This time three years ago my mother was alive. I passed through the nursing home on Christmas morning and the corridors were all warm and cosy, although outside there was snow on the ground and blue skies over the canal. My mother and her elderly companions were wheeled into the day room with great fuss and fanfare.
Bald heads dappled in the winter sunlight turned to examine me. Withered eyes squinted at the Christmas tree and the colourful lights and the presents that the staff distributed. Later, when a musician arrived, everyone danced, even my mother, who was in a wheelchair. Though she didn’t really know what day it was.
She clutched her handbag. She kept everything that mattered to her in that bag: her photographs, her rings, her chequebook and other remnants of the past. Times when her husband was young and they danced on New Year’s Eve in the golf club. Times when her children were small and she baked Christmas cakes, and puddings, and arranged precious baubles on the Christmas tree to amaze them. Sitting in the wheelchair, she was wearing a scarf that we had brought her that morning as a gift, though she paid it little attention.
She just closed her eyes, and opened her eyes. And breathed in and out. That was about it.
Her companions were looking great. Nurses had helped to powder noses, and apply lipstick and make-up and there was a tint of colour and a lively shape in everyone’s hair, thanks to Majella the hairdresser, who had called in a few days earlier.
Then came the Christmas dinner and the paper hats. My mother looked bewildered as she stared at the cream tablecloth and the Christmas crackers.
Stones for Christmas
My Christmas was always focused on mother. And even though she is no longer walking on the Earth, nothing much has changed. She is with me in other ways.
Recently a friend brought me stones as a gift for Christmas. A strange gift, you might say; they are oval, and from the sea, and they hold fossils on their surface, and can be arranged in stacks. The smaller stones sit on top of the larger ones and there are four piles, containing three stones each.
I assemble them outside the door of my studio like a shrine, and I wait to see if I can hear wind blowing through them. If I do I would call them singing stones. But so far the wind has not gifted them with music.
The act of breathing
So I go inside and sit by the fire and stare at them through the window. And for a moment I fall asleep, so that when the Beloved arrives she laughs, and says, "You are like an old man dozing by your fire".
I say, "I'm lucky to have a fire, considering the price of fuel and the carbon tax, and the amount of windmills all around me now, whose owners are granted enormous sums of taxpayers' money just to lodge those monstrous cement creatures on what used to be the bare and beautiful slopes of lovely Leitrim. "
“There you go,” she says. “That proves my point. You’re like a grumpy old man.”
I tell her about the beautiful stones and how I am hoping to hear the wind whistle through them. I ask her what sounds remind her of Christmas. She doesn’t reply so I say, “The sound of a boiling kettle would be very appealing.”
She says, “Okay, I’ll make some tea,” and she turns to go back into the house.
“I’ll follow you in a few moments,” I say.
But I forget. Instead I doze again and think about the Hindu god who creates everything that exists from sound. He creates each universe from the vibration of his breath. He simply breathes out. And breathes in. And then closes his eyes. He falls asleep. And then he wakes up. And opens his eyes. And breathes out. And then he breathes in. And he closes his eyes. And thus the universe pulses for eternity.
I think of my mother before she died. That was her rhythm too: every few minutes she would wake up and open her eyes. Then she closed her eyes. And fell asleep. And then she woke again.
And outside my window I see the stones. And I wonder if they too breathe in and breathe out. And far away, I hear the sound of a kettle boiling and I know my Beloved has scalded the cups and that I must leave my dreams and return again to the ordinary world.