Julie Jay: My mother-in-law was never happier than when indulging her grandkids' every whim

Mary was a woman for whom unlimited minutes on the telephone were invented — I have never met somebody whose phone rang with such frequency. A New York taxi driver probably receives fewer calls on New Year’s Eve than Fred’s mother would on a singular Saturday night. It was no wonder her phone was rarely silent for long, because she was the absolute queen of shooting the breeze in to the wee hours.

Despite living in Kells for 50 years, she was a proud Leitrim woman to the very end and could relate any topic to how it impacted Carrick-on-Shannon. The Cold War had them all stocking up on beans, the Cuban missile crisis had them all hiding under their beds, and their family toy shop was the first to stock the Nintendo beyond Grafton St.

She spoke of Carrick with such yearning on our first meeting I had to Google how far her homeland was from her current residence, surprised to find it was a mere hour and a half up the road. Still, an hour and a half was an hour and a half too long for a woman whose childhood had been spent on the banks of the Shannon and whose love of the river was rivalled only by her love of the UK royals (bar Harry, whom she had recently started to view as a bit of a turncoat).

Even more than she loved her friends and Shannon, Mary loved her grandchildren and was never happier than when indulging their every whim. My attempts at enforcing a bedtime routine when staying at Mamó went out the window early on as she insisted her children had never gone to bed on time and it hadn’t done them any harm — my husband is a testament to this.

I am fairly sure Mary’s nickname in some quarters must have been Brittanica, with her knowledge of Carrick and Kells family trees being nothing short of encyclopaedic. Hers was a unique ability to make connections and join the dots in a manner that would have been the envy of most Special Branch detectives. 

Forget six degrees of separation, in the world of Mary everyone was but two degrees and a wedding in Mohill away from being a third cousin once removed.

Mary’s grandfather, Sam Holt, was a founding member of Fianna Fáil, something which she kept under wraps for a whole three minutes of being in your company, before shoehorning in the fact he had been one of the founding members of Dáil Éireann. So proud was she of this fantastically impressive ancestor that, when pregnant with my second, she kept suggesting Somhairlín — the Irish for Sam — as a potential name.

Given that we already have one grandchild in the family called Sam, we all eventually agreed that though the direct genetic connection to the foundation of the State was going to be a fun piece of trivia for first dates in the future, calling 40% of your grandchildren after the man was a tad excessive, and the subject was dropped.

I do not have enough fingers and toes to convey how many times people I encountered on the street would tell me, beaming, how they had worked with Mary in the swimming pool. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I realised just how big swimming was in Kells back in the 1980s and 1990s. In employment terms, this pool seems to have been the equivalent of Silicon Valley for the Midlands.

But I can just imagine her at the reception desk, getting the chats in and selling those horrendous verruca socks to people like me who spent their childhoods terrified they could get asthma from not drying their hair fully.

Her funeral in Carrick-on-Shannon was a testament to a life well lived — the church was bursting at the seams with cousins, old schoolmates, and neighbours all thronging the pews to pay their respects to my mother-in-law, Fred’s mammy, Éamonn’s wife, and the boys’ Mamó.

It was a reminder that life is not about perfect kitchens, being the last to leave the office, or getting the children to bed before Eastenders. Life is measured by our relationships with others and our ability to stay connected despite the different directions choices can take us. Mary understood the assignment, always, and in the test of life, there can be no question but she passed with flying colours.

It is so hard to believe she is gone. Yet, like the river Shannon itself, we will keep moving forward because life refuses to stand still, as much as we sometimes want it to.