Joe Canning

2.

Family

The butterfly was the gift.

That's how I saw it. Her way of being there for us. Reassuring us. Settling us. At first, I wondered if I was the only one who noticed it, fluttering around the altar of the church in Monaleen. On 25 November 2022 - our wedding day.

The moment the priest mentioned Mam, the butterfly stirred behind him. And to me, instantly, that was her. Just letting us know that she was with us. Even the priest momentarily stopped, realising that everyone's attention had been drawn to this tiny, winged creature. A butterfly in November. How often would you see that?

Maybe people will read this and think it silly. But I have faith, and if you ask me to explain that faith, that moment is where I'd go. Ten months after her passing, experiencing that profound sense of Mam's presence on our wedding day.

She was with us too for Meg's IVF treatment: three weeks of injections, and both of us acutely aware of a butterfly in the house. Then the moment Meg's pregnancy was confirmed, the butterfly was gone.

Maybe believing in an afterlife is the only real comfort available to us after losing somebody we love. And I believe we'll all see Mam again. I certainly hope so.

She had this deep equanimity about her. A calmness you never saw crumble. In many ways, I suspect that it fooled us into believing she was somehow unbreakable. The cancer coming back clearly wasn't good news, but you never got that sense from Mam. Even as she became increasingly unwell and experienced a few fainting episodes, I think we always believed that she would pull through.

I know I certainly did.

Call it naivety, but when someone is so strong, it's easy to underappreciate the seriousness of their predicament. Mam never really spoke about her cancer and certainly never betrayed any unease about the possibility of it being terminal. So it was all too easy to be fooled into believing that her condition was less serious than happened to be the case.

Even when she went into the Oncology Unit in St Joseph's University Hospital that Christmas of 2021, you couldn't detect even the tiniest sliver of self-pity. In hindsight, it was clear that she was very sick, and I don't doubt she probably knew herself that she was dying. But that knowledge could never be allowed weigh on us.

That was always her mentality: my problem, not theirs.

By then, she couldn't really eat as the cancer had moved to her stomach and, heavily medicated, she was sleeping a lot. But right up to the last few days, she could be extremely lucid too. It would almost fool you into believing that she was coming around and getting better.

Maybe on some level we all understood what was happening. I know for certain that my sister Deirdre did, but she'd only tell us as much as Mam would want us to know. And Mam was adamant that she didn't want to go to a hospice, because to her, that was where people went to die. It's not strictly true, of course. Often people go there for a period of convalescence and return home again.

But to Mam, I think going to a hospice would have registered as some kind of acknowledgement that she was giving up. And she would never countenance the idea of the rest of us seeing her accept defeat.

So maybe there was that element of denial in how most of us dealt with her final days.

Post-Covid restrictions were still in place, so we were confined to one visitor at a time. I'd bring her in a Calippo ice pop because she loved the cold sensation on her tongue.

And often, I'd come away faintly reassured that she was rallying a little; telling them all at home, 'She was good tonight.' I wanted to believe it. We all did.

About a week before her death, the doctors expressed a view that she might only have a day or two left. But it wasn't really until the very last 24 hours that she stopped talking. I had just arrived back in Limerick from the hospital when I got the call that they'd been told Mam was expected to pass that night. The doctors could see she was weakening.

We were all there at her bedside for the end: Dad and the seven of us, watching her breathing just getting slower, weaker and more laboured. Then it finally stopped, and we found ourselves looking at one another in silence. Mam was gone, and there was nothing that any of us could say to soften the realisation of what had just happened in our world.

There's this beautiful passage in a book called The Five People You Meet in Heaven by American author Mitch Albom that I think speaks to the heart of how those of us lucky in life are shaped by the people we call Mam and Dad. It goes:

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand. Their stories and all their accomplishments sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones beneath the waters of their lives.

When Mam was first diagnosed with breast cancer around April 2015, she began losing her hair through the treatment. A few of us - me and my nephews, Nathan and Adam - decided to get our heads shaved in solidarity. There's actually a picture taken of Davy 'Darby' Glennon and me doing umpire at a Féile semi-final that my brother Seamus was refereeing, and we're both proud skinheads.

Until she got sick, Mam used cut everyone's hair at home, so she knew how finnicky we could be about it. Shaving it all off was a big thing for me then. Just my way of saying something.

As a family, we were always religious. Mam and Dad would say the rosary every night, and if you happened to be there at the time, the expectation was that you'd say it with them. This would involve kneeling on the ground and turning a chair around to lean on.

On Wednesday nights, Dad played cards up in Uncle Frankie's pub in Woodford and, on the way home, we'd say the rosary in the car. Often I'd pretend I was asleep in the back seat to avoid having to join in with 10 Hail Marys. It never felt especially heavy-handed or prescriptive, although - as with most families - Mass on Sundays was obligatory.

Today I'm not a regular Mass goer anymore, though there's still a certain comfort in getting to church the morning of a game. Even when I was living in Oranmore, Davy Burke and I would make a point of taking the two-minute walk to Mass that morning. An aunt of mine who lives nearby in Craughwell said she used hear of kids going to the church because they knew there was a fair chance that Burkey and I would be in the congregation.

To this day, I retain a faith. But if you asked me to articulate coherently what that faith is, I'd definitely struggle.

Every time I'm in Portumna, I go to Mam's grave and talk to her. I say a few prayers and always feel her presence. She died at quarter to midnight on 26 January 2022, but the headstone says 27 January, because that's what was written on the death certificate. We all still miss her terribly and believing in that 'next life' - whatever it may actually mean - probably helps with the process of grieving. When Josie was born this year, we all instantly noticed this tiny red mark between her eyebrows. And that's when I first heard the expression of a stork: a tiny birthmark some babies carry that is interpreted as a kiss from an angel.

Funny, the Clifford brothers in Kerry were interviewed in a newspaper a while back, talking about their late mother and the influence she'd had in their lives. And it struck me that if you just changed their surname to ours, the story would be identical. It was actually weird reading it, because to me, it was as if they were talking about my own mam. Someone endlessly quiet, someone understated, someone who did absolutely everything they could for their family. I remember getting Dad to read that article.

Maybe I was just more attuned to this stuff after her passing because I always had the tightest bond with my mother. Being the youngest in the family by some distance, and being named after her, I suppose I confided more in her than anyone. And, in a strange way, she in me.

She loved Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and even now, be it on her birthday or at Christmas, I still buy some to bring and leave at the grave. On some level, for me, just doing that brings her back, even if I find myself standing there eating one alone.

Just about all of my childhood days were spent around Mam because she brought me everywhere. One of her jobs as a community nurse was to call to elderly neighbours in her role as 'home help'. She'd always bring along a newspaper, and the priest would get her to distribute envelopes for people to make their parish donations. The idea was that they would then bring the envelopes with money inside when attending Mass that Sunday.

Even though the religious structures in your life might slowly diminish over time, I sense there's still a comfort in just going to certain places like the church or graveyard. In that idea of death ending a life, but not a relationship. It's almost as if you can turn down the volume of the world and do some kind of...