Loss

Mike of Genial Misanthrope commented on my last post on his (and all of ours) wish not to outlive our children.

But I write of this again. I've written of my own personal circle of good friends and relatives who've not been so lucky. I link to them all here. And I say "all" because there are quite a few. An aunt's child, a school friend of my daughter's - herself a mother of a teenager. And on. At my high school reunion a few years back, one of my schoolmates appeared with a shaven head from cancer treatments. Six months prior her only daughter, birthing a third child, had died in the birthing process from a stroke. Not uncommon.

And many more death posts. Too many. Or maybe not enough. I've outlived my mother by 14 years now. Death looms more clearly at the age one's parent dies. And yes, they've done studies. It bubbles underneath the surface. Stolen time, I feel. So death is more present to us.

I was with someone on Tuesday who lost an adult son. I talked of missing daughter who's left a gaping wound in my own small family. A pain that never leaves. A pain often completely ignored and unacknowledged by some family members. And in some cases added to by deliberate shunning and non-inclusion which makes it all the more unimaginable. I'm not alone in that either.

I am staggered and amazed by how most of us get through the often unbearable pain of living with such enormous losses trailing behind us. Focussing on what we have, I expect.

My friend felt a missing child was worse than a dead child. I have no idea. How do you weigh one pain against another unless you've experienced both?

I don't label any behaviour "brave". In fact I despise the word. As if failure to be brave makes a person less than, inferior. We need less of this bravery thing and more of feeling and grieving and roaring out at the injustice. And shaking our fists in exhaustion.

I'd rather you and I had the permission to scream our losses to the skies in each others' presence.

The loss of those living, the loss of those dead. And all those losses in between.

The Last of the O'Sullivan Sisters. Part 2 of 2.

See Part 1 here.

Strange that. How lives that can be so remarkable in hindsight are so very unremarkable when they are actually happening. My Auntie Kit's life was such. She had six children. She took care of her rather nasty mother-in-law (one of those who would drag you by the ear while screeching in weird laughter). When visiting my aunt I remember hiding in a wardrobe to escape the fun and games of Granny M. as they always involved pain of some kind or "teasing" now reclassified under 'abuse'. How her own grandchildren survived her is beyond me.

Auntie Kit joined her husband in his garage business, school bus runs and taxi service. She was one of the first female commercial drivers (I would say) in County Cork. On her Cork City runs she would always drop in for a cuppa and update my mother on life in their village of birth. Driving taxis and buses she would pick up all the news. Her husband, in the meantime, continued at night with his musical life as a band pianist, accordionist and banjo player. There were always sessions taking place in their parlour and as the children grew, they joined him in public appearances.

Her husband died young, reasonably young. Like his mother before him, he didn't believe in doctors so had undiagnosed diabetes. When he died, she reinvented herself as a golfer, bridge player and held Scrabble matches every Sunday night in her house. My father, himself a widower, would never miss a Sunday night at Kit's and when I was home on holidays, myself and my now older children would join the crowd of Scrabblers and munch on her wonderful baking and endless cups of tea. It was always a teetotal house.

She was featured in the paper quite a few years before her death (see above), having turned 90, still playing golf and bridge and driving herself around.

I will remember her as her own remarkable woman - an inspiration and a driving force. As were all the O'Sullivan sisters.

The Last of the O'Sullivan Sisters. Part 1 of 2.

Catherine(Kit)O'Sullivan in her heyday.

Today my mother would have been 100 years old if she had lived. A rare thing, you'd think. But you'd be wrong. Her grandmother, my great-grandmother whom I remember well, lived well into her nineties and had a misstep on her stairs and fell to her death when I was, what, 8 or 9. So 100 would not be far-fetched. It certainly wasn't in the case of my recently deceased aunt who lived to be just shy of her 95th birthday.

I was fortunate enough to have 8 blood aunts. My father had 5 sisters, my mother 3. They wended their way in and out of our household when we were growing up and my father's two surviving sisters, when he had passed, would meet for lunch once a week in a fancy hotel in Cork when well into their nineties.

However, my mother died in her fifties leaving her 3 sisters and her mother bereft along with her own husband (my father) and 6 children, 3 of whom were teenagers.

I have written of some of my aunts before, here's a link.

My maternal aunts along with my mother were four stunning girls and in that old expression would make the heads of the blind turn and weep at their beauty. I have no trouble believing that, having been at several Nollaig Na mBans when I was growing up and listening to their raucous stories. The sisters remained extraordinarily close to the end of their days.

My mother's last surviving sister died last week. I visited her every year I returned home to Ireland. Up to a few years ago she played golf and bridge but then her baby, a son of 49, died a horrible death from lung cancer and she 'turned'. She looked inward then, much like my grandmother did when my mother died, and was never the same. Inner memories pertaining to the deceased loved one were deleted, never to return, while girlhood reminiscences were embraced as if they were yesterday.

We take our ease and comfort where we can and losing a child is unimaginable, no matter what the age.

Part 1 of 2. See Part 2 here.

The Unspeakable Part 3

I wonder how us humans bear the pain of life sometimes.

I've written about this before.

The death of one's child.

And it happens again. In my community. To a lovely man who chats with me every morning as he takes his daily constitutional. Always dressed beautifully in soft khakis and a walking stick (to ward off unwarranted attention from the odd stray dog, he tells me).
Dan lost his wife a couple of year ago to cancer, a lingering death which broke his heart. This couple gave a lot to the community. She so much that I will write about it sometime.

Yesterday he gets the unbearable news that his youngest child, 44 years old, died from chronic alcoholism. All attempts to help him failed. I can't even describe the pain Dan is going through.

I saw the effects of the death of a child up close and personal with my grandmother who lost a whole chunk of herself that never came back after her daughter, my mother, died far too young.

And more recently, a beloved aunt lost her youngest of 49 to the ravages of cigarette cancer. Yes, I always insist on calling it that. And she lost most of herself and had to be put into care. A woman who was a golfer and bridge player only a month before.

And then, at my high school reunion a month or so ago, one of my classmates, herself in the after-affects of radiation and chemotherapy and barely able to walk, shared that four months before her 38 year old daughter, 3 months after giving birth to her last child, had died suddenly of an aneurism.

Heroes? I don't have to look very far.

They should all get a medal just for suiting up and showing up.