last year, on this day i finished my exams, i stopped writing and put down my pen at about quarter to four in the afternoon. i sat calmly looking around the exam hall and watched people frantically scribble for the last fifteen minutes. strange, i thought, that i should feel so finished, that i don’t need to check back over what i have written. that i know it’s fine. at quarter to four, fifteen minutes before the end.
i left the exam hall in a dash to beat the rush hour traffic and hightailed it to dun laoghaire to see the film cold mountain with jude law and nichole kidman. it was an utterly absorbing film. it was also quite long. when i left the cinema to return to my car, i had about five missed calls. my phone wouldn’t normally register five missed calls in a month, let alone in a couple of hours so i knew something was wrong.
i rang home, but couldn’t get through to my mother. so i rang my brother. who broke the news to me that my much loved uncle Christy had died that afternoon. the shock after all the stress of the exams floored me. i stood outside the cinema for about ten minutes crying my eyes out. i then went to my car where i sat for another twenty miutes crying deep, grief filled sobs. i was distraught. honestly, it was the first raw, emotional, slap you in the face grief of my life. i felt like a little girl. i wanted my mother.. i went back to my house and sat crying in the kitchen. they didn’t really know what to do with me there. sk was at a film premier and forgot to turn on his phone. desperate for some familiar face who knew Christy, I went to my aunts house. She fed me and gave me something to drink. Later I went home, and after more crying, fell into an exhausted sleep.
the next day i began the long lonely drive down to west cork. crying the whole way. i was never so relieved as when i met my mother outside the funeral home. she knew how much i loved Christy. later, after the removal we went back to the house he lived in. nothing lonelier i thought, than the empty room of someone not long departed. i imagined him in that room, suffering his silent battle with leukemia. he was only diagnosed about a month before his death.
Christy is gone a year now and I still remember him. I am happy he is no longer suffering, happy he is at peace. That week in Bantry this time last year haunts me sometimes. I have never felt as sad as I did that week.
May he rest in peace. He was a special man and I hold him in my heart and in my memories. It strange to say this, but I know that he was watching me that day of my last exam. He died at quarter to four.
