I said at the beginning that this is about Benny Mason. Not about me and not about my ma, but I’ve got to tell about her. There’s no way out of it. I’ve just got to get it off my chest.
She was Kathleen Foley before she married Da to become Mrs. Tim Callaghan. Pictures of her taken when she was at Dublin College show how pretty she was. I look at the pictures and it’s terrible hard trying to see my ma as a girl — my brain has got to shift some really stiff gears — but it’s her, all right, a slim shy slip of a girl with green eyes and red hair. She didn’t change all that much — until she got sick.
Da took time off from work last July so he could be with her. He took me and Annie with him every day to the hospital because Ma was dying and soon she would be gone and we would never see her again.
Toward the end Da tried to leave Annie with Aunt Maeve and Crazy Uncle Rufus, thinking it would upset her too much to see Ma’s desperate condition, what the disease was doing to her. But Annie started to throw a fit, so Da let her come. The three of us spent every day by her bed, leaving only in shifts to grab a sandwich or a drink in the hospital cafeteria.
Aunt Maeve and Crazy Uncle Rufus popped in for a short visit every day, too. Lots of times, Da went back again and spent the night there with Ma while Aunt Maeve slept over at our place.
Going down in the hospital elevator at the end of each day, leaving Ma behind, I felt like I was running out on her. Da never said much, but he held Annie’s hand and hung an arm round my shoulder as we walked to the car. Sometimes, when we stayed late and Annie was wrecked with fatigue, Da carried her in his arms and I held the car door open while he sat her in the front passenger seat and buckled the seat belt around her.
For over a month we watched Ma wasting away. She was like a Polaroid picture in reverse, brilliant color fading away to nothing. She slept most of the time. When she was awake she wasn’t saying much, and what she did say didn’t always make sense, except for the word “home.” She knew she was dying and she wanted to die at home. That was clear enough.
We brung her home and Da and Aunt Maeve took care of her. She didn’t last long, but at least she died in her own bed with her family around her.
Me and Annie, we couldn’t believe she was gone, that we would never see her again.
We were left only with snapshots. And her things, the closet full of her clothes, where I go when I skip school sometimes and I’ve got the house to myself to remember the smell of her.
Ma left us.
That was back in August.
Kathleen Foley Callaghan’s ashes are now a part of Mosquito Creek Trail, behind where we live, where she’d started to jog two or three times a week when we first got here from Dublin.
After the memorial service, I walked the trail with Da and Annie carrying the urn in my backpack. At a spot by the creek where a small waterfall tumbles over the rocks, Da opened the urn and shook it and we watched the ashes blow away in the wind. Then we sat by the creek and listened to the birds.
I was thinking of Ma, the way she was before the sickness. Now she was a tiny part of a Canadian creek bottom and its soil and a part of its trees and grasses.
Annie was sniffling.
Da said to us, “Your ma isn’t gone. She’s here.” He waved his hands around at the sky and the creek and the trees. “She’s here,” he said again. Then he put his arms round us. “And she’s here in both of you, too. Kathleen Foley Callaghan will never die as long as you both live. Do you believe that?”
I did.