Love that lasted beyond the last breath in Sligo
It is about an old farmer, and the balloon he brought with him from his home below the Curlew Mountains to the modern geriatric hospital which countrymen of his era always thought of as the County Home.
Maybe this yarn is a slight thing about a green balloon.
Maybe it is much more than that. I cannot be sure, and that is the pure truth.
The nurse who told me the story was born and raised in the same townland as Mikey and Molly.
They had a handy small farm.
They had no children, but a nephew who lived nearby was like a son to them always.
The couple were popular.
Mikey had been a thatcher for three parishes when he was young, when there were a lot of thatched roofs.
After that, he still made wicker baskets and creels. He was very handy.
There were often lively card games of Twenty Five in their kitchen, up until relatively recent times.
It was a lively house until Molly died two years ago, suddenly, at home, at the age of 87 years.
The nephew and his family and the neighbours kept an eye on Mikey’s wellbeing after that.
He was two years older than his wife.
He managed well enough for the first while, but then started to go downhill fast enough, and was not that happy for visitors to call any more.
That’s an old story, is it not.
The nephew was always welcome though, and it was common knowledge he would inherit the place when the time came.
He is a good, caring sort.
It was him who told the nurse that Mikey was not able to look after himself safely any more, and that he should go into the hospital where she works.
She called shortly afterwards, as a neighbour rather than as a nurse, and was quite surprised to see how frail Mikey had become.
He was sitting in his old fireside chair beside a dead hearth. She noticed the green balloon floating over the back of the chair.
He told her he remembered thatching her father’s house.
After that, and a conversation with the nephew and two other concerned neighbours, she called several times again, and herself and the nephew put pressure on Mikey to go into the hospital for at least a while.
He resisted quite fiercely for months, but at last agreed.
She was on duty in his unit that evening, when the nephew drove him to the hospital.
He arrived with a large suitcase, was on a walking stick, and was carrying the green balloon with him.
The nephew tied it to the head of his new bed.
It dropped down and was out of sight, except when the fan was turned on overhead in hot weather.
Then, she said, it would flutter over his head on the pillow like something alive.
Mikey had begun to slip away last December.
The week before they put the screens around his bed, she asked the nephew what was the significance of the green balloon.
Mollie blew up the balloon as a surprise for the nephew’s eldest daughter, and tied the neck of it, and then slipped out of her chair on to the floor and was dead.
Just like that it happened.
Mikey showed him the balloon after the funeral, and said that it was special because it contained Mollie’s last breath in this world.
Mikey, being handy, even put glue in the neckpiece so the air within would not escape.
None of it did, either.
He died in his sleep in the first days of this year.
Later, before the undertaker closed the coffin, the nephew put the balloon in the space between Mikey’s head and his dead shoulder.
The nurse, as a neighbour’s child, attended the funeral in a small calm graveyard below the Curlews.
When they were lowering the coffin into the loamy grave below, somebody slipped a little and the coffin lurched downwards sharply.
Everybody around the grave heard the green balloon bursting with a pop within.
Most had no idea what caused the sound, but the nurse and the nephew knew. Molly’s last breath escaped at last.
The nurse told me she felt as if they had sent two souls to paradise rather than just one.
That’s the story as it was told to me. I don’t quite know why I am passing it on like this, except I suspect it is about a lot more than just a Green Balloon...
