Kidney Punch

Kidney Punch
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Death is the baby that is born with us, and walks with us through a life.
it is the chink where the light comes in, a hairline crack in the giant Universe that allows us to ease our tiny souls in and out.
It is our shadow self.
I am telling the Matron that I subsist - when not fed by others - on a diet of caffeine, nicotine and chocolate, when I realize she is also telling ME something.
Important.
Listen to this says the small voice in my head and my eyes fill with tears as I hear her explain that Siobhán is being called home.
To be present, to be in THIS moment, I find that I am rhythmically punching myself softly in the right hand side of my lower back, again and again.
And as I notice I become aware that I am punching myself and so her words seem to come from a long way off, as if she is whispering through wet newspaper.
She has also noticed the punching.
It is impossible to stop.

Her calm voice is a million miles away, and I smell the cinnamon candle from the visitors toilet mingle with the hot lilies beside the radio, incongruously playing pop music.
A matter of time.

I sit in my Mother’s bedroom holding her hand and crying while the radio plays Theolonious Monk’s Ruby My Dear

And I turn off all the lights and sit in candle glow with the window open, and brush my Mother’s hair.
She is deeply deeply asleep.

I do not really believe She is dying hour by hour.
As we all are.
She looks frail as we leave, my sister and I, and I look back in at the small white head, leaning to one side and I have an ominous feeling of dread, a foretaste.
At home, I am unsettled.

I take a sleeping tablet and dream that I am woken by the phone with the name of the nursing home flashing on the screen.
I am woken by the phone with the name of the nursing home flashing on the screen

“It’s time to come in” the Matron says and I have to get to my Dad.
I run through the streets with unbrushed hair.

He is sitting in the kitchen playing his accordion..
I look at the half cup of tepid tea on the table, the tannin stain inside the pink porcelain.
“You know that thing you have dreaded for years?” I ask and watch as he covers his face with his hands, and the accordion strap falls unheeded down his arm.
“Has it happened?” he whispers.
“No, but it is” I say and I stand behind him then and rub his stiff shoulders while he wipes his eyes with a torn tissue and from somewhere deep inside of me I hear a voice saying all the right things, about strength and acceptance, and doing it for her,
For her.
We are as alike as two peas in a pod he and I, needy, emotional, highly strung, liable to revert to hysteria as a default setting, so alone in the kitchen I feel the Dooley in me elbow aside the Mahon in me as if to say move along, nothing to see here, I got this and play a blinder.

My Father sits with her all day, holding her hand, sometimes talking, sometimes not.

And We listen to "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" playing softly on the radio.
If it takes forever I will wait for you …………………………

On a slippy slidey sofa bed in the upstairs office I lie wide eyed in the unusual country darkness - listening to the screaming wind outside the sealed glass.
It is a banshee.
I have to get up and sit staring out into the blackness, as the wind howls and wails, hurrying the clouds across the moon, peekaboo, peekaboo, and I think this is happening, come to peace with it.
I open the window a crack although it is icy, to allow the wind to sneak in, to remove the awful horror of the feral cat keening, to let it gain access to the interior instead of screeching outside to come in.
Come in, come in why don’t you instead of screaming out there? 

and I look up into the mottled sky and think - My Mother is going out there, out among those rushing clouds, that peekaboo moon.

There is a nest of some insect things caught in the hinge of the frame, unopened for months.
The polished ebony of a dancers shoes, a slash of metallic green on their wings, I am repulsed when I see them slither and move, tumbling over and under each other, until I realize they are not buzzing and alive, but merely blowing in the fluff that has harnessed them eternally in a macabre dance of death.

Siobhán’s cheeks are two scarlet slashes against the white linen, and I feel a brick swinging in the wide open spaces of my heart .
My eyes hurt from not closing them, looking for God.

And I light the lavender burner and sit.
I sit with the light streaming in as the mist coats the window,
and the Spring Sun illuminates the greenery of the sill,
plants bought for occasions and just because................
I sit with the pain of loss
and I sit with the quiet figure of Death,
waiting in the corner,
who sits like an elderly gentlemen with a soft hat on his knee,
having doffed his cap and shrugged his shoulders,
as if to say,
- " just doing my job here " – Nothing personal.
It’s all personal.
Since I was a child I have watched the mourners in the top pew, and imagined,
and empathised,
and craned my head to get a look as the box slowly passes,
the muffled crying,
the broken ravaged sobs.
Now it is my turn.
To every season turn, turn, turn.
I take the chance of a lift,
to go home and feed my babies,
never knowing that the man in the corner was eyeballing a fob watch on a chain,
and that the sands of the hour glass were running out,
until as the car drove away and I put my key in the door, the dogs already barking with delight
the phone rings and I have to go back........
NOW.
My stomach turns.
I look wild eyed up and down the street.
I have forgotten how to call a cab.
And as I try to breathe -
in a burst of sunlight
so that I am dazzled,
a car slows and the window drops and a man’s voice shouts
"How's Siobhan?"
And I say "bring me there" already getting in the back seat.
He takes off in a burst, fuming at traffic lights and I watch the grey streets and green fields flash past from a detached calm space I am unfamiliar with, as I listen to him talk.
It is as it is.
Could the irony be that the Universe who has watched me document every step of her journey, leave me absent from the finale,
They are all around the bed when I get in,
and She has waited for me.
"Read something beautiful " says the sister and hands me an extract from the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
and through blurred eyes
I talk about the stranger who lives inside us,
and walks with us from the moment we are born
and whom we spend our whole lives running away from,
and Siobhan left us quietly,
left us hanging on a breath,
until there was none,
and my Father said "She's gone" and dissolved.

She was the sunset, and the moonlit sky, and the butterfly,
She was the smell of Lavender at midnight around my lonely brothers shoulders as he stared into the fire.
She is the energy and the presence that has nestled deep in the centre of me,
in the wide open spaces of my heart,
where the wind blew through.

Sometimes at the end of warm nights,
when sleep had stiffened her limbs,
I watched the sky,
the images of us reflected in the glass,
the scattered clouds collecting us,
allowing through the mirror
the memories of that other time,
of us as children in our Nana's house,
Blind Bill and Birds Custard
of Girly, and Handsome, and Tawnish,
of Duck Arse & Dickett & Keyhole Kate
of nights in the Club and visits to graves,
Of bottles of porter, and Crotty’s cakes
when it was her
leaning into the big chair,
bracing and placing and holding,
her own.
Some times the memories weave such a spell
that I stand with bent knees, braced,
holding her,
looking into that other time,
between my Mother and my mind,
her illness
and her tiny miracles,
between my fears and her strength,
and looked at the big sky that holds us both
Adrift

In the end, my Mother died as she had lived, - gently.
With everyone in the room that she had loved,
and who had loved her,
telling her.
And when she was gone,
and I heard the last sigh come as the sobbing started,
I opened the window and let the screaming wind take her spirit, and they blew away together, and it became quietly calm and the sky cleared.
And so it is with disbelief and in a state of detached numbness I hold her wedding photograph handed to me by the undertaker in her black coat,
as the box containing Siobhán is lowered into the soggy clay,
the canvas strap being fed slowly through the hands of her son,
and She tilts,
as the woman in the black coat mumbles
"aisy does it, Let her down aisy, aisy does it"
until with a soft thump -
She is back in the damp earth, in the womb of the land.
And I turn in my black coat to face the outstretched hands, the hyacinth mouths.
Now I hold her in the secret chamber of my bursting heart that is locked to all but those who know the password, and hold her always in my mind, and honour her in words
free and released, soaring in the sky, as her journey not ends....... but in fact, begins.
Again.

In the silent church, I creep across to the coffin with my small cosmetic bag of creams and brushes and from within the centre of me bursts out a harsh sob that hurts my chest, bursts out like the stuffing from a fat couch, "Do it first lads, and then we'll work out how"
And the man on the radio sang -
"What'll I do
when you
are far away
and I am blue,
what'll I do?"
Masquerading behind your every fear about death is the face of your shadow self, your soul partner, coming to wrap themselves around you, and lead you gently home.
And so I turn in my black coat to the outstretched hands and the hyacinth mouths
Siobhán stayed long enough to teach us how to let her go, and so it was on the last day of winter that the wind carried her soul back to the Universe it had come winking out from, and after all the storms and gales a spectacular sunset bathed the green fields and the white gate, and a full moon rose to a shining peak in the lilac sky.

.
Death is a tragedy that only time can heal, Love, the only memory Alzheimers couldn’t steal.
MDM