Family ties were crucially important to the Celts. I thought it would make for a nice symmetry to invite a husband and wife to contribute letters, so here we follow Angela’s letter in the previous section with a letter from her husband, John MacKenna, to his late mother.
Letter to My Mother
Dear Una,
Last night I had a strange but comforting dream. I rarely dream about you now, not like I did in the weeks and months after you died, but last night you were there. And the unusual thing about it was that, although I was in my fifties in the dream, you were a woman in her forties, as though, year by year since your death you had grown younger.
Anyway, in this dream, you were sitting on the wall of the cemetery at Coltstown, outside Castledermot. It was an evening in early summer and the trees that skirt that sleeping ground were in full leaf, the cherry blossoms hanging in fists from the branches near the road and you were reading a book of poetry and swinging your legs, more relaxed than I ever remember seeing you in life.
And then word came, don’t ask me how – on the wind, perhaps. Word that your eldest son had died, word winging its way across the Atlantic from the sunny heart of Carolina. And, in the dream, you left your book on the cemetery wall and walked up between the stones to the plot where you and Jack are buried. He was setting a table for tea, it was right there on the site of your grave and you told him about your son’s death and he put his arm around your shoulder and then he said: ‘Will I set another place, for Jarlath, at the table?’ You nodded.
When I woke, I felt a surge of reassurance and warmth, a surge of gratitude to you for bringing that hopeful feeling and I was reminded – and sometimes at this remove I need reminding – of the warmth of your welcome for our friends when we brought them home; of your love of books; of your concern for others; of the fact that so rarely in life did you allow yourself to sit and swing your legs on some low wall and let the world go by. Instead you were scrimping and saving to get us through school or college, to put us on the road to somewhere rather than nowhere.
I was gladdened by that dream and by the thought of you and my father and brother sharing a quiet meal on a summer evening while all around you the birds sang and the cherry blossom hung in the still air, waiting, like the rest of us, for the time when we will fall.
As always – thank you for being there to say that everything will be alright.
John