Poor old Joe passed away yesterday, after having a heart attack on a drive into Sligo. Last Friday, when I was behind the bar, the husband pointed at him, tottering past the window, and I blurted, "Fuck!" Of course I felt ashamed at my outburst. He was only harmless: he'd come in, offer me a sweet (only women were offered sweets), order a glass of stout and a whiskey "with a wee drop of red lemonade", shout for "a box of fags" from the cigarette machine (any brand would do), and ask me repeatedly how many women lived in California. It always tickled him, the idea of that many women living in a place he had never visited.

//

Only last Monday I was at a funeral mass in Galway, listening to laments in Irish and English, the shadows of pigeons flickering on walls and mourners through stained-glass windows. The next day a surveyor measured the house; it took him three hours, it's that big. On Wednesday, there was another funeral, us shuffling through a house, shaking hands and respectfully viewing the body of a 94-year-old woman. By Saturday I was dancing amidst a heaving heap of beautiful bodies, celebrating a friend's 50th birthday in a nightclub in Dublin.

The next morning I hung out with my nephews and niece while they played a videogame in which their avatars try to kill each other; Siún declares, "I don't care anymore, I'm going to kill myself." The husband and I took a while to head home: waiting nearly an hour for ice cream at Dún Laoghaire pier, which the children tossed in lumps at noisy starlings, and napping in the sitting room to the bells and whistles of a TV gameshow. Night snuck in swiftly: towns and villages appeared as smears of light on a black canvas as the husband drove us home.

//

After hearing about Joe's death, the husband remarked, "God, since Covid, there have been too many funerals."

<<