Regaining appetite for life after pain of bereavement

“Nothing prepares us for the ferocity of grief,” writes Alice Taylor at the start of her book on bereavement. “Someone who was part of your world is gone, and has taken a chunk of you with them.”

And Time Stood Still

Alice Taylor

Brandon/O’Brien Press €16.99

It is a daunting topic, but one that is well suited to her strengths as a writer — her candour, her memory for detail, and her awareness of the importance of family and the wider community. It is a beautifully produced hardback book, illustrated by unusual, atmospheric photographs.

On the cover is a tea-cup and saucer in the familiar blue willow pattern, in homage to Alice’s mother who, like Alice, could never drink tea from a mug. I remember my mother and her sisters having the same dislike of tea in mugs (coffee for some reason was acceptable in a mug), and it is through such deft touches that Alice draws readers into her world.

It is nearly 25 years since Alice’s debut, To School Through the Fields, became a surprise success. It sold internationally and became one of the best-selling Irish memoirs of all time, a boon for its small, Dingle- based publisher, Brandon. Alice went on to publish another 10 books, all edited by Steve McDonagh, founder and driving force of Brandon. McDonagh died suddenly while this book (which took 12 years to write) was being edited, and is described in a chapter entitled ‘The Motivator’.

While nostalgia for a way of life fast-disappearing was a strong factor in Alice’s early work, now she is more inclined to emphasise the continuity of rural and small town life, the way the best traditions survive, if in slightly different forms. For example, religious funerals are nowadays often replaced by secular gatherings, but the core of the event is still to bid farewell to the departed and celebrate their life.

In the future, anthropologists may find Alice’s memories shed light on the central, therapeutic place that waking the dead has in Irish society.

The small farm on the Cork-Kerry border, familiar from Alice’s first book, is recalled at the start of this one, when the smell of a sulphur candle recalls the death of her brother Connie, when Alice was six. Her memories of that time suddenly came alive, “as if the smell had turned the key in a locked memory box,” allowing Alice as a grown woman to complete the mourning she had been unable to go through as a child.

The most devastating of Alice’s losses was the sudden death of her husband Gabriel Ó Murchú, who collapsed one morning with a heart attack and never regained consciousness. It was after the loss of Gabriel that Alice experienced the incapacitating depths of grief.

It would be reasonable to expect a book about bereavement to be depressing but, while harrowing at times, Alice’s memoir is also consoling, describing ways of overcoming the terrible blow and regaining an appetite for life.

Religion is not always the answer. Alice recalls that when her mother’s family rosary was extended by too many extra prayers her father, who preferred walking the fields to conventional worship, would cut her short by complaining “Ah Missus, we’ll be here till morning”. For Alice too, nature rather than religion is the great consolation.