Ruth

I put the telephone down and know Ruth is in the last moments of her life. There have been telephone calls before at odd hours but never at four in the morning. I dress quickly and run out onto an empty Tivoli Road. It is dark and raining so heavily I am soaked by the time I get to where the car should be parked. I can’t find it on the road. City of stolen cars. God is testing me. This is what Ruth will say and I try not to get angry but it is too late—I am shaking with rage. I look in my pocket for money to call a taxi and as I’m counting the money in my hand I remember that it’s a different car I have while mine is being repaired. It’s blue this new one but I can’t remember the make. I find it parked behind the yellow sports car belonging to the bitch who had once complained about the noise coming from the flat. I had confronted her about it, telling her I had no radio let alone a television. It’s other sounds, she had said, like someone in pain. She had the gall to look me in the eye but when I asked her what she meant she just said it kept her little girl up nights. Tell her it’s not pain, it’s pleasure, I had said. You know pleasure, you’re a married woman. I had regretted that. I had seen her in the summer in the garden with her excuse of a husband, seen the silence and the weak attempts to be a family with their desolate daughter. Every time I pass the soft roof of her sports car I want to slash it.

Ruth hated sentimental movies and I laugh at the appropriateness of the rain. I turn the key in the ignition, and the cassette player comes on abruptly:

The smell of fresh cut grass is fillin’ up my senses

And the sun is shining down

on the blossoms in the avenue

There’s a buzzin’ flyin’ around

the bluebells and the daisies

There’s a lot more lovin’ left in this world—

Don’t go! Don’t leave me now, now, now

While the sun is smilin’

I turn the music off and wonder if I should have called Ursula—she is visiting her father in Pontoon and won’t be home until later this evening.

The roads into the city are bare and still I drive carefully. I stop at red lights and wait on the quiet, wet roads. The August dawn is coming. She will not wait for the morning, she will leave now, in the darkness. Don’t go yet. She has been dying of cancer for seven years, and many times I wished her dead so her misery would end. And mine. I wish I had the courage to overdose her on morphine rather than go on. The windscreen wipers are exhausted with the rain. Don’t crash. Just get there. I drive deeper into the city. It is a Tuesday bank holiday and the first trickle of workers are mournfully beginning the week. I am going the wrong way. I have been so used to going to the hospital to see her. Last Thursday morning the hospital had called me at work and told me to come in immediately. I had been called before like that and was reluctant to drop everything if it wasn’t urgent. A week ago, Canning, the hairynosed fucker I had for a floor manager, had asked me how many miraculous recoveries I expected my sister to make. Not many more, I had said. But the nun spoke calmly and quietly on the telephone and said, yes, she said, yes you should come now. She wants you to come now to sign the papers. She wants to be moved from the hospital to the hospice. She is nineteen.

I slow down to get a sense of where I am going; my mind is blank and I drive without knowing where I am going, hoping something will click eventually. I am not meant to be with Ursula. If it was meant to be she would be here now. It is an absurd thought but instinct tells me it is true. I feel already we have left each other, that all there is left is to say the words of leaving. Harold’s Cross. The hospice is Harold’s Cross. Either through Ranelagh or Donnybrook, one of them. There is only the sound of the windscreen wipers and the tires cutting through the wet roads. The silence in the car is heavy and I turn the stereo on again:

you can’t leave now—don’t leave now …

if you get there I know you’ll like it …

I switch it off. The traffic light is red and turns green but I do not move. I start crying. The light turns red again. Then I feel her spirit touch me, a faint, warm embrace falling on me and I feel her faint kiss softly on my cheek. I feel a surge of relief run through me and then it is gone: I know she is dead now.

Darkness has almost completely left the sky when I park the car in the Ambulance Only space outside the main doors. The doors, usually open, are closed to the morning chill. I step into a churchlike stillness. A nurse is walking down the corridor. I take to the stairs, falling up them three at a time. It is futile to hurry but the legs are oblivious to what the heart already knows. As I come off the last step onto the landing, a young nurse, barely twenty, is standing near the window. She raises her palms to slow me down, and then changes her mind and drops them as if they are annoying her. Her face is taut with the struggle to find words. She looks as if she had been left in charge and is not quite ready for the job.

—Are you for Ruth?

—Yes. It’s okay. I know.

—I don’t even know your name. Are you her husband?

—She doesn’t have a husband. I’m her brother.

I walk past her towards the ward.

—She’s not there.

For an instant I think perhaps she means she is in the corridor with a suitcase ready to go home. Then she moves her hand to her mouth and I know I am right in thinking her dead. It is disturbing that she has been moved already. It has begun, the whole grisly business of the body.

—God, she was so young, she says.

The nurse is crying and I go to her and hug her shaking body. When I look at her, her face is blotchy. My eye catches her name tag, the same name as my sister. The strange serendipity of life seeping into us, swirling around us.

A mass of pillows sit her half up in the bed and she looks like she has a dozen times when she has fallen asleep this way, only she is completely still. I almost speak to her. Such stillness in death. I want to joke with her about the nurse crying. There is a sheet of paper in a clear plastic folder on the bed underneath her hands. I lift the sheet and touch her fingers: they are cooling. The Lord is my shepherd. Jaded words of comfort on the sheet, put there not for the dying but for the living come to mourn their dead. I put my hand on the side of her warm face and kiss her and then I lie down on the bed beside her and hold her. We were in Grannie’s house the last time I held her, reading from the Flannery O’Connor collection. I hated reading those grim and meaningless stories to her but she relished them. She had fallen asleep on my arm and I awoke then to her calling my name through clenched teeth.

—What is it?

—Basin. It is too late and the bile, as yellow and as slippery as egg yoke, coughs out of her mouth onto the blanket. So strange, no gurgling intestines, nothing but the heaviness of death and a face without pain. I am frightened for her that she was alone in those last minutes. She had been awake, I am sure. Somehow I know she didn’t go in her sleep. She had been awake, waiting for it. I shiver and still myself not wanting to pass my own fear into her. Her face is flushed with the life having left her. At last all the pain is gone from her. The heat of life leaving her now. I pull the blanket up on her to keep her warm and imagine her opening her eyes, calling me a gobshite.

I’m done, she had said, last Thursday, just before she asked me to sign the transfer papers. I don’t want to die but this body is no use. I’m not giving up. You know that? I nod. I am staring out at the traffic on Eccles Street. A busy morning outside but here everything is quiet. The dirty windows can’t be opened and the air is dead. I tell her she has done everything she could. This is the last road. We all take it.

—I’m not giving up. This stupid body is no use. Everything else is grand. You know I’m not giving up?

—You’re not giving up. We’re fellow travellers. I’m going back to America, out of here. I’ll miss you. I’m scared of you dying.

She smiles a long smile and lifts up her hand for me to come closer.

—I’m glad you said that. You’re the only one who ever cared.

—He cares too. He just doesn’t know what to say.

I help her up then, to the bathroom. She holds onto my shoulder as she squats over the toilet bowl. Nothing. The morphine dulls the pain but constipates her. So she stops taking it and then the pain comes back. This is why I hate the medical profession. There must be something they can do with such a simple problem. Fuckers all of them. This is why I hate that we have no money, hate that my father drilled into us the mantra of the poor: money doesn’t buy happiness. No, but it eases the pain.

*   *   *

She is cold now. I get up and sit on the bed. I want to leave the room quickly. I am afraid of sitting with her here, dead, afraid of a dead body that is Ruth. I put my hand on her cold leg and close my eyes and listen to the candle flickering and hissing on the window-sill. For a brief moment I remember sitting in a circle and staring at a candle when I was on retreat with the priesthood, when I was on the verge of my novitiate. Eight years ago. Before all this. It had been the calmest I had ever been. Her coldness is coming through the blanket. There are voices outside, my father is asking the nurse to speak up because of his hearing. His voice rings down the corridors of the hospice, waking the light sleepers who will know another one of them is gone. They are all waiting, all wondering who it is who is gone. My father starts to cry loudly. In he comes clutching the nurse as if he is facing an accident about to happen. His emotion flaps wildly and the peace scatters. A sister appears and offers him a seat in an adjoining room. She touches him on the shoulder, touches me on the shoulder, smiles a radiant smile and strokes my head as if I am a child. God bless you, she says. How often I have heard these words and they mean nothing. But this morning, coming from her, I feel their meaning, and feel there is a God, and God is here now, waiting and watching. I follow my father into the waiting room.

The nun brings tea and sandwiches. The room is bright now, the sun is up. The nun asks if I would like something else. My father looks up from the sandwich he is eating, his eyes guilty as if caught in the middle of indecency. He looks as if he would eat anything, as if he is under orders. The nun comes back with a bottle of Paddy and a glass. I drink the whiskey and it burns into my stomach. My father grins and hands me a sandwich. It is nearly eight when we leave. The morning traffic is heavy and I drive carefully, trying to avoid the heaviest of it. This isn’t the shortest way, he says irritably. I tell him it’s the best way with the morning traffic. We start to argue. I am thinking of the last weekend Ruth and I had together, alone at Grannie’s house. I had picked her up on a Friday evening after I was finished work. She would spend the week in the hospital and then have a weekend out. She was desperate to get out of my father’s house when she stayed with him. The television was always on and there was always endless talk. Him sitting there not watching the blaring screen. I was tired that Friday night, I was doing badly at work. Gerry was covering for me. Canning was in shit form because the Japs had returned a consignment. I had argued with Ursula. Despite her understanding and support, she was jealous of the time I spent with Ruth. For as long as we’ve been together all she has known is this illness. I suppose it could have just been that she was tired of not seeing me and when she did it was hardly worth the seeing. My depression showed most clearly with her. This was another weekend when I would disappear with Ruth and come back Sunday night, tired and loathing the idea of having to get up on Monday morning to face those morons. Ruth wanted a Chinese takeaway. I asked her for directions and she said turn left and I did. No, left, she said. That was left, I said banging the steering wheel and she put her hand to her mouth for me to stop. She opened the car door and vomited onto the road. I am thinking about this as my father argues in the car over the shortest way home. He can’t drive and has no understanding of roads. The longest way is sometimes the shortest, I say to him. We are both quiet, alone in the loss of her.

When I leave him at the house he is frantic with wanting to know where I am going. I tell him I want to be alone. I want to go to Grannie’s house. I am desperate to be with Ruth, to be with what is left.

The sunflowers Ruth planted in the garden are in full bloom. I go around the back and let myself in through the kitchen. There is still the sharp odour of fresh paint. I had been painting the place while she was in the hospital as a surprise. She had done well that week and got out early, before I finished. When she came in the back door she had to run out because of the paint fumes. The chemotherapy made smells repugnant to her.

The paint job was never finished, the pink undercoat grimy with use. We had a phone installed in the house but it never rang, was never picked up. There was never any emergency. The drama of her dying was sirenless. I sit for a while in Grannie’s chair looking at the telephone. I lean over and pick it up, expecting it to be dead; clear electric buzz. There is tremendous tranquillity inside the walls. Finally, I rouse myself to go. There is the funeral to do.

*   *   *

The first thing my father wants to do is to get rid of everything. We drive to Grannie’s house and I begin loading all of Ruth’s belongings into the boot of the car. We shove everything into black plastic bags. He wants to take it all to the nuns, wants to wipe her out. I keep removing things from the boot—her Bible, the Flannery O’Connor stories, the three packs of Dunhill she didn’t get to smoke, her old pink jumper—and putting them on the backseat to save. Bits of her. Daddy is saying fuck quietly to himself. I laugh at the strangeness of hearing bad language coming out of his mouth and he glares at me. He is spending a long time walking around the house picking up things and putting them down again. He’s looking for a system. Room by room we fill bag after bag and carry them out to the car. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

After we drop the full load at the convent we drive to Dolly-mount strand where I used to go with Ruth from time to time. We would park the car close to the water’s edge, and sit there with the doors open, listening to the sea come in, and when the waves began to lap around the wheels of the car we would reverse back slowly, waiting again for it to catch us, reversing back a few feet at a time, toying with the risk of sinking into the softening sand. We would sit and listen to the waves. I tell him this now as we walk the length of the pier.

—What did you talk about?

—Nothing.

—Yous must have talked about something.

No. We didn’t talk much at all. I asked her if she’d go to that clinic in America if we got the money. She said she wouldn’t make it. He doesn’t believe me, thinks I’m holding some luminously private moments to myself, that I’m selfishly cherishing the profound and intimate conversations. But I am being honest. There was nothing left to say. We stop at the end of the pier and Daddy looks up at the statue of the Virgin Mary.

—Fuck all use she was when she was needed.

He looks at me, face of a naughty boy who has gone too far. As we walk back down the pier we link each other. It is the first time I have ever linked him and he is crying. I want to be far away from him. I have no stomach for his sadness. I will leave and not come back. He is ashamed of his tears. Tears have crumpled him into nothing. People are walking along Clontarf promenade. Dogs barking and chasing each other. All the years I cycled out here with him to work in the houses of the middle class I hated. He must have hated them too, the money they held so tightly. You wouldn’t do the window out the back if there’s a drop of paint left? No problem Mrs. The silent years of childhood by his side hating them and smiling at them and taking ten pence into my hand and saying oh thank you very much Mrs. There was one other time he cried I remember. One Christmas Day many years ago. It was the second Christmas after our mother had left. Ruth and I had been fighting. Suddenly he started crying and the two of us stopped and looked up at him, frightened that if he gave in to it all we would be alone. How friendless it was for him after she left, a life without adults.

We go to Jennings Funeral Home at the Five Lamps in North Strand. We have passed this way hundreds of times on our way into town to buy paint in Wigoders of Mary Street. I won’t always be around, you know that, he would say. You and your sister will have to take care of each other. That’s why you shouldn’t be fighting. There’s no one else will give a shite about you when you’re in trouble but your sister. Jimmy Mulligan works in Jennings and ask for him when I kick the bucket. I could not imagine him being dead—he was too big a man. As we grew older and he would tell us he wouldn’t always be there, that he’d be going soon, we would ask him when he was going and did he want a packed lunch. Fierce funny you are.

*   *   *

Mulligan sits with his hand in his chin listening about Ruth’s long illness. Already the story of her life coming out of my father’s mouth is sounding worn out at the elbows. Mulligan says yes, it’s been very hard on you, Francis.

—She was only young. The wife and now her.

Ma isn’t dead, I want to say. She’s worse than dead. I wish the slut was dead. He has some infuriating need to explain all to strangers. He knows Mulligan thirty years but they are strangers to each other, and yet he doesn’t understand this. Maybe he does, maybe he understands everything. I don’t know my father at all. Mulligan can tell I’m judging him, he takes my expression in slowly, pretends not to notice. He lets my father talk until finally he is out of words, sitting there like a toy that’s motor has stopped. Mulligan lifts up his book of coffins.

—We want the cheapest.

Mulligan nods at me and manages to ignore me at the same time. He puts the book in front of us. He begins to explain the various features of the coffins.

—The cheapest.

He smiles tightly and nods.

—This is a nice one, he says, tapping the book with a finger. Cheapest, too. It has gold-plated handles, but of course you won’t be able to lift the coffin by them. They’re plastic. Glued on. But it’s a solid piece. Fine wood.

He rubs his nose with a knuckle as if he’s a farmer selling a pig. He’s not going to spend much longer with us. He can see Daddy is ready and he slithers towards the sale. The word obsequious was invented for undertakers. He starts to list what else we might need.

—Nothing else, Sir.

—You’ll need a hearse?

—No.

—Ah Stephen the man’s right. Unless we put her on a pram, he laughs to make Mulligan feel more comfortable. The family disease—the effort to make strangers comfortable, to be liked. We decide on a hearse and one limousine for the two of us. Aunt Muriel will travel in it too. The bill is just over twelve hundred pounds. Six hundred for the hearse alone. We stare at Mulligan and my father repeats the price of the hearse.

—We didn’t have her insured.

—Yes. Well maybe someone has a car. A friend. That way you’d save on the limo.

—No. It’s alright. We’ll manage. We’ll have the limo, right?

Daddy looks at me, pleading with his eyes to go along. I stare at Mulligan, wanting him to understand he is profiting from grief. Outside, we argue about the need for the car. I’m worn out and agree with him, will agree with anything now.

*   *   *

The priest wants to meet with me to arrange the reading at the funeral and to say a few words. Father Macken had visited Ruth from time to time at the hospital, uninvited. She had no intention of giving her soul to him, and this is how it was, he would sit by her bed and pray for her, hoping she would come back to the church she had left. She had abandoned Catholicism, but not God. If she could have given Father Macken her soul, she would have, she would have emptied the brown paper bag of his grapes and slipped her soul into it for his care. The presbytery is ringed with barbed wire. He’s been broken into five times the previous year. I ring the bell on the outside gate and wait. He comes down the steps slowly, even though he’s a young man. He’s walking with the gravitas of the bishop he wants to be. He shows me into the sitting room and goes through the selected readings for the funeral service. I dislike them all and tell him so, and that, more importantly, my dead sister would not have cared for them. He seems to be as offended by me referring to Ruth as dead as he is by the effrontery of considering any passage of the bible inappropriate. He suggests I take a few minutes to find a suitable passage and leaves the room, wiping the palms of his hands on his thighs.

I look around the room for the first time: heavy floral wallpaper, bookshelves, dining room table with a vase of hydrangeas on it. I thumb through the bible, uninterested. Nothing is suitable. I shut the bible quickly and open it and stick a blind finger on the page—it is from the Book of Psalms, Lamedh. Your word, O Lord, is eternal. This would do, anything would as long as it wasn’t chosen by prickface. I wait long minutes for him to return. Reluctantly, he agrees to the reading but is unhappy I want to say a few words as well. It might upset people, he says. Might upset me not to say them, I say. He suggests I say my few words afterwards at the cremation and not in the church but I explain I want to say something to the neighbors who will not be at the cremation. He will give me the nod, he says.

*   *   *

My father disappears down to the church the morning of the funeral. Muriel and I wait an hour for him to show up so we can all go in the car. The doorbell rings. Ursula. Muriel lets her in. No love lost there. My father will be talking to whomever will listen, anything to distract himself. After getting the bloody limo it sits there with no one to go in it. I invite Ursula to accompany us in the limousine but she says it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to go as she isn’t family. I tell her I would like her to come with us but she says it is not the right thing to do. I am sick of her rigidness, her knowing what’s the right thing to do. We take the limousine to the church and she follows in her car. When I look around at her I can see the strain on her face. In a way, she is the only person outside the family who cares. She had brought rich soup to the hospital, lotion for Ruth’s bedsore legs, simple things that no one else did. But none of that matters—I am burning with dislike for her. Appropriate. What am I doing with a woman who says appropriate? People are blessing themselves as our car passes. This is what the black limousine is, a mobile stage for us to act out our sadness.

He is outside the church talking to neighbours.

—This is Mrs. White and Mrs. Grey. Do you remember them? You were only knee high to a grasshopper. I smile at them. Yes I remember. The bitch who made us eat our lunch in the garage and the bitch who didn’t pay us for over a month. The Whites, the Greys, the Browns, the Blacks, Protestants so dull they couldn’t pick good colours for names let alone their houses. He tells them Ruth and I had been very close, and they nod gravely affording me what they hope is a suitable degree of reverence. Mrs. O’Neill, the wife of the press secretary for the Taoiseach, is there. Didn’t pay us at all for the last job. That’s how they have it, is all my father said. But we’ll get our reward in the next life, he’d say.

—You’re needed in the church.

He looks at me as if he is about to be executed. Outside the church the pallbearers are starting to take the coffin out of the hearse. I ask them to wait and call my uncles over. I remember playing with them as a child but haven’t seen them since they moved to the Southside. The four of us lift the coffin. We buckle briefly under the weight of her. As we walk up the aisle I notice how full the large church is, fuller than it should have been. Who were these people, come to mourn a woman they did not know?

Father Macken is talking and no one is listening to him. His voice carries no understanding of Ruth. He mentions Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ and the joy of suffering and I glance at Muriel and smiles spread across the two of us. He comes down to shake hands with the family during the service, and he skips me. I am astonished I am passed over, and Macken becomes more human, smaller, less priestly.

The time for the reading comes and I walk soberly up to the altar, open the bible at the section marked by the brown taper and stare at the words and start to read and then stop, only slowly absorbing that it is one of the passages Macken had chosen.

—This isn’t it, I say, and then look up shocked that I have said it aloud into the microphone. People stare. I look down and pray to find the passage. I cannot remember where the section is. Lambeth. No, that’s the place in Wales. I had picked it so quickly. Then I turn the page and there, like a small miracle, it is. I read it carefully, and when done, I turn and look at Macken. Macken looks at me blankly, without resentment, the look of foe respecting foe.

The service ends and he does not give me the nod to say the few words. Muriel puts a hand on me and says to let it go. But I am not going to let it go. I am not being bullheaded. I am cold inside and still. I am doing what Ruth would have wanted. The priest is stepping off the altar, people are starting to walk up the aisle to pay their respects, the pallbearers are making their way to the coffin. I ask them to wait and they look from me to Macken and when they get no sign from him they move forward. I tell them not to touch the coffin. Macken wets his lip with his tongue. My hands tremble with the look in the man’s eyes. What was wrong that he would not allow us to grieve in our own way? I ask him where I should stand and he goes up and pulls the microphone down off the altar. I unfold the sheet of paper I have made notes on. I begin to remember her. Her patience with the scum we have for neighbours. Her courage, her humour, her despair, her love of God but not of organised religion. That does it. Macken grabs me by the shoulder and pulls me but I push him gently and continue. Then it’s over. I’ve had my say and feel foolish. I want to carry Ruth out as we carried her in but am overwhelmed with the people gathered around us. People I don’t know, people I do know and don’t like, people who don’t like me, people who didn’t like Ruth, they line up with their words and their reasons for being there. Uncle Aidan, a man uncomfortable with touching, embraces me.

I spend as much time as possible alone, but it is difficult to put Daddy out of my mind. I am full of resentment towards him—I tried for a long time to show him that this day would come and he needed to talk to Ruth before she died. Week after week we had sat on either side of her bed talking to each other, and she watched us as if watching a game of Ping-Pong. How well intentioned but impossibly stupid I was to foist my understanding on him. It was like this with everyone who came to visit her. The tentative How are you? was never really a question at all. Ruth said hospital is an unbarred prison. You enter, they take away your clothes, force a routine on you, force muck they call food down you, make you share your days and nights with strangers, and the visitors, the visitors are the worst of all; slinking in, fear mingled with guilt, and out with embarrassment, relief trailing behind them.

*   *   *

The scattering of the ashes. I telephone him to arrange it. That’s taken care of, he says. It is not even a week since her death. Paddy Howard took me out to Howth and we did it there, he says. I am glad he has done it that way. I need to hate him. Now I can leave Ireland finally, without guilt. It’s as if Ruth has died twice and I have been excluded from this more private funeral by my own flesh. I hate him. I hate him because I am closer to Ruth than anyone, no one could love her as much as I do. I didn’t think she could be loved more, even by the man who had helped bring her into the world. The vision of Daddy climbing a hill with his favourite customer to scatter his daughter’s ashes sundered the idea of who I was in the family. He had lost his only daughter. He, who had brought her into the world, and raised her, he alone would watch her leave.

Only in New York years later did I begin to feel how wrapped up in myself I was, and when I told Holfy about this, she told me I must ask him what happened. I couldn’t. Daddy had been through enough. I did not want to bring him more pain. This is only partly true. Fear and anger kept me quiet. I was not certain what I was afraid of but I knew I was angry for being left out. Five years later when I did ask him, I did it in Lone Tree, four and a half thousand miles away. Daddy had only recently decided he could afford a telephone and when it rang he associated it with danger and expense. He went quiet when I asked him about the scattering. I don’t remember about all that, he says. The contempt I am trying to rid myself of rises up. He isn’t even sure where the hill is.

—Paddy didn’t walk all the way with me if that’s what you mean. I walked on a bit on my own. It was a lovely day. Very still. There wasn’t a sound or a murmur anywhere. I got to where I thought was a good spot and said a little prayer, and I opened the urn and scattered the ashes. But just then a wind came up and blew the ashes in my face. It got in me eyes. Paddy said to go for a pint but I didn’t think that was right so he drove me back to the house.

I am shaken when he tells me the story, not because of the wind, I can dismiss that as pure chance, but because he tells it so succinctly. I understand in the calmness of his voice how I have wronged him. He is an old dog after being abandoned by his owner and having no understanding of why he is alone. I see him differently through the few letters he has sent to me in America. Tentatively, humbly, he offers his son advice. He says he knows nothing of life and says he makes many mistakes. His age shows in the shakiness of his inelegant handwriting. His letters with their dates and their regular indentations at the beginning of every paragraph remind me that he is not just from a different generation; he is a man from a different era. And, despite the poverty he endured in the early years, he had held us together as a family. Nothing, not even our mother broke our family. Nothing, except death.

*   *   *

My mind died for a long time during her illness, and immediately after her death. I thought of her every day after she was cremated, though of her as ashes. Every night my last thought was her in the coffin in the mortuary at the hospice. She had been alone there. I cannot shake from my mind that she was still alive then, and scared. Thought of her as dead flesh, as ashes, as gone.

The Sunday before she died I took her out to the front of the hospice and wheeled her down to the Grotto. She was running out of cigarettes, and I said I’d go around to the shops to get her some. I walk down the long drive, and, as soon as I turn the bend, run. She might die there and then in the wheelchair. She is weaker than I have ever seen her. The shopkeeper is chatting amiably to a customer who is wearing a pink hat. Why remember that pink hat when I can’t remember the sound of her voice? While I wait for the shopkeeper to be done talking I pull some sweets off a shelf. Maybe she would like some chocolates. Biscuits, too. A Sunday newspaper. When the man finally serves me I ask for eighty Dunhill. Always Dunhill when she was in the money. I shove them in the bag and rush out. No matches. I run back and throw ten pence on the table and shout matches at the man who has returned to his conversation with the pink hat. I stop running at the bend in the drive, slow to a fast walk. Her head is down, her chin on her chest, asleep. A cigarette, trailing smoke, held loosely between her fingers. I say her name quietly and she opens her eyes slowly, like a cat waking from a hot sleep. The cigarette drops from her hand. She can tell from my face I am thinking how close the moment is. She looks ashamed of herself, of the indignity of dying, dying before she becomes a woman. She reaches down to pick up the burning cigarette off the tarmac and stops half way, as she does I can see her as a teenager crouched for the four-hundred-metre relay, digging her spikes into the hard grass for leverage, the fastest finisher in the school. She could be behind thirty metres by the time she was passed the baton and still hit the tape first. I pick up the cigarette and hand it to her, but she shakes her hand minutely.

—Sick of being sick, she says.

*   *   *

The night before she died I slept badly. Sadness finally exhausted me and I dozed. My mind fell in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, morphine drugging Ruth into death, Ruth calling for our mother, Ruth calling, screaming an animal scream at death. I thought I should take her out of the hospice tomorrow and bring her to Tivoli Road. I thought about getting up now and visiting her. It was nearly three in the morning. I felt her mind awake, felt it moving through me, through the streets, through the houses, felt her breathing a goodbye, each breathing in a heavy triumph and each breathing out a resignation; soon it would be the last breathing out, no more words would be spoken, no more thoughts would form. She would be lucid. Everyone asleep in the hospice, the night nurse listening to the radio in the curtained office. I fell back asleep and in my sleeping, she slipped away. Nothing bit like that single regret.

Whenever I look at her photograph on my desk I freeze and am able to think of nothing, not even her. Eventually, I begin to notice the photograph less and less. The funeral begins to occupy my thoughts. I question my motives. Was I no different from the priest who wanted to save her soul in his fashion when I wanted to celebrate her memory in mine? Perhaps I was looking for attention by dramatically and poignantly making a stand at the funeral with the priest. Perhaps I was no better than the hypocrites who shook my hand in their effort to assuage their guilt. I wasted so many days not writing when I promised her I would write every day. The most horrific truth is forgetting, forgetting and going on. But there is no other choice. The only option is to live a fiercely joyous life knowing full well that misery leans against every street corner.