Meanings

Days accumulate meanings as we age. Today would have been my mam’s birthday, were she still with us here, and so with me thinking of her anyway social media throws up recollections of birthdays past. The one from four years ago featured two photos, one from her youth, before she’d married Dad, and one from her time in the nursing home. Her eyes and smile were the same. I had no idea when I posted that that that I’d not get to spend another birthday with her, that on her next one Covid protections for herself and others in her nursing home would mean I couldn’t visit her, and indeed that I’d not see her again until more than eight months had passed and we could all sit with her body, and I could tearfully hold her icy cold hand.

‘Looking forward to seeing this wonder this evening,’ I had written, ‘after adventures at hospital and work, and before dinner with my post-Santiago in-laws. It always strikes me as oddly funny that Mam, Marvin Gaye, and Seamus Heaney were all born within just a few days of each other.’ She outlasted Marvin and Seamus, of course.

That dinner with the in-laws proved significant enough too, with us finishing our dinner in Drumcondra and having a skype chat with my brother-in-law and his girlfriend after we’d finished our meal; to our delight, but hardly to our surprise, we learned that they’d gotten engaged. And so, since then, my wife has lost a mother-in-law but gained a sister-in-law. Families wax and wane.

April 9 was, I always knew as a child, not just Mam’s birthday, but the birthday of the older brother of one of my two best friends. Said brother would became a dear friend in his own right over the years, not least through our working together in a pub alongside the girl he’d himself marry, though life being complicated neither he nor Dave could make it to my wedding. It’s been more than seven years since I’ve seen him, so I’m looking forward to tomorrow, when we’ll set out for Holland to see him, and his wife, and tulips, and a Camino friend I’ve not seen since I was in Santiago, and so many Vermeers.

And with that, Happy Easter.  Here's to the Resurrection, and to the promise of Resurrection.