"I’m too far gone for prayer never mind a holy medal"

I’M COUNTING down the days until my trip to Notre Dame University, Indiana, where I’m to attend my son’s graduation.

My heart is full of excitement, but it’s being squished right down to the bottom of my ventricles by a fear that I might not make it; my daughter’s recovery from neurosurgery has followed an eventful course — much like crossing a high, long bridge that some hellish fiend has constructed, incorporating hidden trapdoors where you least expect them, through which you fall without warning, so fast that you go down without touching the sides.

I don’t want to leave my husband and children in Ireland to fall down a trapdoor without me. I wouldn’t want to fall down one without them; at least when we fall, we fall together. It makes all the difference, that.

But my husband’s having none of it. He insists — with the generous spirit that drew me to him in the first place — that he’ll kill me if I cancel just because of a silly old trapdoor. I’m to go, he says, and that’s that. To look forward to it, he says, and not worry.

So I’m observing his looking-forward-to-it commandment faithfully. I do this by putting my heathen mind and heart to praying very hard before I go to sleep — for no trapdoors, please — clutching — of all things — a holy medal that someone gave me, even though I don’t really know what a holy medal is.

I’m following my husband’s not-to-worry bidding too, which I do by lying awake at night trying not to worry until I’m about blue in the face, which is my fall-back position to which I revert when all the mindfulness nonsense — often invented by people with nothing much to worry about — fails.

My husband says neither of these approaches are what he had in mind.

And now, the night before my flight, what with all the suspenseful psychological prep, I fear for my sanity.

My sister — a kindred spirit in neurosis — who is accompanying me on my trip, fears for hers too. She’s had her finger poised over the flight and hotels cancellation buttons on her laptop for the bones of a month and it’s done her head in. “I’m too far gone for prayer,” she says on the phone from her office in London, “never mind a holy medal. Way too far gone. By the way, have you done any research on Chicago?”

I disclose all I the information I’ve uncovered. “Someone told me it’s known as the Windy City, so bring a jacket.”

“Are you taking the piss?” she says.

“No,” I say.

“That’s like saying New York is known as the Big Apple,” she says, and tells me to hold while she tells her work colleagues what I’ve just said, reporting back a few seconds later that her entire department thinks I’m a knob.

She texts me on the night before our departure: One more night. We’re going to make it. I know we are. XX.

I try to fall asleep and draw comfort from her text but lie awake instead, thinking how the last trapdoor we fell down opened during the night. And that it’s weird how something as soft and warm as a bed can feel like a knife-edge.

But now, my sister and I are sitting side by side on Aer Lingus flight EI0123 before take-off, looking at a link my son has just sent to my sister’s iPhone. It’s a picture of a double bed, under some sort of vent, in a gruesome-looking basement.

The bed is made up with rainbow striped sheets covered in lepoard spots. Even in the Gestapo interrogation-room lighting, the sheets are perfectly dazzling.

Underneath the picture my son has messaged: The bed you’re sleeping in, in my house. Bought new sheets!! Can’t wait to see you!! XX

“Is he taking the piss?” my sister asks with a stricken look that betrays an old, old fear of basements. “It says they’re 100% polyester,” she says. “We’re sleeping on 100% polyester sheets in Josef Fritzel’s dungeon.”

“Only for three nights out of seven,” I say, as suddenly, we’re airborne.

My sister and I hold hands. “We made it,” I say, squeezing her hand. “I’m going to see my son.”

“Stockholm Syndrome,” she says, squeezing mine. “I can already feel it coming on.”