Story 21: One More Day

Emma Heatherington

If I was a child again, I would ask God for one more day with her. Just one day to warn us, one day to say goodbye.

The day in question will live with me forever, even though it was spelt out in death in an ill-prepared, no-nonsense, no-time-for-digesting-what-was-going-on way – and no time for an innocent mind to interpret why it was to happen. I still can’t . . .

My mother Geraldine was the life and soul the party, the life and soul of our lives and of everyone who was lucky enough to know her.

I remember her taste in music. She was an accomplished singer and was into everyone from James Taylor to Leonard Cohen to The Police. She even liked Barry Manilow, much to my teenage disgust.

I remember the day she recognised my love for music. When I wrote my first musical aged only twelve, I remember how she advised me on structure and story, how she talked to me and helped me choose the right songs. She let me stay off school one day because she knew how much I loved one band in particular and didn’t want to miss them on Pebble Mill at One. (Video recorders? I didn’t trust those for one second and she knew it!)

I remember her smell, I remember her voice as she spoke as well as sang, but most of all I remember her laughter, and she laughed a lot.

I remember how she loved Levi’s jeans, the discovery of MTV and Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”, the angst of Angie in EastEnders, the way she would chuckle at John Cleese in Fawlty Towers and how she looked forward to a night out on the weekends when she could find a baby-sitter to look after us all.

She had a laugh that could stay in your heart forever and a smile with the most perfect white teeth I ever did see. She was proud, fiercely proud, and loyal beyond belief. If you were her child, her partner, her sister or her friend she loved you until the end. She adored her children and her family so much that she thought each and every person who came our way should adore them in equal measure. In fact, it’s a lasting joke that if someone on the street admired one of us, she would make sure they complimented the other five individually, even if they couldn’t tell one of us from another.

She had an ear for a tune, an eye for detail and good taste, a way with the written and spoken word and a humour that would light up a room no matter how many people were in it.

She was the baby of seven girls, was thought the world of by her sisters and was the apple of her father’s eye. Photos show her as a petite, beautiful blonde standing with pride beside the tall, dark and handsome man she married.

We had moved into our new house a few months before it happened. We got the keys on a Wednesday night and she was so excited that she moved us into it in darkness, with no electricity, and lit the fire for light and warmth and we talked and sang through the night. She had colour schemes chosen for every room. She had plans for French windows, for a patio, for a place where the little ones could play. She had plans for everything.

I was fifteen years old when it happened. I had been out ten-pin bowling with friends the night before – a Friday – and just as I was leaving the house she asked me to wash up after our evening meal. I was in a rush to see my friends.

I said no.

Typical teenager, I guess, but nonetheless her words have stayed with me ever since.

“One day you will realise why I appreciate a bit of help,” she told me as I slammed the door in full tantrum, which wasn’t really true to my form. She wasn’t angry, she barely raised her voice. She was just tired and weary of all the chores and daily necessities her life entailed.

I was the eldest – she was a thirty-six-year-old mum of six children in steps and stairs right down to the age of eight months. As a mum myself now, I can see clearly how the simple task of someone else washing-up would have meant so much to her.

I came home that night and peeped into her bedroom as she slept. The baby was in the cot, sleeping sound, her tiny hands laid back by her cheeks and the sound of her soft breathing made the house sound so peaceful.

I heard my father rise for work the next morning and then shortly afterwards I heard the baby cry and the sound of Mummy tending to her downstairs and then doing what all the experts told her: to go back to bed and sleep when the baby slept.

She asked for some help later that morning and again I was reluctant to expand from my own little world. I was tired, it was a Saturday, I had my own things to do. By eleven a.m., she was asking for the doctor, for her sisters, for anyone to relieve her of this strange pain that had overcome her. Indigestion, the doctor said, but he handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it to call him in case things became worse.

My Aunt Eithna arrived and rubbed her back, telling her she would be okay and tried to soothe her younger sister as she writhed around the bed in pain, with no clue what was going on within her young body.

Another sister called and then panic set in. The doctor came back, and then my ten-year-old brother ran to the end of the road and guided an ambulance to our new house.

We were in the sitting room, our new sitting room where she had lit that first fire only months before, kneeling in a circle and saying words of the Rosary with an elderly neighbour – words of religion that none of us were old enough to recognise.

My mummy died before 3 p.m. that Saturday, 4th May, 1991, just three weeks before her thirty-seventh birthday.

A massive heart attack, they said. There was no further explanation, really. The medics were as horrified as we were but no one as much as my dad who had returned from work at lunchtime to be met with such shock, such horror, that his young wife and the mother of his six children was gone. He had spoken to her that morning when he left for work as she stood with their baby girl in her arms, and when he returned from work she was gone.

She was buried on a beautiful sunny day, a Bank Holiday Monday and my father’s forty-first birthday. The most painful day I will ever know.

If I was a child again?

If I could have one more day with her, this is what I would do.

I would play all of her favourite songs and I would never criticise. I would sing along to Barry Manilow and laugh with her as she told me of how she saw him on stage with his red piano like a dot in the distance of the huge arena, her first live concert in all her life.

I would take her to New York city, a place she longed to go to and we’d even fly down to Nashville and sing “Crazy” like we were both Patsy Cline.

I would go shopping with her, we would try on clothes, we would laugh at how things didn’t fit no matter how much we wanted them to. We would go for coffee, we would stroll around like we didn’t have a care in the world. Like her world had no end.

But I was just a child. I didn’t know what God’s plans were for me and my family. I didn’t know that after that day I would never see her again.

Life goes on and time heals. So they say.

It does go on and it gets easier in that we learn to live with the pain, with the heartbreak, with the question of why life and why God would be so cruel to take away a mother from her six babies and from a husband who loved her so.

I am a mother too now and I am thirty-seven years old, just a few months older than she was when she died, and the thought of leaving my own three children at a time when I sometimes believe that my life is only beginning makes me realise just how much she has missed out on and how much we missed out on by not having her with us.

Does she know how we live now? Does she know she has six grandchildren as well as the six babies she gave birth to herself? Does she know some of us inherited her talent and are making a life writing in a way she always dreamed of? Does she know the men we each loved and lost and those we have loved again? Does she know how many people still talk of her with such disbelief that she is gone but with so many smiles around her memories?

Was she with us on the days of our exam results, when our children were born, did she see me when I launched my first novel, did she see her daughters on their wedding days, does she watch her only son when he sings in her honour at his gigs, does she watch over us on all the big milestones we come across . . . all the life-changing hurdles we have got over?

Does she see us sitting at her grave talking to her like she never left us in the first place?

Does she know how much every day we still miss her and how much our hearts ache to have her for just one more day?

If I was a child again I would cherish her more. I would understand that she was not only my mother but also a fantastic, funny, beautiful young person with her own needs and her own sacrifices and who was in the prime of her life, just as I feel I am now.

I would have done the washing-up that Friday evening. I would have nursed the baby more. I would have hugged her like there was no tomorrow because on that day there was no tomorrow.

For those of you who still have their mother, I look on you in so much envy. I watch my friends who visit their mothers, I watch as she becomes their best friend and their confidante and I still fight back the tears of what me, my sisters and my brother have lost out on. I watch my aunts look out for and enjoy their grandchildren in a way I only wish my own mother could have.

I imagine things all the time.

I imagine her every day.

I imagine how she would have looked now, the songs she would have loved now, how we would have spent time together and how she would have advised me and my brother and sisters on the choices we made in life and how she would have nurtured us and stood by us in any of the mistakes that we made.

I imagine how she would have made a career for herself when we were all a bit older and how she would have danced with my father and how they would have been lifelong companions and grown from those glamorous young parents who hoped and dreamed for easier times from the hardship of bringing up a young family.

I can hold on to my memories, but nothing holds you better than a mother’s hug.

Give your mother a hug today . . . a really big one. And if she asks for something, big or small, do it for her if you can.

Emma Heatherington is from Donaghmore, County Tyrone, where she lives with her three children – Jordyn (17), Jade (12) and Adam (11). She works as a writer and freelance PR and has penned more than thirty short films, plays and musicals as well as seven novels for Poolbeg Press, two of which were written under the pseudonym Emma Louise Jordan. Emma has just completed her first feature film script which is in early development and her dream is to see it on the big screen with Liam Neeson in a lead role . . . Her favourite things, apart from writing and hanging out with her children, are all things Nashville (she is a self-confessed country music fanatic!), romantic comedy movies, sing-along nights with friends and family, red wine, musical theatre, new pyjamas, fresh clean bedclothes, long bubble baths and cosy nights in by the fire. Find Emma on Twitter @emmalou13 or on Facebook at emmaheatheringtonwriter.