Reeling in the love

In a break in the endless shaking of hands, we checked out the shoes. The men in the family were a credit, it has to be said, and myself less so. My daughter was philosophical about her cowboy boots, proclaiming them "shiny enough". She had patterned dark tights and a black skirt bought in Dunnes in Shannon. It was the only acceptable style of skirt, none other could even be contemplated, but it was shop soiled.

The nice lady from Eastern Europe, after phoning their shops in Limerick and Ennis and discovering there were no more size eights to be had anywhere, took €4 off and sent us away with exact washing instructions. Another lovely Eastern European lady in the repair shop on Parnell Street gave it a more secure hem for the funeral. Without the industry of recent immigrants, my daughter would have been at her grandmother's funeral in frayed jeans.

My mother had no shoes on at all. I peeked in her coffin and her feet were neatly wrapped. I tucked a copy of her wedding photo under her arm and some rose petals from a place which is special to me and we approved of the choice of the turquoise suit and the bit of make up and a touch of lippy. She was 88 on 2 February and, between one thing and another, she hasn't liked me all that much since she was 80.

While all family estrangements are regrettable and sad, the estrangement with a parent is, perhaps, the most difficult of all. I remember, years ago, discussing with a number of friends the awful things that parents say to their children when driven to desperate threats. "I'll put you into the middle of next week", was the Irish contribution, that friendly old threat to knock your offspring into a coma, which was pretty shocking to other cultures represented in the discussion. Equally shocking, to me, was the American "I'm your mother, I brought you into this world, I can take you out".

Our relationship, although never the closest, had very definite highs. For years, even though I was 3,000 miles away she would phone on any given night when I was (a) sad or (b) frightened by cataclysmic Israeli coastal thunder and lightening storms. The calls never failed, nor the twice-monthly letter. The relationship low was my reading the Sunday Independent every week just to find out if she were alive or dead.

When there is such total estrangement, the news of death is strangely turned on its head. I am looking at the clock now on Monday night as I write, not thinking she is dead four days but thinking instead that five days ago she was alive. And I have learned that the heat of grief was most intense when the estrangement happened and I am left with the dregs of it. And the casting of hooks back into the past to reel in the love.

I remember that she put up with my goodnight incantations as a child which I would endlessly repeat until she accidentally stumbled on the magic response, the only one that would still me. "Goodnight now, a stór".

I remember how she put up with my figaries when I went off food and would only eat if she fed me porridge while standing by the bathroom sink with the tap running. She explained it away to a neighbour who thought she'd been indulging me by saying "Well, what can you do? You have to get food into them".

I admired, in those last coffin-open moments, those hands of hers, still small and neat, which worked hard, unendingly, unceasingly, on the farm, in the shop, in the pub, in the home. Her determination was phenomenal, not stopped by any health mishap.

When, in her 70s, she ended up in hospital for a brief stay, a neighbour was heard to proclaim: "She's never in hospital! I thought a tree could fall on that woman and she would just keep going."

The falling-out between us has been something I kept mostly to myself. Once a friend brought my sadness to her own mother and I was sent a message back which said that when a daughter goes away and lives abroad, things can never be the same when she comes back. I don't know. I know it took the both of us to make it go wrong. And that it happens in other families and, mostly, is not talked about.

And as we stood for hours and shook the hands of the neighbours and the relatives who came with their gift of sympathy, I was conscious mostly of the black skirted one beside me whose boots were indeed shiny enough. And I prayed that I will have the strength to work for her, to offer the opportunities that I was given. And that I will have the instinct to know when lightening frightens her, or when she is sad, whether she is 3,000 miles away. Or in the next room.