‘Now, as some of you might know,’ Mrs Devlin said, ‘Séamas’s mammy has just died, and he’s very sad.’ I had been smiling nervously, but now frowned, as if I was in a school play about a sad little boy. ‘Everyone should be extra nice to him, because you wouldn’t like it if your mammy died, would you?’ I held the frown, concentrating hard on the pose, the way you do while waiting for a photograph to be taken.
I don’t know that I should have even been present for this, and wonder if they do things differently now. The whole thing felt rigid and strange. Maybe they had gone over it during the fortnight in which I was absent, and this was merely a reminder. Maybe repetition was necessary. Perhaps this public airing was itself a humane approach, a way of avoiding my mother’s death becoming one of those half-known-but-unmentioned tragedies that were common currency among kids, and Northern Irish kids in particular. ‘To save confusion in future, the following tragedies have occurred’, that sort of thing. The alternative led to misunderstandings, and having to spell it out again and again to people who weren’t aware.
‘You wouldn’t like it if your mammy died, would you?’ seemed an odd sort of a way of putting it. It would, I argue, have been preferable for this not to have been phrased as a question, one with a somewhat flimsy, glib connotation, suggesting a debate could be had on the subject. Luckily, the mood of the room seemed clear: my classmates would not like it if their mammies died.
My memories are mostly of blank, gawping faces staring back at Mrs Devlin, but also, amid the glum silence, of slowly registering the artwork that adorned every wall: painted pumpkin handprints and gory blood-effect names rendered in red acrylic paints. The room was festooned with whimsical skeletons, tombstones and wispy joke-shop cobwebs emerging from the filing cabinet beside Mrs Devlin’s desk, terminating eventually behind the long, thin poster of the alphabet that stretched just below the ceiling, at the other end of the room. Guys, you shouldn’t have, I might have thought to myself upon seeing the entire room decked out with macabre tokens of death and horror. But I didn’t, because I was five.
As I stood in front of my classmates, it occurred to me that they’d done all this decorating while I was away, and I felt that pang of melancholy one feels upon realising time has not stood still for others when it has done for you. My friends hadn’t been at chilly gravesides, or home vigils, bouncing from one relative’s knee to another while priests spoke low Latin in sing-song tones. They’d been drawing and cutting out jaunty pumpkins with their names on. This moment of transcendent solemnity, watched over by a dozen melted Homers Simpson, and malformed Sonics the Hedgehog, was broken only by heavy breathing from Philo, who then raised his hand. ‘My granny died,’ he said, in a rather touching show of solidarity-cum-one-upmanship. ‘His granny died,’ said Aoife, nodding to the room in agreement, as if this extraordinary claim required someone to vouch for it. She also said this while pointing at Philo, as if telling on him.
The room considered this exchange, and several classmates shared that their grannies had also died. Their grandas too, in some cases. Paul had suffered the loss of a turtle, some fish and three dogs, a litany of tragedy that had clearly been as painful for him as it was suspicious to us. It’s odd to recall such earnest ruminations on death and grief being carried out among small children for whom the words meant little, and who would, in roughly twenty minutes, be wearing waterproof bibs and smacking jugs around sandpits. Handed a little red car, many of us could not yet be relied upon to sort it with all the other little red cars, but here, in that moment, the garishly coloured environs of 2B of Nazareth House Primary became the unlikely setting for a seminar on grief, and the first ever conversation for many of us about bereavement and how to handle it. I became a special correspondent from grief’s remotest outpost, returning from uncharted land to tell everyone what I’d seen. Once a few questions had been asked, it was hard to stem the tide. My classmates began with solemn commiserations but, quite soon, graduated to slightly more probing queries.
‘Did she go to heaven?’
‘Do you get to visit her in heaven?’
‘Will she bring back presents?’
‘Like a Toblerone?’
‘My uncle got one in Florida.’
‘Is heaven in Florida?’
‘Is there a Disneyland in heaven?’
‘Does heaven have Toblerones?’
I answered each like a hurried politician on courthouse steps, unused to this degree of interest in my life. I was soon experiencing that first weird rush from the publicity that came with having ‘the big news’ in class. Being one of eleven had starved me of attention, and here it was being offered up to me in an undiluted and gravely significant form. My years of self-loathing were a long way away, so for now I rode that wave of attention like a piebald pony. Lacking the tact to package it any other way, my friends made it clear that my bereavement was to be rewarded.
‘Would you like my milk, because your mum died?’ offered Philo, rather sweetly. ‘Yes,’ I must have answered, because I certainly drank that milk. I also got to feed the fish, use the crap little robot no one had ever really figured out how to work and generally do all the best things before everyone else.
It’s easy to say the sadness I felt was incomprehensible, but I suppose that this was true in its most literal sense. I was incapable of comprehending what had changed, or that it had changed for ever. Death itself was too huge for me to grapple with, and my mother’s death was, to me, only questionably permanent. Just recently, she wasn’t dead; she held my hand and told me to play out in the trees by the hospital. Now she was dead, which meant she was happy and healthy, and therefore alive, but in heaven. Who knew what came next? Apart from anything else, the whole heaven thing seemed like a great deal for the time being. I have no memory of the specifics of what I imagined, I just knew that heaven was a real, physical place, and I couldn’t visit her there. I was used to her being away, since she’d previously spent time in Belfast, where I could visit her, but it was made clear to me Belfast and heaven were different in that respect and several others.