Our mothers are the shining lights of our lives

This week’s Mediahuis/INM Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

We can never try to put ourselves inside the head or heart of another person and indeed the older I get the more I realise how unwise a thing it is to do.

When Paudie and David Clifford ran out on the park for the Munster final against Clare in the TUS Gaelic Grounds in Limerick at the beginning of May I was surprised. Their mother, who had just turned 60, had died the previous day.

 

Actually I’m ashamed of myself for thinking such thoughts. In The Irish Times of Saturday, August 26 David Clifford gave a heartrending interview to Malachy Clerkin where he spoke about his mother and how she was ‘football mad’.

He said that he, Paudie and his Dad had a chat and decided to play in the Munster final. He said: ‘And the main reason that we went and played was we knew Mom would have hated to think that she was the reason that we missed the game.’ He went on to speak in the most loving terms about his mother and the wonderful selfless woman she was. Beautiful words from a loving son. Ellen Clifford had been sick for some time.

I know little or nothing about football but I do know what it is to be a son. My mother died in 1988. She was 78, four years older than I am now.  In her late 60s she was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. She underwent a laryngectomy and lived another 10 years. 

In that time she was unable to talk, which was a terrible affliction for her as she was by nature a gifted talker, argumentative too. But she bore her disability heroically. 

Maybe it’s black humour but there was a funny side to it. I learned more or less to lip read my mother but unfortunately Dad never managed and that greatly frustrated my mother. I still find scraps of papers in books with her hand written notes to my father. The pages of her old Oxford dictionary  are filled with them. And they’ll be staying there.

Reading how David Clifford spoke about his mother set me thinking about my mother and the wonderful person she was. It might sound a corny cliche but aren’t our mothers extraordinary people. Of course there are exceptions but in the overwhelming majority of cases mothers are simply amazing.

My mother is dead 35 years and I can categorically say there is never day when I don’t think of her and indeed my father.

She always defended me. I must have been five or six, something happened in school and she was there defending me.

Again when I was 10 a teacher blackguarded me, slapping me far too many times. My mother was having none of it and she and my father took action. 

But it was my mother, who was the driving force in making sure that something was done. And that was 1959.

 

I was lucky to have had my mother for 39 years and yet it was far too short. In so many ways our mothers are the guiding lights of our lives.

 

I still recall at parent teacher meetings how mothers would speak in such glowing terms of their children no matter what sort of classroom scoundrels they might have been. We need to bow our heads to nature every day of our lives.