Anniversary


The First Year

This day last year as kettles were boiling for tea up and down the country,
 the Matron placed her fingers on my Mothers neck and called it.
5.31pm  -  End of Life.
One announces a birth, one pronounces a death, but one rarely actually speaks about the process of either.
The panting pains as a new human arrives to scream a lungful of air -
The chain stoking rattle as another empties their lungs forever.
The first breath -  the last gasp.
Grief is a funny thing.
The way you think about it, imagine it, dread it.
It’s never what you expect.
The balance beam of my place in the world snapped a chain, and swung loose.
 Months with bent head braced waiting for a Guillotine of Grief to fall.
 Not in a crash of blood and bone, but rather a slowly sliding scale of blade that chafes and cuts.
People confiding on wet windy corners, 
under inside - out umbrellas, the bag of logs dripping at your feet,
red rimmed rivers rescued in rain...............
People confiding across Post Office counters, in whispers, while the Queue coughs.
People holding out liver spotted hands to hold your own gloved fingers
People telling tales of feeling the lost person all around them night and day.
Day and night.   Day in day out.
And all the time I knew I could say this day last year, and this day last year, and this day last year .......
Tomorrow I can’t.
Time will erase my “this day last year” into “remember the time”
The Dead disappear into us.
I have swallowed my Mother in tears.
In the chaos of her gentle leave-taking I released her and became her all at once.
The Dead disappear into us.
I swallowed a sliver of her soul in an open mouthed sob.
And that tiny shred began its lengthy journey into the wide open spaces of me where the clean wind blew through, floating in the labyrinth of my internal intricacies, nudging and bobbing, sinking down into my core, and coiled like a seahorse, attached herself to the fibre of my being.
Baby on Board.
Nine months after her leaving I gave birth to a novel, about her, in her words.
In her voice, the soft voice that had been silenced by a disease.
My Mother lives on in me, not as a memory but as a vital presence as tangible as the table.
It is in the way I hold my head, or notice things, in the way I phrase a line, in the way some people call me by her name, Siobhán.
The Dead disappear into us.
And now when grief comes, when it rears its unpredictable head and smarts  my eyes, or catches my breath,  I am reminded it is only the gentle prod of a Mother, reminding me that not only was she here , she always is.




Siobhán as a child
MDM January 2016

The Memoir "Scourged" is now available on Amazon
Author Michelle Dooley Mahon

 http://amzn.com/0993277314

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