After Kerry

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November is the dying season in our family. The light fades out of us, we grow pale and cold and fall like leaves. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins accidentally killed; all the dead of November. Now, my mother.

It’s a good month for burying, November. The low between-light of autumn-going-winter shows the bones and struts of things; the land, the things growing from it, the people standing on it. Ireland is a country that looks best by winter light, stripped bare of leaves and greenery, spare and strong and good. We buried Ma beneath an intense blue sky, the golden light casting long shadows on the grave grass from the marble Jesuses and alabaster angels and our overcoated figures around the hole. Family, the few living relatives, Father Horan. No friends. My mother had never had a friend she had not alienated in the end.

The dying had been painful and long and inevitable. Ironic, mostly. Every time one of us had tried to break away from that dark little house full of the smell of frying food, she had found a lump, or noticed a mole had grown larger, or had pains in her stomach, or passed blood. And she would reel us in from wherever we hoped to escape to. Dangerous, to invoke the name of the angel of carcinoma. He flies in tandem with the angel of poetic justice. November is his favorite month.

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