was prepared for her leaving, but when I realized she was dead, I felt as shocked as if it had happened without warning. I sat holding her hand until it no longer seemed right not to share her with the others.

The men cried immediately. I did not. All their hungover heaving and blubbing felt like blows against my shell of numbness.

Hope didn’t like it either and shouted at them to stop.

“Sssh!” she said, finger to her lips. “Mum trying to sleep!”

I told her to give Mum a kiss, and then I took her to the hospice cafe for sausage and chips, and, to her astonishment, a whole bag of Haribo.

When I put Hope to bed that night, she asked what time we were seeing Mum the next day (we were doing telling the time in Reception class), and I told her that Mum had gone to heaven.

“Why?”

“To see the angels,” I improvised.

“And Jesus,” said Hope.

“Yes.”

“And Nana and Granda and Lady Di and Mother Teresa...” Hope listed all the people they’d recently prayed for together.

I had never seen the point of heaven but now I could. Was that a sign?

I waited for the lull that told me Hope was asleep, then began to creep towards the door.

“Tree?”

“Yes?”

“When Mum coming back?”

What was I supposed to say?

“She’s not, Hope. She still loves us, though.”

“She’ll never stop loving us,” said Hope.

Even though it was dark in the room, I could tell she wasn’t crying. For Hope, it was a simple statement of fact because Mum had said it, and would say it again and again on the cassette tape.

A lot of the relations made the journey from Ireland that they’d never made while Mum was alive. Her leaving for England with Dad in the seventies had been resented by her siblings because, as the older sister, she was supposed to be the one who looked after their father after their own mother had died young. I knew my uncles, aunt and cousins only vaguely from sitting in chilly front rooms drinking tea from the good china that was brought out for guests, on the boring part of childhood holidays in Ireland that Mum and Dad had called “doing the rounds.” None of them had met Hope before, but still they claimed the right to pat her on the head with tear-filled eyes, or scoop her up in great hugs, which she didn’t like at all.

“That enough kissy stuff!” she shouted, making herself all stiff.

“She’s a character, isn’t she?” said my mother’s sister, Catriona, adding, in a loud, doom-laden whisper, “You’ll have to watch her, now, Teresa, and yourself as well, because they say it runs in families. It’s a terrible thing for us all to have hanging over us.”

Even with Mum dead, I felt she was still trying to blame her.

I didn’t think Hope should go to the funeral, but Dad and Brendan wanted her to and Kev said nobody ever took any notice of his opinion anyway, which was a good way to get out of giving one. So that was a kind of majority. Except I was sure that Mum wouldn’t have wanted it either.

“Did she tell you that?” my father demanded.

“No.”

It was one of the many things I should have asked her. It was so stupid. All that time we’d had, and I’d never dared ask what she wanted for her funeral.

“Well, then,” said Dad.

Hope was fine, swaying along to the organist’s slightly slow and tentative interpretation of ABBA’s “I Have a Dream” as we walked in. She stood between Dad and me as we sang “How Great Thou Art,” which was Mum’s favorite hymn. We all said the Lord’s Prayer and Hope said that too, with Dad glancing over the top of her head at me as if to say, Told you!

I don’t think she even noticed the coffin until Brendan got up to read his poem.

With hindsight, Kev or I should have stopped him. I think we were both so shocked by the idea of Brendan, of all people, writing a poem, that neither of us thought to ask if we could read it first. In fact, we both probably felt a little bit ashamed for not writing one ourselves.

If you look in the local newspaper at the memorial section, you’ll see that just because something rhymes, it doesn’t make it profound, except to the author. It was Brendan’s couplet that had “Always there to wash my socks” with “Now, you’re lying in a box” that caught Hope’s attention.

“In a box?” she echoed, her voice ringing through the hush.

“Sssh!” said Dad.

“Tree, is Mum in that box?”

“You have to be quiet now, Hope, we’re in church.”

It used to work when Mum said it, but there wasn’t enough conviction in my voice.

“Mum is in heaven with Jesus!” Hope declared.

Father Michael came creeping across to us.

“Your mother’s body is in the box, Hope, but her soul is gone to heaven,” he whispered, breathing his halitosis over her.

The screaming was piercingly loud as I carried Hope flailing from the church. How could such a little person possibly understand about the separation of the body and the soul? I should have trusted my instincts. A funeral was no place for a child. I’d known it. Worst of all, I felt I’d let Mum down.

It was one of those breezy late-September days, with a few white clouds racing across a blue sky and the trees just beginning to turn copper, too beautiful a day for something so sad. Hope stopped screaming as soon as we were out of the church and started struggling to get down from my arms. The tarmac path had little bits of confetti trodden onto it, pink horseshoes, white butterflies, lemon hearts. Hope skipped away from the church, chasing occasional falling leaves. I stood watching her, thinking that if she caught one, it would most definitely be a sign. Of course she didn’t. Autumn leaves have a habit of darting away when you think you’re on to them and Hope’s coordination was never the best. Before frustration could turn to fury, I took her down the road for a McFlurry.

So we missed whatever trite words Father Michael had to say about Mum being a dutiful mother and wife, and Charlotte Church singing “Pie Jesu” on the CD player, and the coffin going into the ground, which you’re supposed to see for closure. I wonder whether that’s why Mum still sometimes appears in my dreams, and I wake up with this lovely moment of relief—I knew it couldn’t be true!—before my brain cells reorder themselves back to reality.

Mum was a popular member of the community and her friends took it upon themselves to organize the wake in the church hall. The small kitchen beside the stage was a production line of women in aprons turning out platters of sandwiches and mini quiches, scones and home-made cakes, great plastic bowls of crisps and trays of piping-hot sausage rolls, while others wielded the big metal pots of tea they used at the Christmas Fayre and poured glasses of sherry for the women and whiskey for the men.

It wasn’t long before the atmosphere shifted from somber to animated, and people started telling their stories. Mum’s sister Catriona talked about how when she’d heard Mum had passed away she went to the room in the house that had been hers and she’d smelled a powerful scent. Didn’t they say that when people returned, they sometimes brought a fragrance with them? She’d been sure for a moment that Mary was there, before she remembered that she’d put an Autumn Breeze air-freshener plug in the room because it was a bit musty from lack of use.

Dad regaled anyone who’d listen with the anecdote about how they’d met. He’d gone back to his home town in Ireland for his grannie’s funeral and he’d spotted my mother across a crowded room and the light of love was in her eyes.

That phrase, “the light of love,” made me think of Mum’s eyes just before the end. It was a good description. Dad could surprise you like that. You’d be looking at him and wondering what it was that had drawn someone as gentle and intelligent as Mum to him, and then you’d get a glimpse.

“We met at a wake, and now we’re saying goodbye at one!”

His closing line became more tearily indulgent as the evening went on, and people clutched his arm and said wise words like “The cycle of life, Jim,” or “You’ve a lot of happy memories to see you through.”

“Ach, she was a wonderful wife to me!” he told them, which was true, although I’d never heard him say it to her.

I didn’t think he’d been nearly a wonderful enough husband to her, but Mum had never complained.

“Your father’s got a lot on his mind” or “Your father works very hard to put food on the table” were the usual excuses for why he was more often at the bookie’s or down the pub than at home. Not that any of us hankered for his presence, because there was always an aura of threat hanging around Dad.

“It’s the drink, not the man,” Mum had even defended him after the terrible night it came out that she had secretly been paying for Kev’s ballet classes with the housekeeping money, and Brendan had to leap on Dad’s back, kicking his calves, to hold him back, and I’d run down the street shouting at the neighbors to call the police because I thought he was going to kill them.

By the time it got dark outside, there was quite a party atmosphere, with that fug of alcohol and exaggerated emotion that you often get at weddings with family members who haven’t seen each other in a while.

Kev pushed the piano out on the stage, and played his party piece, “Danny Boy,” which he’d probably sung a few times in New York on St.Patrick’s Day because it’s an even bigger deal there than it is in Ireland. Kev’s singing was never as good as his dancing, but he could hold a tune well enough and the performance brought a stunned silence to the room before people started clapping and telling him how proud his mother would have been.

“Will you give us a song, Jim?” someone called.

After only a moment of protest, my father said, “Ach, go on then,” and made his way to the stage, where he stood, leaning against the piano, and, with Kev accompanying him, sang the Fureys’ “I Will Love You.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that. For me, it wasn’t the words so much as seeing Kev and Dad together, and knowing how happy that would have made Mum. At the end, a moment of reflective silence was broken by a small voice, surprisingly loud and clear, next to me.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!”

There was something about the seriousness on Hope’s face and her stout little frame, with her fingers doing the twinkling actions she’d learned at school, that would have made it comical if it hadn’t been so moving.

When she finished, everyone clapped, but unlike Kevin and Dad, Hope didn’t bask in the attention. She didn’t actually seem to notice it.

“What about you now, Teresa?” my aunt Catriona called out. “We haven’t heard anything from you.”

To be fair, she probably only meant to give me the opportunity, but she made it sound like I didn’t want to contribute.

“I can’t sing,” I protested.

“That all right, Tree,” Hope chimed up. “Everyone has things they’re good at and things they’re not so good at.”

Which sounded so much like Mum that everyone except Hope laughed.

“OK. This was Mum’s favorite poem,” I said, wondering why I hadn’t thought of suggesting it for the service.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow...

As I spoke the words, slowly and evenly, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice and do her proud, I wondered whether Mum had yearned for peace and solitude, away from the constant noisy chaos of our family. And as I looked around the faces of her friends and relations, I thought that we were all perhaps thinking that the poem described a kind of heaven for her, which made us feel calmer about the whole injustice of it. That’s probably why people talk about the consolation of poetry.

When I’d finished, the room was quiet.

“Bedtime,” I said to Hope, taking the opportunity to say our goodbyes before the singing inevitably started up again, along with more drinking and the potential for the mood to switch from affection to umbrage in a single sentence.

Hope spotted the butterfly in the corner of the bathroom window when I was giving her a bath. One of those white ones with a tiny black spot on each wing. Cabbage White.

“Want to get out,” she said.

So, without thinking about it really, I opened the window, and the butterfly flew into the dying light.

It was only when I knelt down again and started lathering Hope’s hair that I wondered how the butterfly had got in. There was a buddleia in the back garden which attracted butterflies in the summer, but usually those were orange, and I’d never seen one in the house before. Wasn’t it a bit late for butterflies anyway? Perhaps it had come in to get warm?

Or perhaps the butterfly was the sign I’d asked Mum for, and all I’d done was let it out into the cold.

The morning after, while Dad was still snoring upstairs, and Hope was watching Teletubbies, Brendan came over from the Travelodge and reported that Kevin had already left for the airport.

Apparently there’d been a big row in the church hall a couple of hours after we’d gone home, when Kevin got up the courage to announce that Shaun, the man who was sharing his room at the hotel, wasn’t in fact a colleague en route to a business meeting, but his partner of two years, a partner, he’d shouted tearily, who he couldn’t even introduce to his own family at his own mother’s funeral!

The fact that Kevin was gay didn’t come as much of a shock to me or Brendan (or in truth, I suspect, to my father, who’d always been suspicious of the dancing), but to come out at a funeral, Brendan said, well, it just wasn’t on, was it?

Dad, now twice the mawkish victim, had wailed to Father Michael, “I’ve lost my wife and my son on the same day!”

So that had given Kevin the opportunity to list all the resentments he had harbored since adolescence. Ironically, it was Shaun who saved the day, arriving in a taxi and scooping Kev off back to the Travelodge after hearing his belligerent meanderings on the phone.

He seemed like a decent enough fella, Brendan said.

It did cross my mind afterwards that maybe Kevin had, consciously or unconsciously, created the opportunity for a dramatic exit—he’s always been theatrical—to relieve him of any familial duty. Or perhaps it never even crossed his mind, as it didn’t seem to cross Brendan’s, that there were three of us with a sister about to be only five years old and a father who was a drinker.

“I wanted to talk to you about what’s going to happen with Hope,” I said, trying to broach the subject.

“She’ll get over it sooner than you think,” Brendan said. “Kids do.”

He was a father with two little ones of his own now, so he knew about these things. And he lived on the other side of the world. What did I ever think he was going to do? But it would have been nice if someone had just asked if I was OK.

I left it to the last minute to cancel my university place. Not because I forgot, or was distracted, but because I think I was hoping for some kind of miracle.

I waited until Dad and Hope took Brendan to the airport, so I was on my own in the house.

The woman in the accommodation office was brusque. “It’s terribly short notice.”

“My mother died, so I’ve been busy with the funeral,” I told her.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

I hadn’t yet worked out how to respond to people saying that. “It’s all right” didn’t do it. “So am I” sounded impertinent.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. Which wasn’t right either.

There was an embarrassed pause.

“I’m afraid we won’t be able to refund the deposit unless we find someone else to take the room,” the woman finally said. “Which I have to say is very unlikely at this point. Obviously, I’ll inform you if the situation changes.”

“Thank you.”

I put the phone down, and that’s when I cried. Great, wracking sobs. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t just the end of my dream. It was Mum’s dream too. Going to university had been our project.

I don’t know how long I wept, sitting in the kitchen that felt so empty without her, until I finally stopped and found myself staring at the plate that said, Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

It says in all the books about bereavement that when a small child loses a parent, the worst thing you can do is change things. You’d think that a fresh start or a change of scene would be a good idea, but it says not. The child’s had enough change. What they need is a bit of stability. I suppose that’s how it was for Hope with the plate.

I put it away in a cupboard, but Hope noticed as soon as she came in and demanded its return. So it remained on the knick-knack shelf in the kitchen. And sometimes it made me rueful, and sometimes it made me depressed, and other times I felt so angry I wanted to smash it on the floor, which are all stages of grief, according to the books.