I remember my mother busy in a kitchen flooded with sunlight, preparing food at a too small table or ironing sheets and towels. I remembered the biscuit brown patch in the silver ironing board cover where the iron had burnt through to reveal the thin sponge layer beneath. I remember the hiss and tick and the smell of the puffs of steam sighing from the iron's mouth.
Sometimes she would talk, not necessarily to me although I was in the same space. I felt at times as though I had stepped into a chapel where she was praying, confirming again deep vows she had first made long ago. Her words landed in the soft earth of my life like the little helicopter seeds that fall from a sycamore tree.
Always speak the truth. Don’t be swayed by others.
I was young. I was concerned with what I would wear for that night’s party. My life was all action, a swift two-step toward the dazzle of any new experience. Yet, the whimsy, the softly spoken poetry of her reflections chimed with the sweetness of a delicate bell. Something here mattered enough for me to wrap the words in an old soft cloth and tuck them away somewhere safe.
My mother died on the day before bonfire night. The last days of October had the feeling of an emptied room filled with a calm and final light that completely fills the space where life had once been lived. The still-warm days drifted into November. The air was scented with the sweetness of decay. We found a rose on a bush and took it to the hospital. Not much could rouse my mother from the reverie into which she had descended. Except the rose. She held it in her hand,
The last rose of summer.
In the end the talking stopped. Silence broke through and settled inevitably and irrevocably and slowly over the days, over the bed on which we sat either side. Sillence revealed itself, not as a thing like a mountain or a chalice, but as the herald of the end of things and the undeniable presence of everything. The tenderness of silence filled the little hospital room with its curtains that didn’t quite fit, it filled her lungs battered with disease, it filled her heart broken with living, and then it wrapped itself around our fear and loneliness. Silence, and this impossibly simple and tender presence became the truth, deeper than anything spoken. The rose sat in a glass on the bedside cabinet silently unfolding.
Colette Power November 2017
