The Day of the Dead

Every year in your cemetery we have The Blessing of The Graves.  The Rosary is recited and the priests sprinkle holy water on the graves. The dead are remembered in prayers. Beforehand, each family tidies up the graves of their loved ones, fresh flowers are brought.

Most people come and stand at the grave of a parent or grandparent.  This is sad for them but it is at least the correct order in which things should happen. Some of us have sadder stories.

In your row of graves, there are, including you, six babies, of these the other five were born sleeping. You got to see the light of day at least and we are glad that you did have those few weeks.

The lad buried beside you was twenty-one and killed in a road traffic accident.
Three graves up, there is a teenage girl who took her own life.
There is a young mother who died suddenly an hour after giving birth to her third. baby. Her other children were only toddlers at the time.
All these graves to remind us how dreadfully unfair life can be.

Time is marching on. There are new graves every year.  At the moment, when I drive past the cemetery on the way to your brother's nursery, I can see your grave from the road. At night, I can see if your solar lights or candles are lit.

 But the row next to yours is filling up.  If four more people die, another grave will be placed behind yours and I will no longer be able to see your grave from the road. I am not looking forward to that day.

One day, your grave will be opened again and my body will be lowered down next to yours, deep in the dirt. Some people believe that that will be the end of the conscious part of me. If that's true, I will join you in oblivion and leave life to the living.

I choose to believe though that my consciousness will live  on in another realm and will meet yours again. Since you left our world, you have given me little hints and signs that this is so. I choose to believe that this is so because it is the only way that this can ever be made right.

When You Were Real

You were only here for seven weeks. You were in my tummy for 28 weeks before that of course, but we didn't really know you.

After the seven weeks were up, and you were gone, I thought of you as an angel, soul or spirit. Someone whose presence is always here although the part of you that was physical was gone.  I talk to you all the time in my head and talk about you a lot to others.

Your brother, the youngest of our boys, talks about you as if you are living another life elsewhere. "Sylvie-Rose is a toddler now" he says as if he has the same image I have of the child you should have been, growing up three years behind him. 

One day, he said something that broke my heart. He was talking about you, when you were here, when you occupied the Moses basket and had your nappy changed and were fed expressed milk from a bottle as you had only ever latched on rather lazily at my breast.

He said "When Sylvie-Rose was here, when she was Real."

And it seemed so harsh, that truth, than when you can't see someone, hear them, touch them, then they aren't Real, not in the true sense of the word.

There is comfort in Reality. Comfort in hugging your brothers, physically feeling their presence, knowing with absolute certainty that they are least are Real and no-one can tell me they're not.  I can't ever truly have that with you. I feel that you have sent me signs, little reassurances that you're still with me. Nothing that I could ever prove was truth, no Empirical Evidence of your Reality.  Just about enough for me to say "That was Sylvie-Rose" And on bad days, I don't even have that.

All I have is faith, hope and love that floats out somewhere into the ether. And I miss the reality of you.

Not Being Grateful

"Well, at least you have your boys" said my friend two years ago, trying to think of something to make me feel better.
Or the lady who had struggled to have her one child telling me that she had had to have IVF and that I should be "grateful for what I had"

Oh, that it were that easy! But it's really not.  I adore my boys. They are the reason I get up in the morning, the reason I carry on and in all honesty, if I didn't have them here, I'm not sure that I would have carried on.

It's not the case that if you have a lot of children, losing one here or there will have less of an impact on you.. The hole that they leave after they have gone is so much bigger than the the hole that was there before we had them. They come, these children and they put down deep roots in your heart. And when they are ripped away, you are left with a huge crater in the centre of your world and you are left, standing with your living children, teetering at the edge of the abyss.   The hole doesn't get filled in with the passage of time either. Perhaps the edges soften but the hollow remains.

I do hug my boys a little tighter now, worry more than I should when they are out of my sight, I fear more that I will lose them, because when things have gone very wrong, you lose faith in the statistics that lied and told you everything would be fine.

But grateful for this shattered life? No.

Rooted

When we bought our house, the home you only lived in for four short days, Sylvie-Rose, we intended it to be the last house we lived in. A nice big family home with a large south-facing garden, ideal for children, lots of children.

Just as well. You are buried just a little way up the road in a plot in the local graveyard. We call it your garden, mainly because "grave" sounds wrong for a little child.  I visit your garden every other day. In the beginning it was every single day. I like to tend your garden, I have learned a lot about gardening since you died. I have learned that plants will only grow in conditions that suit them, that some can't stand the exposure to the wind in that graveyard, that mulching is needed in Spring, that some plants look tiny and delicate to begin with but then grow too tall for your little garden,

You have a small lawn that needs to be strimmed in summer, you have fairy houses and figurines, porcelain toadstools and mostly small alpine  plants, a few dwarf evergreen shrubs with bright berries for colour in autumn and winter,  There are solar lights which work in summer but in winter I rely on sanctuary candles which burn for seven days. I never like your garden to be dark.

And I know now that I can never move too far away from your garden. Even when I return from a week-long holiday, I hate the way it begins to look unkempt. This village will always be my home now. This need to put down roots was never in my nature. Your grandfather loved to travel and so did I.  I liked the idea of wandering from place to place, of perhaps retiring in another part of the world. That won't happen now. I am rooted where you are in a little plot,  8 foot squared in a village in Ireland. And that is how it will be.

The Angel in The Room

It is usually referred to as "The Elephant in The Room", that topic we don't mention in case we cause hurt or cause a fuss or a row. But I won't have you called an elephant, so an angel it will be, whether folk want to think of it literally or figuratively.

My brother had an important gig the other night. You would have loved your uncle, Sylvie-Rose, he is the sort of uncle who turns you upside down and swings you around and brings you foraging for blueberries up a mountain in Wexford. Your brothers love to see him and hero-worship him.

But aside from being the best sort of uncle he is a talented musician and I did want to be at this gig. In the ladies, I met a friend of your uncle, also a musician. Successful. I knew her, I had seen her on the TV. I like her songs.

She knew who I was. "You're J's sister, you have lots of blonde boys"  Yes, Sylvie-Rose, your brothers are all blond boys.  All, like you, had dark hair when born which slowly turned blonde, like I was as a child, like your Dad is now. But she didn't mention you. Does she know about you, I wonder, did she hear that J had a niece who died, seven short weeks after joining us here. And I feel awkward because I don't know if she knows. I want people to know about you too. Perhaps she knows and doesn't say, possibly she feels awkward too. People are conditioned not to mention our children who die. Perhaps, here, at this happy event, she might upset me and she wouldn't want that.

And I don't mention you either. Because I don't want to embarrass her, I don't want to be Miss Havisham, dredging up my shattered past. Your existence and my loss of you seem like a discordant non-sequitur in this social situation. I don't want to be the crazy lady in the bathroom.

She doesn't mention you. I don't mention you. You're the angel in the room and we both pretend you're not there.

Ordinary Questions and Terrible Answers

This weekend, I went to a hen party. It was fun, it was nice to get out. But as usual in these social situations, I met a couple of women I hadn't met before. So, chatting in the loo as you do, I was asked that question

"How many children do you have?"

And I gave my usual answer.

"I have had five but unfortunately my youngest died"

Because I can't leave you out.  I know some bereaved parents  cope by only mentioning their living children because they can't bear to have that conversation with every person they meet but I have never been able to do that.

The women were sorry. They apologised for bringing it up. But they hadn't done anything wrong. It was an ordinary question, the sort you'd ask anyone you met socially. Imagine if everyone was afraid to ask a normal question in case it hurt or offended.

I told them it was a good question to ask and sadly, it was the answer that was dreadful, not the question.

And it was no bad thing. It's not like they reminded me of my pain. You can't be reminded of something you haven't forgotten.  Because I have never for a minute forgotten that I had you and never for a minute forgotten that I lost you. I think about you all day, every day. Your little soul is woven into the fabric of my being.

Children? I have five.

Cherry Blossom Girl

Cherry Blossom Girl

We have a cherry tree in the front garden. I always knew I would have a cherry tree when we moved here, it was one of the first things we planted. I love the luxuriant pink blossoms and the final rain of confetti early in May. It was under a cherry blossom tree that your father and I first got together, where we first held hands all those years ago in St Stephens Green.

Our cherry blossom bloomed this year as usual, lots of beautiful, delicate petals and then in just a few short days they were gone. The tree is still there but devoid of all its splendour.

That was you. You came in a shower of pink blossoms, the first girl after four boys. We were showered in pink cards, pink toys, pink clothes, most of which you never got to wear, you were so tiny. And then, in a matter of minutes, with no warning at all you were gone.

And all we are left with is our blossomless tree.