The Family Gift

by Cathy Kelly

  The tapestry cushions – mainly animals but a few interesting flowers from kits from the immensely talented textile designer, Kaffe Fassett – she made them too.

  The sunflower-yellow knitted throw on the couch that Bridget’s cat, another elderly inhabitant, thinks is her own, was knitted by my mother over one cold winter and it’s like a spot of sunshine in the room. The hand-stitched star quilt in corals and pale blues hanging on one wall: yes, another work of art by my mother.

  In short, lack of money has never stopped my mother from making her home beautiful.

  ‘Mum,’ I say loudly as I let myself in. I don’t want to scare her, although with Granddad beetling around all the time clutching one of his encyclopedias or worse, his Guinness Book of Records and asking does anyone know where the deepest lake in the world is, she is used to constant interruptions.

  Granny is easier to hear because even though she is a pixie of a thing, she does have the walker she uses at home, which bashes a bit. The skirting boards and the doors all suffer.

  My mother is in the kitchen, over the stove, stirring something that smells delicious.

  ‘Moroccan chicken?’ I say, sniffing as I hug her.

  ‘With prunes,’ she says. ‘Your grandfather hates prunes so I have to get them into him somehow. Otherwise, all we talk about at night are bowel movements and orange fibre drinks.’

  I can smell that the dish is far less spicy than usually recommended because spicy food does not agree with anyone in the house except Mum, and she never cooks for herself. Only for other people. She is the add-on to her own meals. The carer’s lot.

  I pull an apron off the hook by the dresser and put it on.

  ‘Off with you,’ I say. ‘I’m here. I’ll see you at half two.’

  Maura and I take over from Mum as often as we can, which is less often than we would like.

  ‘I’ll just finish—’ she begins.

  ‘Go,’ I order. ‘I can cook, you know.’

  She smiles wearily and hands me the wooden spoon.

  Her blonde hair is streaked with grey now, and today, she looks very tired. Rather than the massage we are treating her to and lunch with one of her old school friends, she looks as if she needs to lie down and just sleep.

  I am unnerved by this. My mother is a coper. She can do anything – has done anything since my father’s stroke, when suddenly, their life fell apart. She was taking care of her mother and she and my father were considering converting the garage into a little bedroom for his father, who was entirely compos mentis but no longer able to really look after himself, when whoosh . . . the stroke hit our family.

  Strokes do that – hit a family. Not just one person.

  One person takes the savagery of the stroke but all around, their family falls into the hole of tragedy, too.

  Before the stroke, my father was funny, wildly in love with my mother, considering retirement from his engineering job and discussing with my mother where they would travel.

  ‘The Trans-Siberian Railway,’ my father would suggest.

  ‘You’ll be killed,’ Granny would squeak.

  Granny has only been outside of Ireland once, to the Marian shrine at Lourdes. That was enough for her. In Granny Bridget’s eyes, Abroad is a frightening place where you will be taken advantage of and have your money robbed.

  This can happen in Ireland, I think grimly.

  ‘Route 66,’ my mother said.

  ‘Gone, isn’t it?’ said Granddad Eddie, who wants to be the fount of all knowledge but has moments where he falters because he’s very keen on the information being correct. He’s a stickler for accuracy.

  ‘We could do a year-long trip involving rucksacks and Airbnb,’ Dad had said, an arm around my mother, holding her lovingly the way he always did.

  ‘Lorcan Abalone! Rucksacks indeed,’ Mum burst out laughing. ‘If you think I’m going anywhere with a rucksack, you’ve got another think coming.’

  ‘How is everyone,’ I ask now.

  ‘Fine. Your father slept well. He’s calm today. Mum had a dreadful nightmare about going into a wheelchair and she’s still very fretful. Eddie says he wants an allotment.’

  I laugh. ‘He hates gardening.’

  Mum laughs too and looks like herself for the first time since I’ve arrived.

  ‘He found a mini seed catalogue in one of the papers and he’s enchanted with it, wants nothing but plants for his birthday.’

  ‘It was his birthday in March,’ I point out.

  ‘I mentioned that,’ she says, swiftly putting a few things into the dishwasher, ‘but he feels that at his age, he is entitled to more birthdays than normal people.’

  ‘Ha! At least he knows he’s not normal.’

  My mother finally goes upstairs to change and brush her hair, and I take stock of my charges. In the downstairs den, now turned into my father’s bedroom and bathroom, he sits in his wheelchair on the highly expensive cushions that are air-filled so as to help the sitter avoid pressure sores, the bane of all invalids’ and their carers’ lives. My father can move – but his rare condition means he has no impetus to do so.

  For a moment, I take in the smell of the sickroom: the lavender oil my mother burns in a tiny aromatherapy pot each morning to remove the scents of hospital cleansers, hand washes and the smell of the sick room. In his chair, looking out the window but not seeing, is Dad.

  Dad is Not Dad. At least not the Dad I once knew. Not anymore. He doesn’t talk and looks at the world with unseeing eyes. He has to be fed, as he appears not to know how to feed himself. The other great worry, as for all wheelchair-bound patients – whatever their reason for being wheelchair bound, is that he will get a pressure sore because they can lead to sepsis. Taking care of him outside a nursing-home environment is a huge responsibility, but my mother insists.

  ‘He knows it’s me,’ she insists. But for once in my life, I am not sure I believe her.

  It’s his eyes that tell me the true story. Dad’s eyes are so like mine and Scarlett’s and once, they sparkled with humour and intelligence.

  Not now.

  I have a sudden, crushing memory of Dad on my wedding day, the two of us waiting in the tiny little porch of the very old chapel belonging to the old country house hotel where we were getting married.

  I was grinning and ready for the off, and Dad – who was tone deaf – hearing the music, and saying: ‘Is that our song, chicken?’

  ‘No, it’s Elvis,’ I laughed, high on happiness.

  The music was Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which Eddie kept saying was by Packie O’Dell, because he’d wanted us to have Irish music.

  My arm slipped through Dad’s, and he reached with his other hand, held my fingers tightly. ‘I’m always here, chicken,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘Always. Dan is a great man: wouldn’t have let anyone else take you from us, but we’re always here. I’m always here.’

  Dad was tall, too. Is tall. The only member of the family as tall as I am. His hair is like an old lion’s mane: golden bits and grey streaks and worn too long for his own poor mother, long departed, who used to say, ‘Lorcan, would you cut your hair! Or even brush it!’ and everyone else would grin because Dad would not be Dad if he wasn’t running a big hand through his mane of hair, making it go every which way.

  Someone from the hotel stuck their head into the porch. ‘Are you ready?’ she whispered, a hint of the frantic about her voice.

  We were the first civil wedding of the day because the tiny chapel was always fully booked for people who wanted the peace of a place of worship for their civil ceremony and also, because it has a genuine Harry Clark stained-glass window of a Madonna who looks like an ingénue 1930s movie star with smudgy eyeliner in the nave.

  Dad had smiled at me and squeezed my hand tighter.

  I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Right back at
you, Dad,’ I’d said.

  The wedding party had been glorious. Fun. Not a hint of stress.

  ‘I want it to be lovely and let nobody worry about if their daughter wants to wear her new jeans, or if their husband has to keep rushing off to the bar to look at the match on Sky Sports,’ I’d insisted in advance. ‘We don’t fuss and I don’t want our wedding to be about fuss.’

  ‘Another reason I love you, woman,’ Dan had said, burying his face in my neck. ‘I won’t wear jeans.’

  I laughed. ‘Ah now, Conroy,’ I said. ‘No teasing or there’ll be no conjugals for a month.’

  He saluted. ‘Message received. No jeans, ma’m! There’s no big match on, either. I’m not daft.’

  Unlike Dan’s first wedding, this one was non-religious, small and intimate. The guest list was short – just family and genuinely close friends. Because Dan’s father was no longer alive, we had plans to take care of his mother, Betty, so that she didn’t get stressed or feel left out. Watching her two tall sons, Dan and Zed (actually Ed, but he put a Z in there when he was ten and it stuck), both so full of confidence and energy, Louis Conroy had been just like them.

  We’ll take care of Betty, I mentally assured the long-dead Louis, determined that at this wedding, her needs would be paramount.

  Lexi, a perfect little flower girl in pale pink tulle and silk, had taken off her shoes and played sliding with all the other children on the glossy wooden floors in the specially designated room adjoining the reception area. Liam, a stocky eighteen-month-old, was happy to be glued to his Nana Betty because she fed him whatever he wanted.

  Scarlett and I had accompanied Mum and Betty shopping to get wedding outfits.

  ‘Tell her no second-hand shops,’ Dad had roared as we whisked Mum off. ‘Let her spend a few shekels, for God’s sake!’

  Mum had chuckled affectionately. ‘Yes, Lorcan,’ she said out loud. We left the house. ‘That dressing-gown he loves, the purple silk one – straight out of the Vincent de Paul shop in Dundrum,’ she said. ‘He knows well where I got it. Loves it.’

  ‘You could wear that to the wedding and look fabulous,’ I said, ‘but this is about Betty. She had an awful time with Dan’s first wedding. Trying to compete with the Markham money nearly gave her a nervous breakdown, from what Dan tells me. I think the doctor gave her Valium for the day.’

  Mum settled into the front seat. ‘She won’t need Valium at your wedding, darling. Unless Eddie asks her to dance, that is. He feels not enough people know “Doing the Lambeth Walk”.’

  Eddie was mad to dance on the day, but he dutifully played his role because Dad told him to.

  Betty and Mum had looked stunning, although Betty kept telling everyone that it was amazing what good value was to be had in the little shops in the city centre these days. ‘Less than a hundred euros for the whole outfit,’ she said delightedly to all and sundry, and Scarlett and I beamed at each other, because Scarlett had hastily unpinned price labels on anything Betty liked and when she made a choice, Scarlett produced a label for €80 and said with just the right amount of surprise: ‘Isn’t that great? You picked one from the sale.’

  Using Dan’s credit card, she secretly paid for it all, far more than €80, and Betty was delighted, dignity intact.

  My first dance with my new husband was glorious – I love music and will sway to anything, but Dan, he has magic in his bones and with his arms around me, one large hand held firmly against my back, I can flow into a waltz with the best of them.

  We’d picked ‘It Had To Be You’, by Michael Bublé, no arguments whatsoever.

  ‘It had to be you,’ murmured Dan as we rotated round the dance floor, all eyes upon us. But he danced as if it were just us alone, his breath close to my ear and my head resting on his shoulder.

  ‘Right back at you, husband,’ I murmured. ‘Nobody else.’

  When the music ended, Dan kissed me very softly on the forehead, then on the lips and the small audience whooped, at which point Dad had grabbed me. He hugged me and said ‘I’m so happy for you, little girl,’ which was his affectionate nickname for me because he knew how I’d once longed to be tiny.

  The band, finally allowed to play, struck up a spirited rendition of ‘Proud Mary’ and we were off, whirling round the floor. Before long, Dad being Dad, had urged half the wedding party onto the floor and the band had been asked to play another Tina Turner classic, ‘Shake a Tail Feather’. Dad was energetically demonstrating just how to shake it.

  On that glorious evening, his energy was infectious.

  I look at him now in his wheelchair and the memory of my wedding day seems as if it happened with another person playing my father.

  Stroke guidebooks and specialist nurses tell you to treat your beloved person normally, to talk to them, tell them things as if nothing has changed. I try, I really do. Yet deep inside me, somewhere I wouldn’t be able to point to on a biological map of the human body, I feel his absence. I don’t see him behind those eyes anymore.

  The MRI and endless neurological tests pointed to major brain damage because of the infarcts on both sides of his brain and despite the plasticity of the brain and the research on how neural pathways can improve, his particular damage is plainly irreversible. But still, we all try. Because we love him. Even this bit of him left to us.

  Nobody can bear to imagine life without him.

  Dan and I sometimes quietly discuss what his life is like now.

  Would we want to be in that wheelchair if we were the ones lost in another world, not able to physically function in this one? There’s no cute Pinterest quote for that.

  ‘Please don’t let that be me in that chair, that bed,’ Dan says sometimes, when we’ve talked about my father and what the future holds for him. ‘Find a way to end it.’

  ‘We live in the wrong country,’ I remind him, in a conversation we’ve had so many times before. ‘We can’t choose. When it’s early enough to choose, people want to hold on to life. And when they’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole, it’s too late for them to choose.’

  ‘Hi Dad,’ I say cheerfully now, ‘how are you today?’ and I begin the stream of chatter I have perfected as a way to make sure I am both communicating with him and not stopping long enough to leave gaps where he once would have answered back.

  I can’t bear that he cannot answer back. It hurts so much; therefore, chatting blithely covers it up. As a woman who can talk her way through demonstrations of how to cook an entire dinner party, I can talk blithely with the best of them.

  ‘I want to show him this brilliant programme on Nazi Megastructures,’ says Eddie, arriving in the room with biscuit crumbs sticking to the front of his cardigan.

  Eddie loves biscuits and can find packets of them no matter where they are hidden. My mother usually supervises all food consumption in the house in case somebody chokes, but Eddie must have discovered the latest stash hidden for the carers.

  ‘She gone?’ he says, gesturing to the kitchen.

  ‘If by “she”, you mean your daughter-in-law, hopefully, you old rogue,’ I say and brush him down gently before hugging him.

  ‘It’s only a bit of a custard cream!’ Eddie says in protest. ‘Imagine hiding the custard creams. It’s inhuman.’

  I grin and agree to push Dad to the living room where Nazi Megastructures is on hold. Eddie is very technologically up-to-date and controls the telly in the house. Probably why he and Teddy get on so well, I think.

  Soon, the three of us are in front of the box and Eddie is pointing to Dad.

  ‘See, you’re smiling, Lorcan!’ he says triumphantly. ‘I knew he’d like it,’ he says to me. ‘Me and Lorcan love a good war show.’

  I nod vigorously because I am not up to speaking.

  11

  Sometimes bad things need to happen to inspire you to change and grow

  The next morning,
I sit at my desk at home and try to ignore the fact that we have yet to tidy away a lot of the household stuff. Recipes, I think, staring at the blank sheet of heavy, unlined paper in the giant notebook in front of me.

  Recipes need to be written, and now.

  When in doubt, get out the serious stationery.

  So to help myself out of my emotionally-blocked state, I decided that a fancy notebook with lovely, expensive paper would help.

  I’d even sprung for a pretty purple ink pen to assist. I’ve decorated my new notebook with pretty wrapping paper and labelled a whole section: ‘New Ideas’.

  Inexplicably, none of this has helped. I am focusing and the magic has not happened. Bad things have not helped me to grow. They’ve just made me reliant on sleeping tablets.

  Where are you, bloody Mildred, when I need you for ideas? I demand. Quiet now, huh? Only pop up to belittle me.

  Real chefs don’t get blocked, Mildred says.

  The inner voice is right. I am not a real chef, clearly. I am an imposter. Poster girl for Imposter Syndrome. Sorry, poster forty-two-year-old woman, I amend. When I look in the mirror, Mildred rarely ceases to remind me that younger, far more talented chefs are rising up behind me in a great wave. My career could be over in a flash.

  And whose fault is that? Yours. Moping around. The world is in chaos – you were only mugged. Stop whining.

  Mildred knows how to draw blood, I can tell you.

  I wish she were like Alexa or Siri or one of the computer/phone helpers and I could just tell her to shut off, but with inner voices, you can’t: they keep at it.

  I never had such a vicious inner voice till Dad’s stroke and then my mugging, but somehow, the combination of the two have turned the normal would it kill you to learn how to dress better? into a critic who turns my worst fears into words and bounces them into my mind. Bitchily, I might add.

  In order to distance this inner voice, I started calling her Mildred.

  A name like Mildred – sweet, fond of floral dresses and cardigans she knits herself – would neutralise things.