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  • More Bitter Blues
  • John Menaghan (bio)

Bitter the tears that fall but more bitter the tears that fall not.

—Irish proverb

I

I couldn’t stop crying when my father died. Now that my mother’s gone, I can’t seem to start. When she died, a nurse lifted the window sash to let her soul out. She fled, it seemed, without delay, scorning the worn-out body that held, or held back, her soul more than eighty-nine years.

In former times the people I come from placed lighted candles around the corpse, draped with cloth all mirrors in the dead one’s room, stopped all clocks as if to illustrate the end of time. Instead, we passed her body off to strangers who did things to it we don’t want to know.

II

The church my parents attended for fifty years is closed for repairs, so the funeral mass takes place in the neighboring town in a church none of us have ever before been inside. I give the eulogy from a lofty perch, and the priest, a cousin, speaks consoling words.

Outside afterwards a neighbor, whose father died only months before, tells a funny tale. A man, it seems, who broke into the line of cars headed for the church got pulled over [End Page 205] by the cops. His father, once a Captain in the state police, would have loved to witness that.

III

As we bury my mother in the one same grave where my father and his parents lie, I ask myself whether or not she might have preferred to be “with her own people,” as the saying goes. Did she see herself as belonging to her husband’s close-knit family? I suspect not.

Then I think of my ex-wife, remarried now, with whom I thought I’d spend the rest of my life. Will I even hear about it when she dies? Or she about me, if my time should come first? My parents are together now forever, my ex-wife and I eternally apart.

IV

The bad sister stands in my brother’s kitchen. After the funeral, at a meal at some local restaurant we fed all the mourners. We talked about things and people and times past, and the present and future my parents will never see. Will I see this sister again?

Not if I can help it, I think, though I know hearing me say as much would make our parents terribly sad. But they’re gone now, and soon I will be too, back to a life where this sister has no place. From some we never quite part, while others die for us before their bodies do.

V

The night after our mother died, my sister, the good one, had a visit from her spirit. Not restless exactly but not quite prepared to leave behind the comforts of this world. [End Page 206] Are you cold? my sister asked. Would you like to come under the covers with me for a while?

Silently the spirit slipped between the sheets and my sister held what seemed to be her body, trying to warm her perhaps for the journey that lay ahead. I have to go, she blurted, then rose suddenly from the bed. O.K., Mom, my sister replied, and watched her spirit fade.

VI

Were you scared? Someone asked when my sister told that story the next day. Not at all, she said. It was comforting. And I thought: Why didn’t our mother come to me as well—or instead? My sister swore it was real, not just some dream she’d had. Who’d care, I thought, if only she’d come.

There’s an end to everything, including ends. And what doesn’t end endures, and life resumes. And in a way even what’s over persists. Eventually, though, everyone goes home, if they can, to whatever life they have left. Time, then, to pack my things and disappear. [End Page 207]

John Menaghan

John Menaghan has published three books of poetry with Salmon Poetry (Ireland): All the Money in the World 1999, She Alone 2006, and What Vanishes 2009. His...

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