Personal Insights: The death of my mother and the solace of Cork's 202 bus

I remember bits of it, though large interludes are a blank, suggesting that I have filed them away someplace I don’t intend to return to.

A short discussion on the first day with the consultant who gave the game away without much prompting. I often have to cross-examine doctors, and have found them much the most literal of witnesses.

Unless they are given the right kind of jolt, they won’t speculate or indulge in hypotheticals, or volunteer anything, but will simply cling to the letter of their reports with white lipped determination.

But our mother’s man was admirably candid on the day: night was coming down.

I recall too the last scan which looked like a weather map, but here the clouds on screen were cancerous and the little numbers I could divine through wet eyes were all fatal. The screen was black and white, like one of those eternally slow-to-load Atari consoles I happily lost whole days to as a child.

There were so many white spots though by the end that it looked like the tumour hadn’t so much expanded in her lung, but had somehow exploded. I recall my mother’s occasionally wild looks too, which suggested an animal panic at work in her.

My attempts of levity and small-talk were as effective in the event as that first futile dose of chemo before Christmas. She greeted me every day with the same admonition: “no questions”.

She was a psychiatric nurse in her prime, and although a determined enemy of the wilder bits of Freud, she always liked medical trivia, so my time with her was devoted to random asides, thrown out like so many grappling hooks against a high wall.

“Did you know”, I asked hopefully one morning, “that Dr. Noël Browne built the Orthopaedic up by us?”. “No questions”, she said, “and besides that’s politics. Not interested.”

 I barely lasted an hour a day in there for the three weeks.

I rode the 202 bus twice a day, once in the morning and then again in the evening. It’s the most substantial memory I have left of those few weeks, that big swaying double-decker, drifting down into town from my family home next to Apple Computers on the north side, just before the city limits give way to Clogheen and Blarney.

I’ve ridden this route since I was child, and always look out for one particular thing, which may well have been a figment of my imagination. But I can still see it. The bus drives past Dr Browne’s orthopaedic hospital, built with a sudden flush of Sweepstakes cash at the end of the forties, and turns gently to the left as it approaches the top of a gentle incline which will deposit you into town.

This is Cathedral Road. At the top of the incline is the credit union, and at the bottom is the North Cathedral, still as stout and squat after all these years as the fat bishop who was cast abidingly in stone in the church grounds. Cheap money at the top of the hill. Cheap grace at the bottom, and a thirty degree tilt in between.

As the bus descends, one finds oneself temporarily flanked by hundreds of tightly packed houses. All products of the great slum clearing projects of the thirties, and the first building boom in the sixties. The bus continues to move slowly down the hill, through this thicket of brick and bent railings, until the rest of the city slowly comes into view to your right.

On a sunny day, especially in the morning, the mind can play a trick on you and it can seem as if you’re at the same level as the harbour. The bus is descending, and somehow the harbour seems to rise up towards you. Even though you are looking down at it. I always feel like the city is rotating on its axis at this point.

The North Cathedral gets bigger and more definite as the bus continues to sail down towards it, but so does the far off harbour, just at the point to distant starboard where the sea meets the sky. Suddenly the grim vista of all those housing estates is not so oppressive. It’s broken up, but by what? By what looks like a river in the sky.

I looked for that image every morning of my mother’s illness, always from the same front corner seat up top of the bus which allowed you to see out most clearly over the city. Like the two travellers in the foreground of Butt’s View of Cork (c.1760) who can somehow see the whole city in a single glance.

I still don’t know why it was so consoling. Was I unconsciously thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s response to the news that the Union had won the battle of Vicksburg, and had thus reclaimed the Mississippi? “The father of waters”, he wrote sublimely, “goes once again unvexed towards the sea.” I was, I think, impressed by the process whereby a river surrenders to the ocean. The image suggested resolution, a gradual slackening, release, but most of all escape. Yes, the river had finally escaped the city. Now the idea of escape would also have appealed to my mother, especially at the end.

Escape from the painful drips, the constant noise, the insomnia and all those questions. But also escape from the city itself. I came to realise in time that she actually hated elements of the city, and always had done, with its weird class tensions, and the openly malicious humour she called ‘slagging’.

She despised what she called the babble about “rebel Cork”, which suggested a city that was content in fact to commemorate itself to death or one that was nostalgic about an objectively worse era. 

She was born in Dublin, but only lingered there for a few months before returning to Cork in 1954.

She identified strongly with the long Kerry tail in her family, especially on her mother’s side. She loved the beaches, the long sands, and what she at least saw as the screwball charisma of the natives. She awarded them bonus points for their thrift, their superstitions, and the gentler pace of their pub life.

For all that though, my mother lived in Cork City for six decades, locked in a low-level cold war with the place, a woman in internal exile. It didn’t bring out the best in her personality. She was a kind woman, though not an especially warm one. She was capable of tremendous acts of spontaneous charity on occasion, but really believed for the most part that hell was other people.

I could never really tell what kind of inner life she had evolved, but used to be able to appeal to her unconventional sense of humour. (‘Whitnail and I’ was one of her favourite films). At least until the Mercy alas.

It used to be said that a joke was an epigram on the death of a feeling. But there was too much death already in the Mercy by the time she arrived for that. There was little room for anything else. No feelings. No time. And no questions.

* John-Paul McCarthy was born in Cork City in 1981. He attended the Gaelscoil in the North Monastery AG, and writes about politics and history for Tuairisc. He also practices as a barrister in London.

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