We present an extract from This Interm Time, the new memoir from Oona Frawley.
How do we make sense of the world in their wake? And how do we balance love in the present with memory of the past?
As she witnesses her mother's descent into dementia and a beloved friend’s cruel battle with cancer, Oona Frawley reconsiders the death of her father in New York decades earlier, the loss of her parents' home in Ireland before she was born, and the births of her own children. Balancing between grief at the passing of those closest to her, and joy at the emergence of new life, Frawley has wrought a stunning meditation on memory, family and the brief windows of life we share with those we love.
In her illness I had come to carry memory for my mother; I functioned at times as her map, her voice, her narration of self. But I also held her actual memories, particularly as she herself was freed of them, as if they emptied from her mind into mine. A far more profound inheritance than the objects she had given away.
Having grown up with a parent who narrated the past so beautifully and who nurtured the memory of those she loved, I felt the significance of this transfer. I had listened, rapt, as my mother described what seemed to an urban only-child like me a wondrous childhood by the sea, surrounded by siblings and extended family. I was her perfect audience, full of the peculiar child-of-immigrants longing to belong where I lived but also to the place of my parents, aware that I fully belonged to neither.
Her stories conjured Ireland for me while we sat in our Manhattan high-rise overlooking the East River and the lines and strata of midtown. When she bought me dresses in Macy's, she spoke of the dresses she and her sisters had designed and sewn for tennis- and rugby-club dances; she showed me black-and-white photos in which she and her sisters wore pale gloves to their elbows, and then revealed from a drawer a pair of the gloves them- selves into which I slid my child’s hands. I marvelled at the cool white fabric and the fact that they fit in no way into my own life. She described the making of jams from jewels of summer fruit in their long back garden, the plucking of rhubarb stalks with a snap from their crowns, and I considered the mounds of fruit differently when next we walked to the farmers’ market, suddenly aware that, unlike my mother, I could not imagine the fruit’s actual growth, only conjure its pyramidical presence on stalls around the city.
It seems strange to say that in the metropolis of New York my mother made the world bigger with her stories of suburban seaside Dublin, but this is what happened. She passed to me story after story, most seemingly inconsequential in that they were about the day-to-day of their family life, about the preparation of food, the celebration of birthdays and holidays. In sharing these pieces of her experience, which were also expressions of loss, she gave me the profound sense of life being comprised of those details, of the seemingly inconsequential.
I was enchanted by my mother’s endless flow of stories, which extended beyond her own family life into a deep appreciation for the song, literature and mythology of Irish culture. Tales like 'Deirdre of the Sorrows’, the pronunciation of Irish words and phrases, books of small square black-and-white photos that were tiny channels into the past, the recitation of poetry from medieval to modern; all counted as part of that flow, part of her memory.
I drifted to sleep while she sang, not just childhood rhymes and lyrics, but also ‘Báidín Fheilimí’ and ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’, on occasion ‘Danny Boy’, the song she was most requested to perform at get-togethers and the afters of weddings.
Songs gathered to her after emigrating – Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ – also rotated in. Something in the longing notes haunted me, presented me with fragments of feeling that weren’t mine, weren’t necessarily hers either, but were part of some larger state of longing: homesickness, lovesickness.
In retrospect, and as a parent, I know that it was only with me, her child, that she could have shared this weight of memory. It was deeply private and personal, speaking slant of her sometimes-terrible loss, the sometimes inadequacy of what had replaced that life; it would have been unthinkable to say this to someone who would have responded with anything but a child’s ready acceptance.
This Interm Time is published by Lilliput Press
