Jim Clarken

There are parallel universes all around us, ones never mentioned by science fiction writers, investigated by journalists, given credence to by alien followers, or any real consideration by most of us, most of the time. However, whenever we use the word, ‘they,’ we are effectively admitting that these universes, ones almost completely beyond our ken, exist. ‘They,’ it seems, can cover a multitude of worlds from which we are barred, ones we may once have belonged to, and ones we would rather forget we were ever part of. ‘They,’ covers any group we are currently not members of. Students, they. Children, they. Teenagers, they!!! And the mere use of the word bankers can sound like an expletive when followed with the word they. Mind you, that can be said of many professions or groups of people. The elderly are one such group, one most of us would rather not be bracketed with.

However, it will be the last separate world, in a world of worlds, that we will all belong to, and that, only if we get lucky. Everyone strives to live forever, without considering what it means. It means being elderly for a very long time. It entails coping with cataracts and prostates, hearing aids and walking sticks, weakness and memory loss. And somewhere along the way, medics start to whisper instead of talk to you and people start to use we when they mean you. Then of course, food doesn’t taste as good as it used to, films aren’t what they once were, and technology is built to confuse rather than to help.

You may feel smug because you can turn an a laptop, but when your hearing deteriorates to the point that Siri’s answers go unheard, that feeling shall shatter like a Waterford crystal vase meeting a ceramic tile, quickly followed by panic greater than that of a vegan failing to persuade a hungry lion to try out the vegetarian option on today’s menu.

Sometimes, no matter how we try to avoid it, we find ourselves, like ET, stranded in a universe we were only vaguely aware existed minutes earlier. In my case, this other universe, one surprisingly close to home, was respite. It took a plumbing crisis to trigger my warp speed journey to this unknown land. Suddenly, pipes which should remain hidden, were overground, like snakes they laid siege to the house, holes abounded in the drive and the only access to the front door was via a temporary bridge made of MDF. Plotting with the plumber to fix the problem, it became obvious that trenches would have to be dug, paths cut into, and walls drilled through. In short, we were talking a level of chaos which no 95-year-old would tolerate. Calls were made, advice sought, and a solution offered. Not that my mother was happy with the solution, but she ultimately agreed when it was confirmed that if she took respite, she could have a glass of Prosecco in the evenings and have wine with her dinner. During the negotiations I felt like a parent offering bribes to persuade a reluctant child walk through the school gates on its first day.

Once the principle had been sold, however, the system kicked in; the whispering form-fillers lined up behind each, like planes waiting to land at Newark, and ordeal by bureaucrat had begun. My mother, aware that any wrong answer might give a wrong impression, that her mind was in a state of collapse, was more than usually helpful. For once she did not lie about her age, unlike last year when we were in a supermarket where she told a woman that she was eighty. Bloody rude of her to ask, she remarked, as we walked away from the inquisitor. Now she told the truth, but sparingly. Date of birth, she would answer. But as for the follow up question of how old she was, she would reply, do the maths. Have you been hospitalized recently? was a dangerous question. It gave Ma reason to vent, taking out a flame thrower to the reputation of a doctor who once sent her to A&E for a better quality of life. I spent 12 hours sitting on a hard chair waiting to see a doctor, when all I needed was a course of antibiotics, she would begin. He asked me why I was there and when I told him he shrugged, and shook his head, and said, ‘GPs,’ as though they were all village idiots. Then he gave me the antibiotics she had refused me. A better quality of life indeed.

No matter how much experience you have, and I have seen my mother asked this question a dozen times, there is no easy way to ask it. In case of emergency, do you wish to be resuscitated? My mother’s reply usually goes like this, I’ll tell you what I told that doctor in A&E last year, I’m happy enough not to be resuscitated, so long as you’re not actively trying to put me down. The reply puts many a health professional on the back foot. This is often the case with the elderly, at some point they get fed up playing other people’s games. I remember an old woman, who when a young doctor came to her bedside to explain what was wrong with her, said to him, young man, don’t tell me how I’m doing, you know nothing about it, while I practically have a degree in dying.

Forms filled in, follow up telephone calls taken, the day finally arrived. It fell to me to guide my mother through the admissions process. No worries there I thought, we had the equivalent of pre-clearance. Not so. What should have been a two-minute process became a two-hour process. First one nurse, then a second questioned my mother’s prescription. We had cleared that hurdle already, or so I thought when the form fillers had done their best to understand my mother’s particular needs. However, it now seemed that the form fillers had not passed on their findings and as a result my mother’s doctor was being accused of malpractice and me of drug pushing. My mother sat on her bed, completely oblivious to the charges against me, because she was not wearing her hearing aids. I kept bating back objections, grateful to my sister, a nurse, for having explained the meds to me in such tedious detail. At one point the nurse read a remark in the doctor’s report, then pointed to the bed and asked, does she know? Ask her, I replied. One thing is certain, my mother knows more than she pretends to, though she does choose to interpret the facts as she would like them to be. Who doesn’t? the nurse didn’t pursue the doctor’s report with my mother, but she did ask her about hospital admissions; a mistake, as she got a lecture about doctors all being afraid of their own shadows, about the quality of life in A&E departments, and about the wonder of antibiotics. As for being resuscitated… She had her response down pat for that question

I eventually escaped, but my mind was troubled as I drove away. Thinking about them, not the elderly, the medics; there was something about the place which reminded me of The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It induced a feeling of mental quicksand; nothing these reassuring professionals half-whispered resonated with the universe I normally inhabit. They seemed obsessed with paperwork and procedures, but no one thought it odd that an assistant wrote blood pressure reading on a piece of kitchen towel, instead of on an actual page, with the patient’s name writ large, in a prominent place. Having said that, everybody was extremely kind, and my mother knows how to hold her own in any get down-and-dirty argument, so I had no real qualms leaving once the paperwork was done.

As the respite was not for me, but my sister, I felt free to drop extra Prosecco supplies behind enemy lines during her stay. On the morning of my visit, I discovered her arguing with a nurse as I rattled into her room. She was explaining to the young woman, as though she was an idiot, that a cough bottle was not a prescription drug, therefore she could take it whenever she chose to, so open the safe and uncork the bottle. The nurse tried explaining the restrictions on usage of an expectorant but was getting nowhere with her elderly patient, who all the while was waving an unlit cigar about as she pressed home her point.

I had once tried explaining that she shouldn’t take the expectorant before going to bed, as she would wind up coughing all night, only to watch her defiantly reach for the bottle. So it was no surprise when the nurse yielded, and a tiny cup of the mixture was poured as precisely as whiskey from an optic, the liquid was drunk by the victor, and we headed for the great outdoors, so that my mother could smoke her cigar. The journey involved a few near hit-and-runs with the walking aid, as the place was infested with students from a nearby school who were getting acquainted with the wrinkled, determined faces bearing the scars of longevity. Ma’s victory was somewhat muted when we hit escape velocity and landed out in a sun-drenched patio area. Her smoking buddy had been taken hostage by the school kids, and she always brought matches to the meeting. She keeps them in her handbag, my mother told me, but she always forgets where they are until I remind her. There are matches in the oratory, she continued, they use them to light the candles.

Puffing out a cloud of smoke, my mother handed back the matches for me to return to the oratory as I left. On my way out, a nurse stopped to chat for a moment. She’d show you how to live, your mother, she whispered in admiration.            

Sometimes I wake up with a start in the middle of the night and feel like a man facing into the stereophonic depths of a double-barreled shotgun. It seems as though the grim Reaper is standing at the foot of the bed, a deadly weapon’s stock firmly placed against his shoulder, a boney finger on the trigger. We can argue about Death’s form all we like, a skeletal figure carrying a scythe is comfortingly familiar, candles in eye sockets can be added as an optional extra, if you find that reassuring. For others, Death may be a raven-haired beauty with pale skin, blood red lips and a cold, cold touch; why not, if a date with this heart stopping femme fatale appeals. I’ve also heard talk of golden-haired children reaching out to take your hand and guide you to the promised land as your last breath leaves your body, evidently this figure has special meaning for those who summon him, but in this day and age I would be arrested for taking the hand of any child who was not mine, no matter how lost it was. As for me, my grim reaper is currently more of a modern-day brigand than anything else. I imagine him as being overweight, a tracksuit wearing thug with 125 previous convictions; a man who gets a Christmas card every year from a barrister whose kids are slowly working their way through college, paid for by the state’s free legal aid fund. My Death reeks of criminality, and I have no intention of going anywhere with him just yet. As nightmares go, he is just scary enough to wake me up at the witching hour in a deep state of funk, but not so frightening that he can still my beating heart.

I have woken up, sweat pumping, heart pounding a frantic tattoo in the middle of the night, for as long as I can remember. But oddly enough my memory only goes back to a time when I was seven, a time when preparations for my first holy communion began in earnest, a time when the concept of heaven and hell were introduced, a time when being bold became committing a sin. Being bold is one thing, and not a terribly bad thing at that. But committing a sin, spray painting a black mark on the soul with each venial thought, this is when the rubber hits the road, because suddenly I had a soul, one rapidly turning grey by the sounds of it, if not already turning into a Farrow & Ball off-black, possibly called Satan’s Stamp. Suddenly, my soul, something I had only recently acquired, was in mortal danger, bound for eternal damnation. Is it any wonder that I was suddenly waking up covered in sweat in the middle of the night, frozen in panic, ready to confess to every mortal sin under the sun, including that of coveting my neighbour’s wife. I was vague about what that might be, but I was ready to confess to it, so long as my confessor played his part, absolved me, and threw my soul into a hot wash which would restore its pristine-white glory once more. So, by seven, a joyous, free-flying soul had become grounded by the leaden weight of guilt; and my nights had become a torture chamber of sorts. Thankfully, I had the concentration span of a newt, so my soul and I had manys-a-good-time, despite my newfound sense of moral austerity.  

What nobody explained back then, nuns can be very lax about the proper education of their charges, was, that with a little bribery and corruption, a cleric could guarantee a soul-cleansing service that reset the soul to a post-baptism font level of purity. One, it seems, does not have to return to the Middle Ages to buy one’s way into heaven, as my mother demonstrated recently.

Her generation was not one which believed in sharing their secrets, or demons, with anybody except their most intimate friends. Personal tragedies were locked away, buried deep from strangers. Joys were suppressed, in case the fairies got to hear about them and decided to put a stop to them, or some gossip embellished the details of your life until they bore no semblance to the truth, while simultaneously destroying your reputation. Gossips and trolls have always existed, always will. It’s part of what makes us human, this envy of those who walk their own path, this urge to punish those not of their tribe.

My parents’ generation grew up cautious as a way of protecting themselves from their most tribal of neighbours. Their adage, ‘Never talk politics or religion with strangers,’ was partly good manners and partly self-protection. Not that it took a genius to know your least guarded secrets. Anyone could tell your politics by the newspaper you read; your beliefs, by the church you attended; your secret life, by the books you borrowed from the library; and your moral laxity, by the clothes you wore.

As for religion, there was a ninety percent chance that you were a Roman Catholic; part of the majority; and it is always safer to hang with the majority. However, public opinion is a fickle thing. Today’s mainstream religion is tomorrow’s myth, or new age hankering back to Druidic idyll, without the human sacrifice of course. While many people are dismissive of the Roman Catholic church, over two million Irish people attend mass on a regular basis. For me, the church’s dwelling on suffering and sin is a mite heavy-handed, and the modern translation of the bible lacks poetry. However, to others, it offers direction and solace; something I would never deny to anybody.

As I said, my mother’s generation was all about subtext. Conversations with my mother are sometimes twisted and torturous, and the point so far below the surface that it might as well be hidden under the wreck of the Titanic. When she began talking about a church visit, to light a candle, and possibly save American democracy, my curiosity was piqued, but not overly so. St. Teresa gets my mother’s penny, and it was to her shrine on a side aisle that we traipsed, coins in hand, laden down with good intentions. Children were being baptised at the main alter, diversity very much on show at the water font. While a senior cleric was busy renouncing Satan on behalf of these harmless looking infants, various minor clerics roamed the church.

With three candles ablaze, and good intentions prayed for, my mother’s real intention became clear. She was here to nab a priest, one who featured regularly in her conversations at home, a young man who ruined his good looks by growing a beard without her permission. Nabbed and unable to escape, the cleric agreed to meet her at the community centre a few days later. The penny was beginning to drop.

Armed with backup from my sister we turned up for the appointment. The priest was busy, busy, busy. My mother, grimly determined. He did not have a chance. It was too late to feign another engagement, he was trapped and my mother finally revealed what she wanted from him. Extreme Unction. We can argue all we like about language, about the rebranding of this sacrament as the anointing of the sick, but there is no hiding from the fact that as sacraments go, this one is a kicker. There is no disguising what it is about. It is the last rites; the last chance to bleach the soul clean of its sinful past, to polish off minor scratches and pass it off as a one-lady-owner soul to the great car dealer in the sky. As kids we equated it with emergency first aid for the soul. Along with a perfect act of contrition, we were told, that it was like baptism for the old, a sure way of getting through the pearly gates. I suppose it was the equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared rich man being pushed through the eye of a needle. The sacrament was properly ghoulish, associated in our minds with death rattles and priests whispering code words in the ear of the dying; for although anybody could administer an emergency baptism, only priests carried the sacred oil required for this sacrament.

We removed ourselves from the community center to the church to get our hands on these restricted items. The priest looked as though he would prefer to be anywhere but where he was. Still, he muttered his words, absolved all my mother’s sins and wrapped the sacrament up with unnecessary efficiency. The cleric was about to beat a hasty retreat from this ninety-four-year-old, no doubt wondering how she had got him to a secondary scene of the crime in the first place; wondering how she had so out-manoeuvred him. Not old enough to know yet that planning, willpower, and a surprise attack always has the advantage over the unprepared. And now his hand had been gripped, and very old, blue eyes were focused on him. Her lips were moving, his mind was elsewhere.

“What?” He asked.

“You will remember me?” she repeated. “You will remember me father?”

“Well…” he stammered, “I’m… There… There are so many…”

“You will remember me,” she persisted, “Won’t you father?”

He looked down to see a fifty euro note in his hands.

“You will remember me?” she asked again.

“Of course I will Mary.”

Moments later, we emerged from the church, into the light.

“Now I can commit any sins I want,” declared my mother, “They have already been washed away.”

She knows this is not how general absolution works but fondly remembers a man who rebuked a priest who once tried to persuade him to take confession.

“I was given general absolution before going over the top of the trenches in the first world war. A man doesn’t need any more absolution than that.”

“No, no,” insisted the priest, “That’s not how it works.”

“What would you know about it father?” came the quick reply, “Was you ever at Mons?”

I wondered, as my mother was being loaded into the car ,what sins she was planning to commit? Driving? (A vanity at 94.) Or maybe lampooning politicians, though that hardly counts as a sin. After all, they don’t have a good name to begin with, so they don’t have a reputation to ruin.

There is her gambling habit, I suppose, at least according to my aunt. Others may think she is a wanton woman, the way she flirts with the fish man, but that is more about securing fresh hake and a good racing tip, than any improper intentions. As for the scratch cards my mother can occasionally be seen buying at a local newsagent, they are merely a cover for what she is really buying, cigars. Not that she has ever admitted to a doctor that she smokes. But then, what is one cigar a day? Hardly a habit, more of a hobby, a thinking aid when she’s standing up to her crossword outside at the bin, a fresh coffee off to one side.

Yet, as she stands at the doorstep, blowing smoke out the back door, I wonder how she really feels about death. There is no point in expecting her to tell me. Her generation were not built to share their darkest secrets. But if my nightmares are anything to go by, hers must be scarier still, but hopefully, not heart stopping. At least not yet. There are still plenty of cigars hidden in a drawer, waiting to be smoked. And the neighbour’s have been summoned for a little get together. Remember too that, judging by one man’s experience, Last Rites can proceed death by over forty years. There’s a thought, no wonder my mother sent me down for a Euro Dreams ticket today. That draw pays out over a thirty-year period. What does she know that I’m not aware of yet?

Even as Trump forms a committee to Steal America’s Future, Again, (SAFA,) my mother has summoned a council of war to oppose him. While he may have a monstrous regiment of billionaires and bullies, she has only me. In truth, my position is a lowly one, that of a springboard, a listener to political editorials, half-written letters of protest and, lately, I’ve become her poetry critic.

Not being up on satirical poetry, or indeed poetry in general, you might think that recruiting me to her team was a huge mistake, and you would be right; but needs must: even if I am to poetry, what lead is to flight.

Hearing the first lines of The Daffodils still causes me to fall into a post traumatic state; sweat breaks out, I’m ten-years-old again, head down on my desk as verbal shrapnel flies overhead, spewed like molten lava from my teacher’s mouth. Suddenly, my heart needs a defibrillator to kick-start it back into action, and a pacemaker is required to steady its erratic beat. I fared better with Ode to a Nightingale, suicide contemplation, even in poetry, seemed cool during my slouching teens, it was something my darker self could at least understand. The fact that a poet had accidentally touched my imagination seemed ironic to me, but these are some the contradictions in life that one must learn to live with, I reckoned. Shakespeare had one or two grim sonnets which also appealed to my teenage self, even if the rhyming scheme passed me by.

“No longer mourn for me when I am dead…” What a first line! Way to go, Willy.

Wonder how he would fare with a limerick about Trump. You see, limericks are my mother’s chosen form of poetry, her weapon of choice when it comes to dealing with this would-be tyrant.

What SNL failed to do over four years using satire, and what CNN failed to achieve with reasoned argument, my mother aims to do using the humble Limerick. Unseating a sitting president is never easy, but a well-aimed Limerick, she reckons, can do more harm to his seat of power than a direct hit from a ballistic missile on his new forever home, the White House. However, right from the get-go there is a problem. Try rhyming the word orange with anything vaguely derogatory, or anything at all, and you will see where the issue lies. Thus skin-tone comparisons are immediately off the table. To have such a soft target already closed off to us is like losing the first battle. One can already feel the whole globe shake under the weight of tanks on the move. So, where does that leave us? What frantic whispering can be heard coming from the direction of the situation room?

Traditionally limericks are hard-hitting, filthy poems, shared between men at the bar. Normally, the first line includes a person and where they hail from. A policeman from Limerick Junction, for instance. But what about him? That’s when things get tricky. The politically correct police would be on my tail if I were to say more about this flatfoot’s condition. Let’s just say that it’s not complementary and it concludes with the line, by the judicious use of his truncheon. As you will understand, the last line, the punch line, should be cringe worthy in content and the rhyming is allowed to go very awry if needed.

So far, all this non-poet has learned about limericks is that they go roughly like this.

Di doodly doodly doo doo

Di doodly doodly doo doo,

Di doodly Doo,

Di doodly Doo,

Di doodly doodly doo doo.

So far so good. All we need is a good first line and we’re off. The problem, however, is that at first my mother could only equate the future president with Donald Duck. Her first stab at a limerick gave us this first line, ‘When the US elected a duck.’ There can be only one way to finish this limerick, one last word is begging to be used, and it begins with the letter F.

Here is an example of my mother’s writing style. She wrote this limerick, and shared it with me while we mulled over the F word situation.

When they made the wolf whistle a crime

Which engendered a terrible fine

If you think it’s a joke

You can’t really be woke

Or maybe you’re just asinine

My mother, after reciting her limerick and giving some further thought to the Donald project, had a couple of glasses of wine before deciding that the word which rhymed best with duck was too arty an ending for her likes, so she turned to a new line of attack.

His supreme orangeness now seemed to offer my mother an enormous target until I pointed out that the only word which it rhymed with was sporange; a sort of sex sack for fungi, a cell filled with spores. While Trump might be easily confused with a giant orange fungal scrotum, drawing people’s attention to this fact might put people permanently off their food. However, this was not the reason my mother dropped orange from her limerick arsenal, it was the thought of finding a word which might rhyme with sporange. 

The following was a peace offering on my part as I seemed to have turned from a springboard into a wet blanket out to smother the flame of inspiration. My efforts were immediately rejected as being too clean, not satirical enough, and off brand.

There was a man on the edge of senility,

Who disdained every form of civility,

His wives were all foreign,

His sons very common,

And his brain was devoid of activity.

My mother had a point, so I had another go, shoehorning the word orange into this limerick.

When the electorate went for orange hair

The Vance ticket completed the pair

With chaos in mind

And his massive behind

All his allies he drove to despair

However, this again failed to impress. I was told that it lacked branding and was not very funny. The name, the towers, the Kitch were all missing. And they all had so much you could ridicule. We compromised to arrive at this…

When MAGA went out voting for Trump

Like lemmings getting ready to jump

Their minds were confused

And religious zeal oozed

And their orange Buddha gave us the hump

So much for branding. Not exactly an inspiring success. Having failed thus far, we revisited the duck motif with a view to keeping it clean. Can any fun come from such a thought? Possibly not.

When America elected a duck,

His bestie was known as a schmuck,

This rich billionaire,

Who jumped high in the air,

Was soon deemed China’s best luck

With such poor results we have decided to retire from the battlefield for now. If only Edward Lear was around to inspire us to greater effort on the nonsense front, but alas he is not. That does not mean that my mother is putting away her writing pad. She can still be seen walking around the sitting room, muttering half-heard limericks to herself. With any luck, inspirational lightening will strike, and Duck Ala Orange will give way to a limerick of the first order. We can only hope. However, if anybody has a limerick on White House affairs they need to share, please do.