This Time Last Year .................

Tonight as I sat in her darkened room, lit only with Christmas tree lights, rubbing Siobhan's hand where she had a ring cut off today, I reminded her of an episode of my childhood.
It is all I can do to prompt the vast recall of memory that entwines us. 

 And so I talk of old times, and times past and they come blushing in,

  tippytoeing like a ballerina on point, afraid to break the hush.

The soundtrack of my Mother’s life now is her daughter’s voice.
The room she lives in is silent.
Apart from the steady thrum of machinery into her electric air bed, the faint voices permanently calling from the halls
for tea, for a nurse, for Bridie.
One evening in late summer I sat by the open window listening to the water trickling down the fountain in the garden and heard the plaintive sounds of singing coming from the sun room.
One elderly man had begun to softly sing a snatch of a song, one no doubt he had often sung in happier times, and his chorus was picked up, first tentatively and then surer - the voices rising and dipping in a faint reedy choir.

Enclosed nuns singing the Magnificat quietly as they observe their perpetual adoration on red velvet kneelers could not have sung sweeter.

 Monks chanting "Om mahne pehme hung" draped in their saffron robes could not have been more connected. There was a magic about those voices and the recall of the familiar words brought comfort.
Like a prayer.
I looked wistfully at the dictaphone on the air cushion and cursed the fact I had not more cassettes.
When I was a small child I visited my Nana Dooley in her home in Carlow and always slept in the same bed as my Mam. - As she was caring for her Mother at the time, all of the children - siblings and cousins - were as familiar with the geography of this room as I - Her own Mam sleeping in the other double bed across the chimney breast where all I could see of her was a bump in the blankets and the small hills of her feet.

 She and I went to bed at the same time. She, at the back window overlooking her roses and knowing who was downstairs Toping by the rattle of the latch. 

Me, at the front window, overlooking the houses and children allowed out still to play Heck-the-beds, and in the gap at the corner of the crescent - the railway tracks that all night had a syncopated che /che che/ che soundtrack as they carried people and goods to Naas, Newbridge, Kildare Town, Leixlip, Maynooth and on into Dublin.

There was always the sound of a solitary dog howling like a coyote.

 The room I lay in smelt of carbolic soap, and Dettol, and sometimes the commode.

 Lying in the dark- staring at the framed picture of the Sacred Heart permanently displaying his injury lit by a tiny flame - listening to the voices of the adults downstairs was anaethema to me. 

I wanted to be down there in the fog of smoke and laughter, drinking club orange and eating all the chocolate rings out of the tins of biscuits. 

  Or maybe given a pound after bouncing on a drunken Uncles lap and asked to sing a yella belly song for them. I wanted my Mam more.
Of course I played to the gallery, and it was only on very rare occasions that I would open the door to the stairs and sing from behind it.
One morning as she dressed hurriedly in the still dim room I sat up and whispered "where are you going?"
Whisht, says she rolling up her tights - I am running down to first mass in the Cathedal, I wont be long.
I flung the covers off me and began to dress.
I'm coming
Despite her protestations I accompanied her through the quiet grey Sunday morning streets, with the curtains closed the length of the avenue and into the massive Cathedral. There too, the choir was faintly heard balanced high on their forbidding platform, and the sound of the organist and the combined voices made me turn to face them despite the disapproving glances of the old women in their black mantillas .
On our way home Siobhan took me into McDarby's and bought the biggest cornet with a flake.
This little madam had no breakfast and I'm afraid she might take a "weakness " on me  she explained,
I reminded her of this tonight and she listened carefully. 

  It is all she can do. 

She is my confessor, my best pal, my Mother.
My voice has ALWAYS been the soundtrack of her life.

Siobhan opened her own eyes last night for a few moments.
Dad is still low, but coping. I told him today about the man I saw the other night. 

Marching down to order coal I took a short cut through a quiet street. In a house full of flats, the bottom one had the curtains open. The room was small and sparse.  A kitchen/diner combi thing, a bed-sit if you will.  In one corner was an elderly man asleep sideways in an upright wingback fireside chair, but there was no fire. 

In the middle of the room was an electric heater  plugged into the wall, but dragged out into the centre of the floor space. 

On the window sill was a single tiny lighting  candle in a blue glass.
My absolute heart jumped in my absolute chest.
I found it unbearably poignant and sad and stood staring in for a good 5 minutes. At the same time as wondering what I could do, I am wondering who is he?  What's the back story? Has he anyone coming in? - Should I have rung the bell and almost certainly given him a heart attack, or is it enough to bear witness.
There is an old Yiddish saying that goes

 "You turn around it's Yom Kippur, You turn around it's Hannukah.
Life is steadily moving on for all of us, and Tempus Fugit and all that jazz. It just makes me so unutterably sad to see people discarded. In the East the aged are prized for their wisdom and life experience and are revered and cosseted. In the West they are placed in Ghetto's and forgotten. Some nights when I leave Siobhans "Home" I want to do cartwheels in the frozen grass after what I have seen.
My back would never allow this.
As She herself would have said of me back in the day -
"Christmas or Easter, there is always either an arse or an elbow on that child!"

One month away from the 4th Christmas his wife will spend in a nursing home my Dad sits home alone. He has finally hit a wall. It had become apparent lately that he was low - Unable to sleep, with no appetite and no interest in things, and a new departure - tears.
It is not easy to watch your Father cry.
I cry at the drop of a hat. I am outrageously spontaneous and moved to tears by the smallest of things, children, animals, ads, movies, other people, books, pretty much anything.

I don't make a production about it.

 It is as much a part of me as having green eyes. I like to bawl and get it over with. I tell other people to go ahead and have a good roar. It is shedding. It is an emotional release. It is good for broads AND dudes. I don't need an arm around me or I will be worse. I can have a good old cry marching around a supermarket and then sniff and examine the prices of things as if it never happened.
Seeing Little Thomasina cry in a restaurant while the waiter hovered was tough.
Having a conversation across a kitchen table with a pen and paper to draw a rough sketch of the human brain and the endorphins and seratonin that regulate mood was much harder.

 We both cried.

 Having a talk that drew on an arsenal of religions, spirituality, acceptance, depression, naivety and Lazarus was infinitely harder.
He has begun to talk.
In fact he has talked more, and to people more qualified than me, more often and for longer in the last week than in the last decade. Our attention has been so focused on Siobhan that maybe we have been remiss and overlooked the strongest link in the chain.
Any chain is only as strong as its links.
As a family I feel that we are in a giant cement mixer that is being washed at the end of the day. After the soft sloppy cement is finished, the rocks and water are thrown in. It is in this phase of cleaning and polishing I feel we are being made brighter, harder, stronger.

I feel I may come out the other side shining like an Emerald, ten foot tall and bulletproof.
We are minding and spoiling him and begging him to take time out to nourish the soul. I think he may actually listen and these weeks may be cathartic.
Siobhan would understand.
We are Eternal.

..................."to morrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
to the last syllable of recorded time,
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools,
the way to dusty death, Out, Out, brief candle!"
(Macbeth)