‘It appears the cancer has recurred, and the doctors consider the best step is to have a full mastectomy. I’m going to the Royal tomorrow Thurs 20th, for surgery Friday … Emotionally at best I’m disappointed – it was really the last thing I expected at this stage, God’s ways certainly aren’t my ways. I don’t understand what’s happening, I’m upset but I’m still hopeful. I’m banking a lot on Mr Charles – of all the legions of people recommended to me he’s the one I really feel drawn to. I know I don’t have to ask for your prayers not only for me but especially Joe – he is really devastated. We told the children last night and they were great – so practical, who’d do what for them, when and where? We told Sinead and Dara the whole situation and they were very accepting – they’ve been expecting me to go to Belvoir [a specialist cancer facility in Belfast] anyhow. Shane and Mairead would show more emotion but once they got over that they were okay. Shane is going with St Eugene’s Cathedral Choir to the National Concert Hall on Saturday 29th, but maybe the concerts competition is on Sunday I’m not sure. God bless, Sheila.’
Her religious faith is evident throughout the letters, and stretched not merely to church attendance and ancillary responsibilities but to listening to tapes of Catholic mystics like Sister Briege McKenna as she did little jobs about the place. ‘I was down seeing Daddy yesterday,’ she wrote in March 1990, ‘and on the way there and back I listened to tapes of Briege McKenna. Over and over again she repeats “come to me you who are burdened and finding life difficult and I will give you rest and refresh you”. She even goes so far as to say that many people go with their troubles to psychiatrists when they can so easily tell all their worries and heartaches to God!’ Reading these letters, it’s disarming to imagine my mother driving around these very hills, nodding along to the homespun wisdom of some nuns on tape. I suppose these were a charming early precursor to podcasts, aimed at philosophical Catholics with a lot of errands to run. My mother fitted that remit on both counts. These errands too are a constant reference point, as in the earlier missive that sees Mammy segue from surgery to my brother Shane’s choir trip to Dublin the following week.
Her faith also informed the advice she gave, including one odd moment of spontaneous scripture recommendation:
‘[B]e assured of a continuing presence in our thoughts and prayers. Don’t give up. As I was writing I was trying to pray and Matthew 14 kept coming into my head. I don’t know what’s in it and I’m not accustomed to scripture gifts like this but I’ll take a chance and tell you anyhow. I hope it brings you consolation.’
I never did think to ask Patricia if Matthew 14, the chapter Mammy appears to have conjured out of thin air as an impromptu ‘scripture gift’, offered any consolation. In the end, I thought better of it, since upon looking it up I found it tells the story of Christ feeding the five thousand, so it may merely give her unwelcome reminders of all those times Mammy, Daddy and we, their eleven tired and hungry children, had arrived to eat her out of house and home.
Granny McGullion died of cancer in 1984, a few years before the first of these letters, and her suffering had had a huge effect on my grandfather and Mammy. Neither of them ever actually admitted it was cancer at all, and Mammy and her siblings were even instructed by Granny and Granda to tell people it was glandular fever. I guess they didn’t want to give the thing power by naming it, as if saying the word cancer out loud would make it real, somehow. It’s also true that they didn’t want to suffer the pity of outsiders or cause any fuss in their ordinary interactions with people. This last concept is the one I find easiest to believe, since fuss, in all its forms, is like kryptonite to Northern Irish people.
It’s an odd thing to realise how much of your homeland you’ve internalised, the unspoken assumptions, latent behaviours and rigid rhythms of thought that were baked into your breast before you were conscious it was happening. So it is with fuss. Fuss means different things to different people, and it has to since, where I come from, fuss is a particularly pejorative term. Watching American TV shows in which loud, self-possessed people complained about their meals, for example, was as exotic as watching people using jetpacks on Tomorrow’s World. We are, after all, a population who lived through a period in which some 10 per cent of us lost an immediate family member to political violence and saw fit to call this era the Troubles, as if it were not a brutal cycle of spiteful bloodshed but rather a period of intemperate hailstorms, or a breakdown in the country’s system of planning applications.
‘Don’t make a fuss’, ‘it’s no big deal’, ‘ah sure, lookit the horse has bolted, what good will whining do?’ These were platitudes we lived by on the micro and the macro scale, the sorts of things people would say upon being offered a cup of tea, or receiving an unsatisfactory dinner in a restaurant, but would also feel in our hearts when faced with death or trauma or the abject desolation of being alone in an unfeeling world. It could never be said that it is indulgent or improper to speak at length about grief or death; it was just roundly felt and universally known to be the case, as surely as you wouldn’t extemporise on the ugliness of someone’s spouse. Within this heuristic there was, of course, an internal spectrum, just as there are, presumably, New Yorkers who will sit happily silent with a hair in their lasagne.
The arc of sensibility in Northern Ireland bends away from fuss, and it has bent that way inside me since my childhood. It’s one of the reasons I’m more comfortable talking about death in terms of its comical absurdities, in the odd contradictions and baffling misapprehensions that come in its wake. I talk about my family’s experience a lot, and shrink rapidly from any hint that I’m being too grave or serious while doing so. Far be it from me to make my family’s tragedy seem like something that was actually sad. The more I think and talk about the events of my life, the more I think on this horror of fuss and consider it the part of myself, and my homeland, that I would like to change above all others.
When Granda McGullion retired, in a move that, depending on who you talk to, was either par for the course or callous towards an old man, he had to leave Blaney, since the house came with the job. Certainly, Granda never held it against his employers and respected and admired the Tottenhams until his dying day. The feeling was very much mutual, particularly for Ashley, who adored the McGullions. ‘They always had a little light in the window,’ Gabriele tells me he was fond of saying. ‘He loved going there.’
The day before, I had been about to tell her about the letter my mother had written to Patricia in tribute to Ashley, when she produced a photocopy of it herself, a gift from Patricia some years earlier. It reflects how much my mother thought about people other than herself, even when going through unimaginable stress.
‘I hope to go to Fermanagh tomorrow to see Daddy for Easter,’ she wrote. ‘He’s in good form but was very saddened to hear of Ashley Tottenham’s death, do you remember him? His first wife died and he then married a German girl who had been an assistant at the Convent & College. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer, just after me and put up a great fight. He was only 37. I had been talking to him a lot any time I was down home because he was always interested to see how I was doing. Thank God I’m fine.’
8
The Forge