Edel Coffey: I prefer to think that our loved ones are everywhere after they die

But everyone has their own question to deal with. Some of us might have been pregnant before the pandemic began, but have since lost those babies, and might now have to find answers for the question that asks ‘and how old must your baby be now?’ There are all sorts of variations on these questions from ‘and how is the job going?’ to ‘and weren’t you due to get married?’ and everything in between.

A lot can happen in two years. It’s an odd feeling having to quickly paint over the big gaps in our lives now with these broad brushstrokes, while stopped for a casual chat with an acquaintance, bags of groceries weighing down our arms. Really what these gaps in our lives need is slow and detailed colouring in with nuanced shades over many attentive hours.

But so much time has passed and so much has happened, we don’t want to linger there. That was another time, another place.

But there are other gaps that we still have to fill in from that time, other crevasses to be closed. 

As I reacquainted myself with my friend, we realised that we had both lost a parent since we had last seen each other and that neither of us had completed the final leg of the funeral ritual, the interment of our respective parent’s ashes. 

I was reminded that we were not alone in this when the news emerged last week of a memorial mass for the late Brendan Bowyer of The Royal Showband. The 81-year-old had died in Las Vegas in 2020 but, due to Covid, this was the first opportunity his family had to bring his remains home and inter them at Dunmore East.

There must actually be lots of us I thought, as I listened to the news reports of Bowyer’s delayed memorial. Because of the severe restrictions on funeral gatherings at the time — no wake, only ten people allowed to attend the church service, no afters where we share our consoling memories — many people have postponed this final part of the rite, in the hope of having a funeral of sorts at a later date.

But a lot of us will also have gotten used to having our loved ones’ ashes around, so much so that it might feel like a bit of a wrench when the time comes to inter them. My mother’s ashes are still sitting in pride of place in the kitchen in my father’s house and I realised that I quite like seeing her there, every time I go home. I understand that the more religious amongst us may take peace from the idea of their loved ones being laid to rest in the consecrated ground of a graveyard, but I’ve never felt the presence of the people I loved there, beneath the soil and the carved granite.

I prefer to think that our loved ones are everywhere after they die anyway, their atoms dispersed to the corners of the universe, their energy in the electricity that lifts the hairs on the nape of our neck in warning or the good timing that opens up a parking space in a packed car park.

With my mother, I tend to remember her in the objects that once belonged to her — her jewellery, a wallet, a leftover passport photo hidden in a drawer. I know she touched and used these things, and in turn I think I can feel trace elements of her when I touch and use these things too.

On my mother’s first birthday after she died, I received a text from my aunt, saying: ‘As you know, she is in everything we see, stars at night, flowers in spring, leaves in autumn, sea and sand. All our memories are in everything.’

I suppose it doesn’t really matter where our loved ones are laid to rest, whether there is a headstone in a graveyard or an urn on a shelf. The person we loved is neither here nor there.

As we begin the painful work of closing over the gaps that the last two years have left in our lives, it’s worth remembering that our loved ones live on in our memories and that our memories are in everything.