Four years ago, following a a fairly brutal two-year battle with cancer, my mother died; a relief, in the end, though it still doesn’t feel so. Some deep-lying tumour in the breast missed by the usual mammograms and only caught after it had already metastasised to her bones, with the damage already thoroughly done – like a firework going off, one of the doctors had put it at one point, scattering sparks of itself to spots on the shoulder, the hip and leg, and most terribly, the lower back, the spine. It was the back pain, in fact, that had forced her initially to her GP, after bearing it already probably too long, typical enough of the kind she was, the kind most of us are, I suppose, when it comes to doctors, not wanting to give in to it, playing it down as maybe a touch of arthritis, or the wear and tear of life at (at that time) sixty-seven. Afraid, too, I’m sure, now that I think back on it; a little afraid anyway, clinging to the notion that what you don’t know doesn’t have to worry you. When I was young, cancer seemed a word everyone avoided using. So-and-so has the other thing, you’d hear, said in the most bated way, as if giving any more voice to it than that was to risk drawing it to your own door. That, and God bless the mark – a level of acknowledgement and pleading left to us when easier hope had faded, a kind of last refuge.
Growing up during the late ’70s and ’80s, the eldest son of an ordinary family in an ordinary village, God was a part of life, as vaguely present as the sound of the wind almost always in the trees. Those around me weren’t particularly demonstrative of their faith, and some of whatever that faith was, looking back, probably rote, a thing drummed into them and learned by heart or maybe just so generations’-engrained that it was as much habit as whatever else, work or school, washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning, busied their small, ordinary days. With mass a duty of a Sunday morning, blessing themselves whenever they had to pass by the church, and giving a minute or two over to stillness when the Angelus rang out just ahead of the evening news, the small constancy of an Almighty was part of the shape of the week, and accepted without question, there being a place then for everything. I’m writing of impressions now, that’s all. Memories, faded or otherwise, some of what I’ve held onto, and some, I suppose, of what in its way has shaped me, things I tend to ponder when out walking the fields with the dog of a breezy afternoon, the most connected part of my day, my prayer time, you might call it, if you can be sufficiently loose with the term, watching for how the light shifts and what colours the seasons bring, watching Dixie, my sheepdog, a badly abused rescue the very definition of love and these past few years now the purest soul I’ve known, bounding and rolling joyfully in the long grass and responding at a charge to my whistled calls only to at the last instant, in relentless fun and play, sidestep me and dart away again, laughing between barks. These walks are the closest I get to any sense, however fragile and fleeting, of the numinous, unless a piece of music, caught at just the right moment, Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, maybe, or Shumann’s Traumerei, or heard at low volume while lying awake in the dark in the small of the night, Chet Baker’s Almost Blue, happens to bring me to that. I know, from all we’ve learned and been sickened by in recent years, all the horrors revealed, that plenty from back then and before, had God, the inflicted notion of God, as an overwhelming sufferance, beaten into them and worse by the monstrous element among the brothers, priests and the nuns; but for many, I think, and certainly in our house, faith, whatever it might have been in earlier times, was lightly enough felt. And easier, maybe, because of that, to eventually set aside or let go of, when there felt like reason enough.
The air tastes of copper now, I remember my mother saying at one point, referring to the cancer, the treatment, the whole fright of it, maybe, and I knew what she meant because it tasted that way for me, too, and for all of us. Anxious about everything, with that tinge of dread to every breath. There’s the initial shock, the days spent in around the hospital, the battering of tests, and then finally, the news, tempered with easy talk about what could be done, and what else if that didn’t prove enough, because this wasn’t the old abattoir days, medicine was coming on in leaps and bounds and there were options now that there’d never used to be, the doctor’s voice airy and reassuring even as her gaze scrutinised, holding on always just that second too long, giving other truths away. Life stands still, becoming illness and little else, and yet the clock continues to run.
At the end, the final few days after two years of different treatments that worked for a while and then hadn’t, radiation that wore her to a nub and the relentless battles waged to manage calcium surges and proteins in the blood, a priest was called. There’d been a very brief hospice stay, only shortly before, which upset her far more than it helped, and so we’d fought to have her at home, with a special bed hired and set up in the front room and all of us around, all the time, tightening the circle to just us, family, friends, relatives, taking turns sitting with her, reminiscing, talking about things that had hardly until then been spoken of. In the hospice, when the doctor with the greatest reluctance had released her into our care, he told us that she’d possibly not make it the fifteen minute journey home, and that even if she did we were looking at probably no more than the day that was in it, or, at the most, two. But at home, where she wanted to be, and where she belonged, with her family around her and her ghosts close, she stayed seventeen days with us, all but the last two or three, lucid. A nurse came daily to manage her pain, and if there were things during that time that I’d have wished never to have had to see then I also wouldn’t give up a moment of it, for what it continues to mean to me. However, on the morning of the day the priest was called, something changed. A new kind of pain entered the frame. The district nurse had come to dress a wound that is upsetting even now to think about, and I’d held my mother, in a by-now routine embrace so that she might be turned, I the only one she’d been saying that she trusted not to let her fall, big as I was, her fine strong son; and in the shifting or upheaval, something internal seemed disturbed. After that, her colour changed, turned deeply bruised, and an expression, even in her unconscious state, of pure suffering overcame her. In the previous few days, for the first time in the longest time, since boyhood, probably, I’d started chancing prayer again, in an embarrassed, half-hearted, guilt-ridden way, the last refuge of the scoundrel, as the saying goes, but still I suppose desperately hoping against what I knew in my heart was inevitable. But seeing my mother in this new state, so mired, I prayed, if that’s what I was even doing, for an end to come, quick and merciful. And it was an hour or so later that a cousin of mine, who had always been as close as a daughter to my mother and who’d returned from Aberdeen to be there with her for the time that remained, took it upon herself to phone for the priest.
We were standing around when he arrived, a shortish thickset man just a little older than me, and he shook hands with those who offered. A priest I’d seen before, though only once, from the next parish over, who’d actually presided over the wedding of my cousin, some twenty years earlier, a marriage that hadn’t in the end taken. The priests of the diocese were that week on retreat in Killarney, some annual jaunt, and he, one of the priests attached to the African Missions, was on emergency duty, covering when and where needed. And he’d been the one to answer my cousin’s her call. I think about these minutes often, if I’m honest about it in shame for how hard I’d let my heart become, and how unwelcoming I was, and how angry, keeping myself back while others, my father, my cousin, my sister, conversed in murmurs, looking at how his hands held folded to one another, fat, white, gentle, and how he kept his eyes lowered, in sympathy and understanding. What faith I might have had I’d mostly moved away from, finding reasons aplenty to justify that, and thinking I suppose that with all I wanted from the world, I was fine to live without the possibility of God, the sense of something higher and greater at play. A lot of us speak in mostly flippant ways of struggling with our demons, and the kind of thoughts that possess us, but I’m not at all sure that, on that damp, sad, grey October late morning or early afternoon, I wasn’t being given a glimpse of mine. While he readied himself with his vestments, I stood with the rest of my family at the bedside, and then he started to pray. And something changed. We all felt it, the eight or ten of us who were there, and were shaken by it. You might say that we’d been primed, wearied and probably vulnerable as we had to have been from weeks of ordeal, and with so much of the Church still set deep in our foundations, as much as we’d attempted to shrug free of it, and I suppose all of that is true, but all I know and would swear to is how the entire atmosphere of the room shifted, that in among those words of extreme unction the twist of pain slackened in my mother’s face and her colour returned, and unconscious as she was, a teardrop burst from the corner of her eye. From mine, too, something that, for all that had gone on, I hadn’t until then been able to manage. In the space of the priest’s words, and the blessing he laid down, what torment there’d been turned tranquil, for all of us. And since then, I’m not sure I’ve been quite the same.
It wasn’t the next early morning but the one after, the 13th, into Wednesday, coming on for 2 a.m., with us all still there, that my mother died, and it wasn’t so much a turning out of the light as the slowest possible receding, like the setting of a summertime sun or a tide going out in deadest calm. That part was peaceful. All the evening, from first dark and on through the following hours, there’d been glimpses, things sensed. A little after midnight a scented candle in its can exploded, like a gun going off. Other things, too, strangenesses that I may go into another time, or I might not. At a few minutes to two, the silence was overcome with birdsong. I know how it sounds, but it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. It lasted maybe half a minute, and at first no one said anything, we each probably assuming some kind of auditory hallucination brought on by grief and exhaustion, and then my father, in the barest voice, heartbroken, asked if any of the rest of us were hearing anything, or whether it was just him. “Birds,” the Irish Cancer nurse said, a woman doing these shifts voluntarily, in retirement, after years of working in hospitals and care homes. She’d heard it before, on a few occasions. Birds singing, though there were no windows open and the chimney had long since been cowled. And we listened, to the sound of it, as if behind the air, faint but clear, a small chaos of chirping. A kind of music. She’d seen and heard other things, too, over the years, she told me, when an hour later I’d gone to the door with her, to thank her for everything and to say goodbye.
~
Billy O’Callaghan is the author of four short story collections and four novels, including My Coney Island Baby (Harper, 2019), The Boatman and Other Stories (Harper, 2020), and Life Sentences (Godine, 2022). His work has been translated into nineteen languages and his recent short stories have appeared — or are forthcoming — in such journals as Agni, Fiction, the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Ploughshares, South Carolina Review, and the Threepenny Review. His latest novel, The Paper Man, was published by Godine in 2023.