‘Jennie Barrett has a lovely broach from Switzers,’ she said. ‘Silver and purple. She’s going steady with a fella from Booterstown and he bought it for her.’
‘Jennie Barrett is the height of glamour,’ I said.
‘That she is!’ Gran replied.
I didn’t know who Jennie Barrett was – a former work colleague, probably, back when Gran worked in a factory making clothes – but I enjoyed the old lady’s stories, the way she sat on her leather sofa like a guru and rattled off photographic details about scenes long past. The anecdotes oscillated around a conclusion that never quite arrived, and then she would say, ‘Is today Saturday?’
She thought every day was Saturday – but when you’re an old-age pensioner, it sort of is. Her lapses were entirely forgivable.
It emerged slowly, like a shadow that coloured her but did not yet threaten to take her away. She poured milk over her cornflakes, but put them in the microwave and there I’d find them hours later, limp and curling. But the errors were cumulative. She started losing weight. She became frail. She aged a decade in only six months. When the shadow took her, the bed kept her.
Putting her in a nursing home was harder for us than it was for her. It was a grand, pale-blue building, an old manor on the edge of town with a glass porch over the front door. My mother promised to make sure someone visited her every day. ‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ she replied. No matter their age, there is no one lonelier than a child without parents. Mum didn’t want to lose the counsel, or the authority, or the outmoded, constabulary parenting advice, especially now.
‘At least she’s a widow,’ my mother would say. ‘She doesn’t have a husband depending on her,’ attempting to obscure how reliant daughter was on elderly mother.
The full story is in An Alternative Irish Christmas, published by Tramp Press.
Soula Emmanuel 