Séamas O'Reilly: Writing of my mother's death recalibrated my grief

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

My mother died 32 years ago this past Tuesday, so I was feeling contemplative and a bit weird for much of the day. I always do. I buffer a bit, wrestle with odd feelings, ring my dad.

I spend as much time wondering why I feel the way I do, as I do trying to feel better in some way. 

And somewhere, behind those feelings, emerges a sense I should feel bad for wanting to feel better.

My mother died when I was five, so the grief of it is not something I process every day, at least not consciously. 

In one of those perverse, self-defeating instincts that afflict all the bereaved — and keep the world’s psychotherapists in holiday homes and trips to Cancún — the anniversary of her death makes me feel bad about not grieving her more.

There’s an absurdity to it, really. That this one day is different to any other feels asinine in some way I find hard to define. 

Arbitrary and solipsistic, perhaps, as if grieving by appointment.

It’s been a long time, and since becoming an adult I’ve never established a proper ritual or rite to observe in her honour, so — I tell myself, quietly — it shouldn’t really make this much difference.

But it does, of course. I dawdle at the sink and stare off into space a bit. I hug my son. 

I am struck, perhaps for the first time, by the resemblance he bears to me, one to which everyone else attests, and which I usually find hard to see. 

I am aware, with a gnawing sense of vertigo, that he will in a few short months be the same age I was when she died. 

I get him ready for the day and find he looks impossibly small. By the time I walk him, hand in hand, to school, we are both five years old. 

And then I work, and write and forget, and it comes back. 

Séamas O'Reilly: I’ve spent a lot of the past two years thinking and talking about grief. 

I do a little more dawdling, a little more staring, across a dozen or more strange little moments throughout the day.

I’ve spent a lot of the past two years thinking and talking about grief. 

My memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is, at least ostensibly, about that very topic. 

Part of the instinct behind writing the book was to make sense of my family’s story to people who might find its more outsized factors too tragic to contemplate: me bereaved at five; my father widowed at 44 years old and left to deal with unimaginable grief, and 11 children between the ages of two and 17. 

In all that, I also wanted to capture the happiness I experienced, to interrupt the tragic framing of my childhood and put the sadness and difficulty into context with the joy.

The process of writing it was definitely cathartic, allowing me to put into words thoughts or feelings I’d never written down or said out loud. 

More revelatory, however, were the thoughts and feelings I’d never consciously thought or felt at all. Shame I experienced as a child suddenly came to the fore: for having forgotten so much of my mother by the time I was eight; for having insufficiently grieved by the time I was a teen.

And with these darts of pain came a trickle of guilt about the process I was undertaking right there and then. 

I had realised, a few months into writing this story, that another, quieter instinct was at play. 

I wanted to tell the world and tell myself, that I was fine. That I had, in some sense, ‘completed’ grief. 

That for all its sadness and tragedy, I’d come out the other end with a roguish smile and a marketably tragic backstory. Would someone who was really sad, I lied to myself, be writing this many jokes?

There followed a year of thinking very hard and deleting even harder, and a gradual process of recalibrating the story I was telling. 

This was, I now realise, nothing less than recalibrating the story I’d been telling myself for my entire life. 

A death held at arm’s reach, a trauma that was vacuum-packed and kept out of the way, shielded from the world by mental barriers I’d first erected with the piteous efficiency of a sad child; the concrete defences of my canny adult self giving way, layer by layer, to a patchwork of Lego. I broke my way back into the vault, brick by brick, until I’d rebuilt my own grief in something like its true image. 

I recovered three entirely new memories of my mum from the debris. And the jokes, when they returned, felt true and earned. 

I’d spent a year unpicking knots in my head and found my book was better for it. Certainly, I was too.

Better still, people liked the book. The jokes, yes, but the sad parts too, and the confusion and the guilt and the shame. 

Some — more, in fact, than I could ever have imagined — were moved to share their own experiences, in some of the most meaningful and treasured conversations I’ve ever had.

Some sent me pictures of my mother I’d never seen, or memories of her and us I’d never otherwise have known. 

Some told me it had helped them through grief themselves, whether it was one that was old and rusty like my own, or the stark, cold water of a fresh bereavement.

I winced at those who told me they’d been given the book before I’d have thought it would have been helpful. 

A few reported enjoying the book, having been handed it by well-meaning acquaintances at their beloved’s wake.

I suppose most of those who did not enjoy it for this reason were too kind to get in touch.

But this week, I thought of all those who told me they couldn’t quite face reading it. Not all of it. Not yet. They were taking it a chapter at a time. I dawdle over the thought, stare into space and think, that’s all any of us can do.