Let the busy world be hushed: Reflecting on a life well lived
Fr Jason Murphy pays a special tribute to the late Maureen Hayes (103) who passed away recently...
The chaffinch eats the seed on the bird table fornent her bedroom window as she lies there in the stilly silence of this summer afternoon on this the feast of the Sacred Heart. The beams of sunshine break through the clouds to illumine the room in which her four adult children gather round her bedside, listening to her every breath. The richest of orange aromas emanating from the Philadelphus bush wafts through her open window. She loved the breeze caressing her face, even as she lay there over these weeks of leaving taking, watching for the May bush to bloom and turn a pinky hue in the hedge opposite her window, the hope fulfilled of warmer days to come.
Over a century delighting in the wild orchid and the yellow rattle that bloomed along the banks where tall Chesnut trees stand aloft sheltering the passerby in the place where she grew as a girl along the narrow road to Ballyhaise on the far side of Butlersbridge, in the townland with a name that is akin to a place in poetry, oh Aughadrumagullion. How many times over the years had she spoken your name, as we waited on the day that she would turn a hundred years from that May day she was born in that townland of her memory.
Her neighbours call in to say hello on their way from voting in Killoughter school as we gather closer to commend her soul to God, ‘Go forth Christian soul from this world in the name of the Almighty God who created you’, as her breaths grow lighter as with the gentle breeze that wanes, calling her onwards along the lane. Oh how she looked to that laneway twixt the Sally trees in the months that had passed watching and waiting for Him to stop by and to take her by the hand to lead her onwards to a place akin to this, where nature gives way in abundance and the trees, they ever bloom.
There, as we watched her sleeping, we wondered where in her mind it was she dwelt, seeming so far away from this place where she had lived. Where was it she had retreated to, perhaps to those childhood days on the street of her home running to fetch water for her neighbour, the blind woman Tilly Ebbitt, or perhaps across the fields in the classroom of Culboyogue school where she imagined the faces of past heroes brought to life by Master Ruddy.
As the neighbours take their leave, her three daughters in their mind's eye are drawn back to summer days like these, in the hayfields beyond, turning with a pitch fork the grass baking in the midday sun, lapping and dagging in the corners, making pikes and haycocks watching and waiting for their mother to come through the gap with a pot of freshly brewed tea and a basket filled with slices of freshly cut soda bread with lashings of red rhubarb jam, the stalks of which were cajoled from the store of Mrs Connolly along the railway line.
Summer days so far from this and how they wish that they could return again and gaze upon her when they were but girls in summer dresses and she was in her prime. For here she was ever constant throughout the days of their lives for three score years and more; for here she has lived and here it is she would die in the moments that were to come, in utter peace and contentment filled, in this house beneath the hills that she has called her home.
Twelve cows she milked by hand in the parlour without on the street, the swish of warm milk hitting the bottom of an enamel bucket in the early morn beneath the light of a tilly lamp, to pour over the porridge that burbled on the range for her children to eat, as she watched them run down the lane bound for Keeney school and return beneath the Railway Bridge, the welcome sight of the turf smoke rising from the chimney pot and the assurance that she was there, always and ever a constant in their lives.
The smell of rashers frying and cabbage on the boil to fill their little bellies after their day at school, cabbage that they grew in abundance to sell along the road to passersby or by the sackful to McCaul’s shop or Donohoes of Bridge Street within Cavan Town. Walking the sow over the road to Treiner’s boar in the hope that there’d be good litter of pigs to sell to the pigman Brady on his rounds.
So it was, one memory borrowed another as they each sat around her bed, their soothing voices enrapturing her in their love as the cuckoo’s call through the opened window could be heard as clear as day reminding of how she longed to hear it’s calling each and every year, as with the coming of the swallows who reared their young, all her years, up and under the eaves of the barn, the barn they remember standing tall in as they tramped down the hay. Nights she spent darning socks, listening to the wireless or knitting Aran sweaters and little cardigans for school. A time for every matter under Heaven, a time to be born and a time now to die.
No matter how long you live she reminded years passed quickly by and the sounds from the milking parlour were to be quietened and no more the trot of sows to over Parsey lane. There she was found sitting in her armchair next the Rayburn, only the sound of the kettle whistling to break the stilly silence of an autumnal afternoon as she turned her head towards the kitchen window to catch the movement of a humankind crossing the cobbles of the back street that might lift the latch on the scullery door.
There in this tranquil kitchen the sweet air of contentment that wafted like the aroma of philadelphus in the quiet of this hallowed room made sacred by the prayers that she recited for each and every one in her chair by the range, contemplative, far removed from the bustle of life the world has known; a novel stuffed down the side of the seat cushion to pass the quiet moments of the failing afternoon, Maeve Binchey, Patricia Scanlon telling each the story of ‘city lives’ that she has never known.
Oh the warmth of her welcome, like a soothing balm after the maelstrom of demanding voices of the world without.
And as we listened to the other remember in the quiet of conversation, she passed serenely, without a stir, from this world just as she had lived, the busy world being hushed and her long years of living ended and in the taking of a breath a new Life, Eternal, where the trees they forever bloom, had just begun.
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