Michael Harding, his mother and all her bits and pieces

Below is Michael Harding's column, which appeared in yesterday's Irish Times. A lovely piece about his mother, her bits and pieces and how she lives on in him.

I worry about everything. If I’m buying something in a shop where I can’t see the till, I worry that I’ll be overcharged. When I press my pin number at an ATM I worry someone will see me.

When I buy online, I worry that someone will steal my credit-card numbers. And when I cross the street in a wind, I’m afraid I will lose my hat. I am always forgetting where I left my phone. And regularly I end up at the toll plaza with no change, and sometimes in the theatre, when act one is very long, I worry about how far away the toilet is. Life is just one endless litany of anxieties.

It’s a trait I inherited from my mother. I know this because, as I cleaned her house after she died, I was able to decipher all her worries from every little note and memo and grocery list she left behind. Two years later and I’m still cleaning it. Last week I found an old radio under the stairs, a wireless from 1953. And a broken vacuum cleaner, five umbrellas, a bag of golf clubs and a naggin of brandy.

Two-year tidy-upIt has taken me almost two years to dismantle her life, since she died – to deconstruct the architecture of her imagination that was contained within those walls for 60 years; to empty each room in the museum of her unconscious mind, and to put it all, bit by bit, into a skip.

The broken chairs, the old sheets, the useless bed, the faded curtains, the women’s magazines from the 1950s, the delph angels, the Child of Prague, the wardrobes of dresses and jackets and suits that she wore to dinner dances, golf-club parties and the weddings of nieces and nephews.

When her good clothes, her religious books and objects of devotion had been passed on to various charities, the skip swallowed all else. It swallowed her life, her privacy, her illness and her death.

It even swallowed the vinyl recordings of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and the crackling voice of John McCormack, which I used to hear rising through the floorboards of my childhood bedroom as I lay awake at night worrying about school homework.

And I thought the clean-up might never end. I harrowed and trawled through old boxes and presses and shelves, forcing myself to read through all the old documents, letters, small diaries and grocery lists, which revealed the enormity of her anxiety about the smallest of matters.

In fact, the task required three skips over two years, but it was all finally done by last Friday, because I really wanted to see an end to it before Easter. And on Good Friday, that last day, on the final shelf I found four cuttings from the local newspaper clipped to a faded photograph of her husband. One was a notice on the occasion of her marriage. And two were birth notices relating to her children. And the final clipping was the death notice for my father. In old age she had attached them all to a photograph of himself as a young intense man and folded it into the back of her prayer book, which is where I found them. Maybe she realised that the newspaper notices eloquently expressed the simplicity and brevity of any human life, or maybe it was just that in prayer alone she was released from anxiety.

The hardest job was trying to decide what to put in the skip and what to keep. At one point I found a box of hats, seven in all, including a feathery green cap; a white straw hat; a beret; and an extravagantly wide-brimmed blue hat, like something a young woman might wear at the races.

The hatbox was in tatters, and I wanted to throw it out. But I wanted to keep the hats. And then I found an old suitcase with my father’s initials on the lid and I wanted to keep that too, but it was empty. So I threw out the hatbox, put my mother’s headgear into my father’s suitcase, which for an instant seemed to bring them back together again.

I will probably leave the suitcase in the attic of my own house and forget about it, and maybe in the distant future someone will be surprised by the comic sight of a man’s suitcase full of ladies’ hats as they forage through all the tracks of private anxiety and trivial worries that I will leave in my wake.