The Last Goodbye

by Caroline Finnerty

  I hope one day, maybe when you have your own children, you will understand my decision and that it wasn’t easy for me. Try to help your dad with the younger ones – the next few months will be difficult on you all but on the up-side you’ll have no one banging your bedroom door with the Hoover when you’re trying to sleep in on a Saturday morning!

  You are my treasure. Always remember that you were put on this earth because you are special, so go and put your stamp on the world, my beautiful girl.

  With love always,

  Mam xx

  Noel 1992

  Chapter 43

  As soon as I heard the shrill ring of the phone cutting through the night-time stillness of the house, I knew. I got out of bed and ran down the hall to pick it up before it woke the kids. I talked briefly to Sister Rita before hanging up. I rubbed the palms of my hands down over my face. This is it, I thought, this is actually it. I picked the handset up again to ring Josephine to come over and mind the kids.

  And she knew it too. It was unspoken between us and if she found it hard to be left behind while I went to say goodbye to her youngest daughter then to her credit she never let on. She shooed me out the door and told me to drive safely and to ring her as soon as I could.

  I turned the key in the ignition and the car started up. I cursed its loudness in the yard in case it would wake the kids. I pulled out onto the dark road and set off for the hospice. After a few minutes the red light for the petrol gauge lit up on the dashboard in front of me. Damn it to hell – the one time that I was in a hurry! God only knew where I would find a petrol station open at this hour of the night. I had no choice but to keep going and hope that it would last until I got there. I knew I was driving fast but Sister Rita had never rung me during the night before so I knew it must be serious. Somehow, I made it there, probably just on the fumes alone. I took a deep breath of the crisp night air in the car park to steady myself and then I went inside.

  I met Sister Rita in the hallway outside Eva’s room.

  “After you left she developed a bad fever, Noel. Sometimes this happens before . . .” She spoke in hushed tones.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I’m sorry –” She paused, taking a deep intake of breath. “I think it’s time, Noel . . .”

  I followed her into the room and when I saw Eva again, the same woman that I had seen only hours earlier, I couldn’t believe how much she had deteriorated. She was lying on the bed, covered by a single white sheet and even though there was a chill in the air, beads of sweat glistened on her body. She was gone so thin and her skin was so translucent that you could almost see right through her like a ghost. Her lips were blue and her face was ashen. She didn’t open her eyes when I came in. I sat down on the chair beside her and reached out for her hand. It was freezing. Every now and then she would writhe and moan in the bed and I would feel utterly helpless. I was so angry as I thought about how unfair it all was. If there was a God out there why would he allow someone to conceive a child if he was going to give them terminal cancer as well? What kind of a God would do that? She had managed to get Aoife here safely but at her own expense. I prayed for him to do something. For a miracle. He owed it to her. Although I wasn’t in agreement with her decision not to take the surgery, I’d had to accept that it was what she wanted. But I don’t think any of us had thought that this was the way it was going to end.

  “Is there anything you can do for her?” I said, turning to Sister Rita when she came back in a while later.

  She upped the dosage yet again to keep her comfortable and her whole body seemed to relax a bit more when the pain relief kicked in a few minutes later. I slumped back down on to the chair beside her bed. I still couldn’t believe that we had come to this.

  “You know, it might not seem like it but she can probably still hear you – our hearing is always the last sense to go,” Sister Rita said softly.

  I nodded. I remembered hearing that somewhere before.

  “Keep talking to her, Noel, so she knows that you are with her and that she is not alone. Tell her that you love her and that it is okay for her to go.”

  So I did as she said and kept talking to Eva, telling her that she was going to a better place where there would be no pain, even though I wasn’t sure if I really believed it. I told her that it was okay to go, that she had nothing to worry about and I would look after everything here. But it wasn’t okay – I didn’t want her to go.

  I loved Eva so much. Where some men talked about their nagging wives and spent their time longing to escape them, I hated every minute of being apart from her. From the moment I had first seen her on the stage when the Ballyrobin Amateur Dramatic Society were putting on a production of My Fair Lady and she was Eliza Doolittle, I had loved her. When I saw her delivering her feisty monologue I knew she was the one. She had the whole audience in the palm of her hand – her charisma had radiated off the stage. She loved acting and she was good at it too but, when Kate came along, it had slipped away and she didn’t have the time to commit to it any more. She kept saying that she must go back to it but she never did. I should have made her go back, I thought sadly. I should have done everything possible to let her do what she loved doing.

  I stayed like that all night on the uncomfortable plastic chair talking to her. I would remember funny things that had happened with the children and I would tell her. Her breathing was rapid and rattling and sometimes it would stop altogether and I would think this is it – this is the end – and my heart would start thumping in my chest but then she would start again. Sister Rita was in and out giving more medications to keep her comfortable.

  When dawn broke I opened back the curtains to let some light into the room. A magnificent red ball of fire lit up the sky. The sunlight glinted off the glass. It was going to be one of those autumnal days that Eva loved, cool, crisp and sunny. I looked back at her on the bed, her lips had turned up at the sides and a smile had crept over her face. It was like she knew that the sun was shining, I walked back over and sat down beside her again. I took her frail hand in mine and then she left this world.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there sobbing as I held her hand, which was already starting to go cold. Sister Rita came in then and went to give me a hug and I’m ashamed to say it now but I stood up and kicked the metal pedal bin in the corner. I just wanted to lash out at something.

  I drove home barely able to see the road in front of me through my tears. The roads were empty at that time of the morning and I drove fast. The car hopped off the crests of the road surface. I remember thinking that if I crashed and died now too that it wouldn’t be so bad but then I would think of our four children and I knew it was selfish of me.

  I let myself into the kitchen quietly and Josephine stood up and walked towards me. We met and clung to each other with heaving sobs.

  Telling the kids was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Josephine sat with me and she cuddled them all as they cried. Kate took it particularly badly. She sobbed until she was hyperventilating and I wondered if we should call Doctor O’Brien up to the house to sedate her. She eventually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion with Josephine stroking her face as she laid her head on her lap. My heart broke as I looked at my eldest, her hair was clinging to her damp face in ribbons.

  I heard Aoife cry then. I had almost forgotten about her. I went over to her crib and picked her up. Her smile lit up the room and I thought how lucky she was to be spared all of this heartache. She was too young to understand and it was a blessing. She cooed at me like it was any other day and not the day the woman who had brought her into this world had just left it.

  We had the funeral as she had wished and Father Ball did a lovely Mass and the choir sang the songs that Eva had wanted. Kate wouldn’t go to the funeral so she stayed behind at home and Aidan came up to sit with her. For once I said nothing and let her do as she wished. It was hard enough on her without me being on her case. One of the neighbours h
ad offered to take Aoife, which I was relieved about.

  A long queue of people came to pay their respects and offer me their condolences in the church. All their faces seemed to blur together as I shook hand after hand. Rough, smooth, broad, narrow, they all merged into one. The smell of incense wafted through the air. My heart broke for the two boys – they looked so lost amongst the huge crowd of mourners. Their school had made a guard of honour for the coffin as it went into the church and I knew they felt self-conscious as hundreds of eyes bored into them as we walked past them all. Eva’s sister Anna had come back from New York again – this time her whole family were in tow and I watched as the boys warily eyed up their American cousins with their strange accents, who they had only met once before.

  When we went back to the house, I noticed that the neighbours had made trays of sandwiches and cakes and were serving up endless cups of tea to everyone. People were busying themselves in my house opening presses and drawers trying to locate things. Someone asked me where we kept the teabags and I got up to show them. It all seemed surreal. It didn’t seem like this was my wife’s funeral. Even though I had known she was dying, it still came as a shock in the end if that makes sense? I would be okay for a few minutes and I would drink the tea that was poured for me and talk to someone and then I would remember it all again. Someone told me that the meat factory was going to be closing after over fifty years in business and I remember thinking that I must tell Eva, but then I remembered I couldn’t. And it hurt as bad every time I remembered. I just wanted her back – this wasn’t what we had signed up for. We were meant to be raising our children together and then when they had flown the nest, it was time for us. That was the way it was supposed to be – not me watching as her coffin was lowered into the ground. The boys played with their friends, which I was grateful for – it was a distraction for them. Kate stayed down in her room with Aidan. I could hear her music blaring through the door but I let them at it.

  Everyone cleared out that evening until there were only a few left behind doing the washing-up. The neighbour brought Aoife back home and said that she had never seen such a good-natured baby. Josephine took her into her arms and sat cradling her for the rest of the evening.

  “She looks so like her mother at that age, Noel,” Josephine said to me wistfully as she stared down at the sleeping baby in her arms.

  I knew her heart must have been breaking. The natural order of life had reversed itself – she shouldn’t be burying her daughter.

  After a few days everyone was gone. Anna and her family had caught their flight back home – the neighbours had left us alone and stopped bringing dinners in the evenings. Josephine told me to send the kids back to school, that it would do them good to try and keep routine and some sort of normality in their lives. Kate had withdrawn into herself completely. She never mentioned her mother – it was as if she had never existed at all – and I wasn’t strong enough to bring it up with her. I didn’t trust myself to talk to her without falling to pieces.

  I would go out into the fields and not want to go back and face the house because it felt so empty without Eva’s presence. I hated those first few minutes when I would come in the door and acutely feel her absence. She could fill a room just by being in it. I always used to love coming home to her after a day on the farm and now I just felt lost in my own life and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  And I had so many questions about Aoife. Although Josephine came over every day to help out with her, once I was alone, I realised that I wasn’t sure of so many things like how many bottles Aoife should be having? Or how was I supposed to know when she needed more? What age did you start them on food? And even then what do you give them? When she was cranky one day, I didn’t know if she was sick, teething or if it was just a bad day. This was all stuff that Eva knew and I desperately missed her and although I had always helped Eva out when the kids were babies, it was always with Eva’s instructions. It was only now that she was gone that I realised how on top of everything she had been. She just got on with things and everything ran smoothly in the house when she was around. Now the school uniforms weren’t even washed, let alone ironed. The house was filthy. A layer of dust ran along the surfaces and the white enamel bathtub had a grey scum along the waterline. Josephine was great and tried to take over Eva’s role in the household as best she could but she couldn’t do everything. And it wasn’t fair on her. She was nearly seventy. But I knew she wanted to do it. She needed to do it. She said it helped her to feel closer to Eva. She had decided to take Aoife to her house to give me a hand, at least take that pressure off me, but I still struggled to look after the other three as well as run the house and the farm.

  “What will we do for lunch, Dad – there’s no bread?” Patrick would stand looking into the empty fridge and I would root around for some money in my pocket and tell them to buy something in the town. I knew Eva would be turning in her grave at the thought of them buying their lunch in the chippers.

  Josephine made our dinner in the evenings but she already had a full-time job in minding Aoife. And she had her own house to run as well. We were so tight financially too – I had let things slide on the farm a bit over the last few months with Eva being in hospital and everything, so now we had very little to live on.

  And I was starting to drink. Not much by some people’s standards but I was never a big drinker and I knew it was too much for me. Instead of coming home at lunchtime for a sandwich, I would go to Doyle’s and have a pint. Sometimes I would go down after work too if Josephine was able to take care of the children. She didn’t say anything at first but I could see her looking at me with her eyes narrowed or she would say “You’re going down again” and it wouldn’t be a question – it was a statement.

  “I won’t be long,” I would offer, both embarrassed and disgusted with myself at the same time.

  And all the time in the background were reminders that Christmas was coming and the sight of all that tinsel and those baubles everywhere just made it all the more painful. Eva had loved Christmas – it was her favourite time of the year. She would go to great efforts to make sure it was special for the kids – Santa letters were written well ahead of time and posted to the North Pole. Decorations were handmade. The tree was put up in the first weekend of December. We would all go to visit Santa and go for a bite to eat afterwards – it was a tradition now. The house would be full of the smell of mulled wine and mince pies and she would bake gingerbread men and decorate them with the kids. She had special Christmas plates and a tablecloth that got taken down just for the day and were put away again for the following year. The house would be stocked high with tins of sweets and biscuits so that we would be eating them for months afterwards.

  Christmas Day was hard for everyone – her presence was sorely missed all day long. I had bought the wrong Nintendo game for Patrick and, although it wasn’t said, we all knew that Eva wouldn’t have made that mistake. I had bought Kate a make-up set full of colourful shades of pinks and blues – the woman in the chemist had assured me that she would love it. But her look told me that it wasn’t what she had wanted at all. Josephine had cooked Christmas dinner for us and, although it was a fine meal, the table lacked its heart.

  Aoife and Josephine had grown very close. Josephine always seemed to have her cradled in her arms. And when she did give her to me to hold, I always felt slightly awkward doing it. I would have the position or the angle wrong and Josephine would gently suggest that I try to sit her forward a bit more but she would cry and then Josephine would say “Oh, she must have wind”. She always knew what to do with her and I had to admit that I would be lost without her.

  Kate was my biggest problem. There wasn’t a week that went by where she wasn’t on detention for something after school. She got suspended for giving cheek to her history teacher. Then I had been called in because of her absenteeism. I was shocked because as far as I was aware she was going to school every morning but then I learned she had been spending t
he day sitting watching TV in Aidan’s house while his parents were at work. I was at my wits’ end with her. She wanted to leave school but there was no way I could let her go without doing her Leaving Cert. The thing was, she was bright and intelligent but she had lost all interest somewhere along the way and now she saw school as something to fight against. I knew Eva wouldn’t have wanted her to leave before completing her education either though what she chose to do after that was up to her. So I held firm on it, no matter how much she acted up. She ignored Aoife completely. I knew she blamed her for the fate of her mother, but she was only a tiny baby and couldn’t be held accountable for it all. Even Aidan, in fairness to him, would go over and look at her or tickle her under her chin at least. Kate still had so much anger inside her and I didn’t know how to help her. God knows, I had anger too. This was where I needed Eva.

  Chapter 44

  The time went by somehow, although I don’t really remember much about it now. I often wondered, if she’d had the surgery before the cancer had claimed her whole body, would she still be with us? But she was caught between a rock and a hard place – maybe Eva might still be with us but little Aoife may not have been – or maybe neither of them would be? Who knows how things might have turned out? And it was futile going over it all again – it still wouldn’t change the outcome.

  I felt her presence everywhere – a song would come on the radio that reminded me of her and the day of her Month’s Mind there was a documentary on the TV about My Fair Lady. And call it a coincidence or whatever but the sun had shone brightly at Patrick’s confirmation – just as she had promised.