I cannot take thee as my lawfully wedded wife until death do us part

MONTH by month, she took the photographs. In the early months, as she took the pictures, she would cry. Cry because of the infinitely lonely plaint of a wood pigeon in the trees.

Cry because the robin would hop around the water feature in the way that had always made her mother laugh. But, despite the tears, she kept taking the photographs, all on her own in a suburban back garden.

At the end of 12 months, she selected the best of the pictures, starting with one of icicles hanging from the branches of a bush. That one, she decided, was perfect for the January page of the calendar she was creating.

The calendar was ostensibly simple, recording her dead mother’s garden over a 12-month period. Its summer abundance and winter bleakness. The birds who had visited when her mother was alive, growing used to her appreciative stillness — a stillness increased in the final year by her cancer.

The daughter and her two brothers printed up a few dozen spiral-bound copies of the calendar, sending one each to their mother’s closest friends, knowing that, once we hung it up, we would be reminded of Colette, at least every four weeks, by the picture of her garden each turned page revealed.

Colette’s garden was a bee-loud glade, cluttered with old-fashioned plants and white painted old-fashioned garden chairs. Her two painter sons adored it so much as a subject, some collectors of their work now own five or six different views of Colette’s garden.

But a painting can get taken for granted. Even the best painting can “go into the wall”, whereas a calendar evokes monthly engagement. You have to turn its pages.

Some of Colette’s friends take down their calendar and move to the next month on precisely the last day of the previous month. Some forget for a few days. But in the simple action of page-turning lies a tiny slice of immortality — she is briefly, smilingly alive to us again.

The calendar was the idea of her only daughter, Linda. Linda was a teenager with a riot of black curls when her mother first worked with me. At that time, we were running six-month courses for AnCO, the precursor of FÁS. Six-month courses in media skills for unemployed graduates who wanted to become newsreaders or presenters or producers. FÁS sponsored the training because it was a time of recession.

One morning, as we were finalising the list of participants for the next course, Colette came to me, to tell me Linda wanted to be on the training programme. It made no sense. She was 17. (Participants were usually in their early 20s.) She was working in a picture framing factory. (Participants usually had at least their BA under their belt.) I shrugged. AnCO made the final selection. I could certainly propose Linda for consideration. After that, though, it would be up to her. The AnCO supervisor did a matching shrug: what harm would it do to interview an eager kid? The panel of selectors were bowled over by the eager kid’s smiling relentlessness. She snuck under the wire and joined the graduates.

By the end of the course, she was an outstanding videocamera operator. This, despite the fact that she wasn’t two hands higher than a duck, which meant one of her brothers had to craft a sturdy box for her to stand on when going out on shoots, to bring her level with her subjects’ faces. The other camera operators brought camera, tripod, tapes and power unit. Linda brought camera, tripod, tapes, power unit — and her box. The box would be set down in front of a TV personality or a captain of industry or a Government Minister with such don’t-refer-to-this defiance, they stayed silent about it. She might have been small and topped with a Niagara Falls of ringlets, but she exuded a determined confidence. Right down to the clothes. Forget power suits. Dark, drapey and imprecise, topped off with a grey scarf roped around her neck; that was her look.

When I had a car crash and was in a wheelchair for a year, she was the only minder, outside my family, I trusted to push it. Wheelchair users live in dread of the willing amateur pusher, who doesn’t understand the need to tilt the thing BACKWARDS rather than forwards when meeting an obstruction.

She left our company at some point, to work on her own. A few years later, she was directing independent TV productions destined for RTÉ, eventually becoming a partner in her own production company.

Along the way, she babysat for her aunt and for me whenever we wanted her to. Which was fairly frequently, because children adored her. She had a knack of making duties — like clearing up a bedroom and having a bath — seem pleasurable. Her own motherhood seemed an inevitability.

Even those of us who hate weddings have for a long time looked forward to her big day, if only for the singing. Some guest would inevitably call out for her to sing that old Eurythmics number Angel Playing with My Heart, knowing how effortlessly she can handle the soaring trills of it.

She did fall in love, a few years ago. I met her fiancée at her mother’s funeral. A tall calmly authoritative teacher who moved among the mourners making quiet introductions and ensuring people knew what was happening and where the meal was, afterwards. The sort of person you feel you know for ages, even though you met them for the first time 10 minutes earlier.

Nonetheless, the wedding, so far, hasn’t materialised. Not because the couple want to save a hundred thousand euro, hire a wedding planner, and orchestrate a three-day extravaganza in a French chateau. The very idea of such a wedding would provoke Linda into shuddering laughter.

Nor is the wedding being postponed because of career ambition. She’s where she wants to be and knows it. To watch this woman as she briefs a production crew on the complex interwoven strands of the televisual story they are about to tell is to observe someone at the top of their game, no longer at the stage where every point must be proved, every task overseen, every editing session interfered with. She can pick and choose, take time away from the office whenever she wants to or needs to.

What’s preventing the nuptials is a definition of marriage, and the widespread belief that this decent couple would in some way bring the institution into disrepute if they were allowed to join it. Proving how joyous, virtuous and socially pivotal their marriage is by excluding others from the same commitment is important to many people, and a significant strand in our national mindset.

I still hope to attend a wedding in the not too distant future.

Of my gay friend.

The girl who designed a calendar in memory of her mother.