Despite turning 80 last year, Anakana Schofield’s mother, Hannah, kept a small farm in Ireland at the time of her death.Courtesy Anakana Schofield
Anakana Schofield’s new novel is Library of Brothel.
Yesterday, my mother was alive. Today, as I write these words, she’s in the morgue waiting for an autopsy, and to be buried.
All I can think is how completely astonished she’ll be to find herself dead. She wasn’t a woman who talked about dying. Even though her life was hard, she enjoyed living. She enjoyed laughing. She enjoyed her two pedigree cows, goats, bees and chickens.
All I managed yesterday was to obtain the soonest plane ticket I could to Ireland. I visited a local Catholic church to light a candle for her and walked about in a daze as though I’d been shot or stabbed but couldn’t yet locate the wound.
From the moment I sat on this plane I’ve become obsessed I will never return to Ireland again in the same way. My mother, Hannah, will no longer be there. This is the last journey I will make to Ireland where my mother, though deceased, is still above the ground. I’ll then return to Canada where nobody knows her. I will mourn alone.
I keep thinking about how many people must make this similar plane journey, also possibly alone, to bury someone far away. It must be common in Canada, where so many people have migrated and where it’s such a large country. People must criss-cross the country dealing with sudden deaths each day. You could be sitting beside someone in that situation any time you are on a plane or train. We are surrounded by those left behind, but we don’t know it. In Vancouver, where I live, you never really see a funeral. You tend to discover people died in a social media post, or someone sends you a text. Or you run into an old neighbour and they update you on who died recently. Sometimes, you don’t discover someone you once knew is dead for months, or even years.
When you move to a new city or country, you never project forward 20 or 30 years to think about how, one day, you may have to resolve the life or lives in the place(s) you have left. Some people cannot even leave because they may not have papers or access to money, or there’s insufficient time to arrive before the person is buried. Some people are unable to return due to lack of physical access to their bombed and besieged homelands. They must mourn from afar, with the double anguish of the death and not being able to attend the funeral. At least I am able to come home.
The best depiction I ever saw of ongoing grief was in Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply. A widow (played by Juliet Stevenson) continues to talk and interact daily with her dead husband (Alan Rickman), which is only possible in the movies. They continue their lives in much the same way anyone who experiences loss carries the dead perpetually chattering in their mind.
To lose your mother is another level of loss. A new level to me, at least. It’s protracted and startling in a unique way I hadn’t bargained for. I lost my father when I was six, so I will never lose my father the way someone who knows their father for decades and decades does. Hannah had celebrated her 80th birthday in July. She wasn’t unwell, aside from the regular complications of old age. The previous August she’d suffered an unlucky injury, after visiting her grandson in Dublin. She’d fallen after a sudden jerk on the tram and broken her hip, but she recovered very well all things considered, and was happily reinstalled on her small-holding farm. The only thing she hadn’t conquered was driving again. It certainly limited her, but neighbours were very good and helped bring her where she needed to go, and she’d bus or walk the rest.
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To take the journey to participate in the stewardship of someone’s final journey isn’t something I’ve thought much about until I am on the plane, staring out into the void. Naturally I am crying. Naturally the people around have now noticed.
The plane ride will be long and strange and lonely, yet I am not alone. My son is in the row behind and hopefully not aware that I’m drawing obvious attention to our woes. I will be very glad he’s with me in the days that follow. He’s attending his first Irish funeral in rural Ireland. He’s never been inside a Catholic church. This experience must be akin to being front row at Coachella for someone who has never been to a concert of any sort.
My son loved his grandmother, and she loved her grandson. A few years ago Hannah experienced a dreadful house fire and afterwards we went over to help her with some weather proofing on the new roof. I had to go to a writer’s festival in Cork, so my son stayed alone with her in a caravan for the week. Every day he cooked her dinners. Since then, she would say “he is a lovely person” and talk about the delicious food he cooked her. The last thing she did for him was to make sure she sent a witnessed photocopy of her passport to the Department of Foreign Affairs, so he would be able to obtain an Irish passport. I had worried about asking her to do it because of her hip. “Not at all,” she said. “This is a thing that grannies do.”
Tradition sits on shoulders differently. I feel lucky that my mother even has a place to be buried. It’s a significant responsibility burying anybody. It’s even more of a challenge if they leave no direction on how they wish to be buried.
The thing about a funeral or a cremation is you only bring the person’s body once. It’s unlike any other marking. A birthday reoccurs. A wedding could end in divorce and require another visit to the church for better luck the second time round. But you die once, and you’re buried or cremated only the once, so there’s pressure to agree on how to dress the deceased and which coffin they’ll be moving into.
There’s limited time to organize when you’ve stepped off a plane after 14 hours of travel and onto a train for another four hours before arriving at the funeral home. Before you know it, you’re shaking hands with a hundred people who’ve come to the wake. They identify themselves to you as a neighbour, or a neighbour of a relative, or they say their name and you put a face to a name you often heard her talk of while she lies elegantly and peacefully in the coffin.
I worried about her being cold, so I made sure we put a cardigan on her and wrapped her in a blanket from the local woollen mill. I touch her hands and face and hair so much my hands smell of embalming fluid for the next 12 hours. We slide books into her coffin, and I sneak an empty notebook in with her in case she needs something to write on. My toddler nephew has a farm board book but doesn’t want it to go into the coffin, then he changes his mind and in it goes beside “Ganny” as he calls her because he can’t yet say Granny.
When it’s time to put the lid on her coffin, after the priest has said prayers and blessings, for the removal to the church, we make yelping agony sounds because it’s so desperately sad and final. I become focused on turning the dowels into the screws around the edge of the lid. I bang on the top of the coffin to let her know she’s moving now and help the undertakers push the coffin from the trolley into the hearse. I bang again on the coffin top to let her know she’s in the car.
We follow immediately behind the hearse containing my mother, because it’s agreed she will do one final journey back through her village, where she was born and died, past her house en route to the church where she’ll stay overnight, until her funeral mass tomorrow. As we wind up the road the sight of the scenic lake and her favourite mountain are picturesque, and overhead the clouds are growling as rain is often threatened in these parts, and I’m struck how she was able, through us, to see the views she’d lived and loved for so many years on this final journey.
Outside her house, all her neighbours have rushed back to stand in a guard of honour for her. The hearse pauses and they all bless themselves. It’s profoundly moving and quietly beautiful. We and she wind down past the old houses of neighbours who’ve all died during her life until we arrive at her local church. The ritual of removing her coffin from the hearse includes prayers and bells. Inside the church her coffin is placed on the altar and a short service takes place to command her into the arms of our Lord (I think). There is another evening mass due to take place, so it’s reassuring she will be extra blessed by the time she is lowered into her grave tomorrow after her own funeral mass.
For weeks and months afterwards, I divided the world into those who have lost their mother and those who have not. There’s something in the eyes or responses of those who have already gone through this moment when you tell them your mother just died.
I had failed to envisage she could die suddenly. I’d imagined a protracted stretch of years of slow decline. This was foolish, since all the women in my family do tend to fall over and die instantly. The fault is mine. For a novelist to admit a lack of imagination is rather a nasty burn.
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Throughout the wake and funeral many people suggested it’s a great way to die, suddenly and in your own bed. I countered this, reminding them she didn’t want to be dead. The suggestion she wouldn’t have suffered wounded me abstractly, since I knew they meant well but there’s bound to be some suffering if your heart explodes catastrophically. Plus, only she could confirm if she suffered or not.
These days, I find myself dragging my mother around Vancouver. We look at the birds together and I still read the weather alerts for updates on storms in her area and will think I must text her, before I have a moment and remember she is safe and I don’t have to worry about a tree knocking her out.
I have also realized the final journey as I had conceived of it on the plane wasn’t a final journey at all: it was the start of many new tributaries. It brought me the stories of other people’s dead mothers, all those journeys becoming part of an expanding tour of all the lost mothers in my life. Critically, I now know an experience I previously could only hint at, and this means others will see in my eyes what I saw in theirs, and I can be useful to them when that time comes.
If there was a final moment at all in this journey it was when all those people stood so respectfully and beautifully in tribute to my mother outside her house, because our final journey is the business of all those who have loved us in the variety of ways it is possible to be valued and loved in this life.