A Farewell Tribute to my Beloved Mother

Last Friday, March 5th, the day I had been dreading my whole life came when my beloved mother passed away - after lingering on for two weeks from the first call from the hospital to say that she was slowly slipping, she finally and peacefully breathed her last, and I was glad to be there in her final hours. She was a great age, in her 90s, and she had lived through so much that I think anyone would be challenged to deal with all she had to cope with in her life. It was great that she lived to meet her great-granddaughter Sofia and this photo, taken the previous Saturday, is one we will always treasure as the whole family surround her for what we knew in our hearts would be a final farewell from our children and Sofia.

I won't go into minutiae here but in a nutshell, she was born during Ireland's colonial era, in the year before the Easter Rising, and she was a child during the struggle for Independence and the Civil War years. Her parents came from Tipperary and Kerry, and my grandfather was a master tailor who had a business in Lismore, to where he moved in 1909. They knew tragedy as they lost their firstborn child, Jack, before his second birthday, a few months before my mother was born. They later had another child, Paddy, who died in 1984 in his late 60s, much too young. My mother was so lucky to live into her 90s and as she was well and active up to her late 80s we have few regrets. She had dementia in the last few years and barely knew me or the family in the past year or more, which made for a long goodbye, and it is difficult now to recall when she started forgetting who we were, it was so gradual a decline.

She married relatively late in life, and was widowed only four years later, when I was nearly three. She was then pregnant and my baby sister also died at a few weeks of age, which was a double whammy for her. She'd lived in Dublin when married, but moved back to her family home here in Lismore to take care of her widowed mother until her death some years later. So there was only Ma and me for most of my life, which made us extra close. Of course in my teenage years that level of closeness was claustrophobic in that she kept far too close an eye on me, keeping my wings clipped beyond what I felt was justifiable - as a mother of a teenager now I can totally empathise!

She was extremely unselfish without being a guilt-tripping martyr, as she gave me her blessing in most of my wayward ventures over the years. It can't have been easy for her to see me leave home at 17 for nursing school in Dublin, and even harder to see me leave for Bangladesh five years later. Communications weren't what they are now, with email and blogging and Facebook, so we probably had three or four phone calls home in that two year period, each of which entailed pre-booking the calls a couple of days in advance. On the plus side, we have a wonderful archive of letters as she kept every one of my letters, as I did hers, which give a great narrative of both our lives as she was a wonderful letter-writer. I owe her for any skill I have in that line, even though I rarely write letters nowadays, having diversified into email and blogging, with the odd bit of memoir writing along the way.

I returned to Ireland with a Dutchman in tow, and she welcomed her future son-in-law as the son she never had, despite the misgivings she must have had before meeting him. They remained close right to the end, a period spanning almost three decades. Jan wrote a beautiful eulogy which he read after her funeral Mass and which moved the congregation to tears and laughter in equal measure. He's agreed for me to post it as a permanent memento to Ma, and I hope it conveys what he intended it to be - a fitting tribute to a great lady. I will post it in a separate post as it deserves its own space.

Her four grandchildren and her brand-new great-granddaughter Sofia are her legacy and I know our children loved her as she was an indulgent and loving granny who wasn't beyond telling me how best to raise them. She must have had lonely days as most of our lives were spent overseas in development work, yet she had a generous and kind heart and was very proud of our work for the less well-off. We came home every year from Africa for a month or more, so she could see her grandchildren growing up, and she was delighted when we moved to Ireland for good in 1997. She spent a lot of time with us between Lismore and Dublin where she went back to live in 1978 when I went to Bangladesh, as she loved the buzz of life in the city. She lived there until 2002 when she moved back to assisted living in Lismore and gradually as she got more frail she moved into increasingly dependent care, and ended her days in St. Joseph's Hospital in Dungarvan, where she had excellent loving care right to the end from the wonderful nursing and care staff, all of whom I am proud to call colleagues.

"May Quinn was a lady" - that's what I kept hearing over the days of the funeral - in the typical Irish tradition it took place over three days. It was a traditional Catholic funeral for a woman to whom her faith and religion meant everything over her lifetime, and she would have been delighted to see all the old-timers who came to pay their respects. Not that there were too many of them as she had outlived most of her peer group, and we often laughed about that together in her good days. She was a very stylish lady indeed - she loved her style in clothes and make-up, and often despaired at my total lack of interest in clothes and style as she saw it; jeans were anathema to her and she always wanted to give me a makeover, about which we had many a laugh. She was struck with the odd pangs of Catholic guilt for what she said was her vanity, but thankfully it never lasted too long!

For those who aren't familiar with the Irish funeral ritual - she was brought to the funeral home where Rosary was said the first night, and then the Removal to the church took place on the second night, when people came to pay their respects to us all. She remained before the altar until the Requiem Mass on the third morning, after which she was buried in the local cemetery with her beloved parents, on a beautifully sunny, cold and cloudless spring day . When I sit in our sunroom or on the patio I can see the yew trees of the graveyard behind our house, separated by a field from the end of our garden.

So while it is a sad time for me and all the family - it's been cathartic to write this as I am at home on a week's bereavement leave from work - and I hope she is looking down from her heaven on all her family and loved ones, and continuing to give me her blessing for these few words in her honour. I am proud to be her daughter and to have known such a wonderful mother, and I know the rest of the family will miss her as I do and we will long treasure the wonderful memories she left us.

Thank you Ma - we love you and will miss you always.