To live and die in Ireland

THE bereavements of Alice Taylor’s life are the theme of her new book And Time Stood Still.
She’s coming to Clare this Saturday for a book signing at the Ennis bookshop and speaking to The Champion last Friday, she said it had been a very long time in the making.

 

“It was in the melting pot for the 12-year period I wrote it over. I needed to go back over each of the bereavements and I wrote about some of them as they happened.

“With bereavement, you can’t write it in a detached form, or be analytic, because bereaved people have a very heightened radar and they know if you’re not where they are. They know instinctively if the person they are talking to or what they are reading is from somebody who has walked in the shoes of bereavement.

“If you’re at the funeral of somebody you loved, when mourners come and shake hands you instinctively know the people who mean it and who come offering comfort and those for whom it’s only a matter of form. You sniff it out, you sense it automatically and I think you have to have been there to know, really. When I was going through one of the bereavements I read a lot of books on bereavement but a lot of them were from the American and the English culture and the Irish do death differently really.”

Her first book of memoirs, To School Through the Fields, was published in 1988 and was a huge bestseller.

However, it was the feedback from a later work, The Parish, which convinced her that publishing a book about grief and bereavement would be worthwhile.

“When I wrote The Parish a couple of years ago I included a chapter about the death of my husband, because that would be part of parish life, a parish death and funeral. A lot of people said to me afterwards that the chapter had really helped them, because you told it as it was.

“My publisher asked me would I do a book on bereavement and I said I wasn’t so sure about it. Then I did, I worked at it over the years. normally a book would take two or three years but this spanned over 12 years. It was a tough book to write but I felt that it might help people. In bereavement you need hand rails and I found that you pick up little bits from different things.”

While she insists the book isn’t particularly dark, she makes no bones about the impact that her losses have had on her or of the toll that grief can take on a person.

“I think nothing prepares you for the ferocity of grief for someone who’s close to you. If you’ve never gone through it, it’s like the ground beneath your feet cracking and there’s no way you can anticipate how terrible and awful it is.

“I think the thing about bereavement is that people walk around looking normal, nothing changes on the outside. Inside you’re bleeding, you’re devastated but you look the same as you did.

“You carry the grief within yourself and this is where friends, understanding and community is very important, because after the funeral is over, that’s when the real grieving begins.”

In Ireland, the rituals attached to death are very firmly established and she feels they offer a kind of comfort to the bereaved.

“I remember a young friend of mine said to me that he thought that after the funeral was over they’d feel better, but when the funeral is over that’s when it all begins, because you go on autopilot when someone dies, especially if somebody dies suddenly.

“You get yourself through the whole ritual of the funeral and the rituals are good, it’s the one thing we do well in Ireland. we don’t pretend it hasn’t happened like they do in other cultures and I think the rituals give the bereaved the time to absorb the reality, because the mind can’t absorb it that quickly, it’s almost as if it’s too much.

“The old-fashioned wake – and they are coming back now – was a good way of doing things because people were in their own environment, in their natural surroundings and they were themselves.

“The neighbours came in and it was therapeutic and soothing and helpful. The church ceremonies are good because we do need ritual attached to it, we can’t treat it casually, it’s of huge significance in the lives of anybody who experiences it so ritual is very necessary and side by side with the need for comfort and friendship, you need peace and quiet as well, because you heel in peace and quiet.”

There were a number of things she feels helped her cope with her losses.“I remember listening to tapes and reading different pamphlets and things and they are all little stepping stones. When somebody dies very close to you, you’re sort of on an island of grief and you need to build a bridge back to the mainland of life. I think the bridge is built with stepping stones, stepping stones of kindness, help from other people and all sorts of little things.

“I found nature was a great, great healer, to walk along by a river, to go to the seaside to walk through a wood. And my garden, I dug and dug and dug and dug! I transformed my garden and not for the sake of my garden, for the sake of me.

“Grief is physical as well as mental, you’re physically exhausted, especially if it’s a sudden death, you suffer from shock and your whole system is gone off track. But after a little while you might take on a creative pursuit and for me it was gardening.”

Painting and baking were other activities she found helpful during dark times, while she feels that in a physical sense grief makes a person feel cold.

“Another thing I found that if it’s the winter, put down the fire. I put down the fire every day because grief chills you to the marrow of your bones and there’s comfort in the fire.

“I think grieving people have a big solid lump of ice inside of them and they need warmth and comfort. In a way, with bereavement, you’re the patient and the nurse and you have to nurse yourself out of it. You can go for Indian head massages or reflexology, because your muscles are tense, there’s a lot of tension in grief, you need to care for yourself physically and be nice to yourself.”

While some people can continue to function as they have always done in the aftermath of a death, it can catch up with them months later, but she feels that while grief may be terribly severe, the pain can ultimately be overcome.

“Some people grieve straight away, but with some people, it goes on hold for a couple of months and then it happens and that’s nearly more difficult. By then, the support system has kind of moved on and people think they’re grand. I’ve often come across people who said it was three months after when the world collapsed around them. At some stage, you’ll just have to plough through it. And it’s rough.

“The one thing about it, you do come out at the other end. You don’t come back into the same world, you come back into a different world but it’ll be an okay world. I remember one friend saying to me when I was going through a rough time, ‘Alice, the sun does shine again’. She had gone through it and she was right.”

While the book deals with things like the death or her husband and her four-year-old brother, she feels it’s not a book that will leave people downcast and that it can be of solace to readers.

“It’s a comforting book and there’s a lot of spirituality attached to grief and bereavement because you’re walking parallel to a world we don’t understand. There’s a whole other dimension at work and you’re comforted and carried on, at times by strengths you didn’t know you had. I’d see it as a comforting book, I’d see it as handrail through bereavement. You can’t pretend it isn’t hurtful or a tough time, it is, but I would hope this would be a comfort to people.”