Life

Nuala McCann: The art of losing isn't hard to master...

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Returning to the beach at Cushendun brings back precious memories of her mother for Nuala
Returning to the beach at Cushendun brings back precious memories of her mother for Nuala Returning to the beach at Cushendun brings back precious memories of her mother for Nuala

THOSE senior moments are creeping up.

I find myself standing at the top of the stairs - a pair of socks in one hand, a sink plunger in the other - asking why I'm here.

Not in a profound way. Definitely not Beckett's: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

More, just why am I at the top of the stairs?

Senior moments mean checking the TV is turned off at least twice and wriggling the door handle endlessly to check it is locked.

There are days when I've come down in the morning and realised that I forgot to lock it.

I have heard of a career burglar who boasted that he never had to break into a house, all he had to do was try for an unlocked door.

But last week I set in train all sorts of panic because my memory played a trick.

Thank you to Denny and Gerry at the charity book shop because I was convinced that among many boxes of books I donated, I thought I had thrown in a box of letters and cards and important photos belonging to my mother.

How could I have been this careless. She's only dead a year.

Cue a flurry of rushed phone calls. They searched the shop for me. They scoured the premises as I sat at home, beating myself up.

Then, I woke at 6am last Friday and had an epiphany, as you do.

I had not been driving my own car on the day of the delivery of books... I had been driving our boy's car.

Lo and behold, the box of much-loved letters and cards and family memorabilia relating to my mother was in his boot.

Cue a heartfelt apology for putting all the bookshop guys to such unnecessary work.

Also a meditation on human frailty and how it catches up on all of us.

The strange thing was that I opened the car boot, saw the box, whispered a hallelujah then added, "Bugger it", slammed the boot shut and left the box inside because I couldn't bear to look.

"You're still grieving," says a friend.

Grief leaves you shipwrecked on street corners, spotting strangers in the distance that could be the person you loved, but never is.

This losing is no fun.

Poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote beautifully about such losing in One Art.

"Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master."

So accept this gradual shedding of youth and vigour, this losing of people you love. Sometimes life is a trudge not a gallop.

Last week, between the loss of the precious box and the epiphany of our boy's car boot, I found myself in Cushendun.

"You live in a Maud's cottage," I told my kind friend.

Not quite a Maud's cottage but a National Trust one looking out over the beach, she said.

And there I was, back at the beach where my mother and I walked in the final months of her life.

We would get out her three-wheeled perambulator and take a stroll.

A few years earlier and she would have been down lifting driftwood for her stove.

Scroll back a few years before the blue disabled badge and the hand rails and the bath chair and she would have given me a run along that beach for my money.

Sometimes she would return hauling a log of driftwood the size of herself.

"No way, ma," I'd say, reminding her of the spider the size of a mouse who moved into my car with some driftwood and still scares the bejaysus out of passengers.

Ma would look at me with a sharp gleam in her eye that meant she would brook no argument.

Walking the path last week at Cushendun, maybe it was grief that fell into step beside me, grief for the woman she was and for the pain of her final years.

The art of losing isn't hard to master... Glasses, keys, a purse but then it comes down to brothers and sister, the dearest of old friends.

And then you lose a little of yourself, eyesight, hearing, a purposeful stride... and then she who was so literate and so eloquent, who could quote Dickens and Austen and Eliot, lost all but a very few words.

We would drive the Antrim coast and back and she would say: "Lovely day, lovely, lovely, love you."

And maybe, just maybe, that was enough.