I was walking up along
the street before mine and he was driving his white van. He stopped to talk to
me and rolled down his window, but he didn’t pull in very far so the subsequent
few minutes were spent trying to wave cars past him in both directions.
After a few impatient
glares from passing drivers, I suggested he might pull in a little more and so he did and then we got to
talking.
It turned out that he was
quite upset. As a man who clearly values neighbourly contact and community interaction,
he was distressed to find that one of our neighbours had very recently died and he had not
learned of it until several days after the event when, as is the normal course of
Irish bereavement, the funeral proceedings were all over and done with.
I asked who the lady
was and he told me it was the nice lady with her dog, which she walks all the
time. For my sins, I couldn’t place who he was talking about. This is very much
a part of my make-up, my continuing and gradually increasing inability to make
connections in my head between people and the places they inhabit.
He tried again to tell
me who the recently deceased lady was but he used the common device of naming
her neighbours and, in this attempt, he may as well have been using the
Periodic Table of Elements to let me know who she was. We parted, both sad at
the event we hadn’t been aware of, with me still painfully unaware of who I was sad about.
Two days later, I was
walking up the same street and, sitting outside her house in the sun, was Donna.
She was sitting on the low wall and grooming her lovely sheep dog with a
textured glove. The dog got up from her grooming session and came over to me
for her customary pet on her head. This is a long-held tradition we have, as I
believe this to be the nicest dog in the entire neighbourhood. She is gentle
and has a benign and pleasant disposition. I was a little touched that she
would give up on a perfectly good groom just to enjoy a head-rub from me so I
obliged gladly.
“She’s a bit out of
sorts,” Donna said.
“Really?” I asked,
“Why’s that?”
“She’s missing her
Mum,” Donna replied and then she started to cry gently.
“She died,” she said.
I stopped rubbing the
sad dog’s head.
“Your Mum? She died?”
Donna nodded. A few
days before, quite suddenly. I gave her a hug. I couldn’t believe it. The nice
lady with her dog had died and I didn’t even know it. And, possibly worse, The
50% Man had told me all about it and I couldn’t even guess who he was talking
about.
And the funny thing
was, it wasn’t because I hardly knew her that I couldn't guess who she was. Quite the opposite. It
was because I knew her so very much better than that. My mind couldn't compute that if might be her who was gone. We spoke most days. The lovely
dog was our common theme but the weather often featured too. She was lovely and
her dog was lovely and I wished I’d known that she had passed away, so that I could have paid my respects, and I also wished that I had thought of her when I learned that somebody nice with a dog had died.
I looked her up on the
website that records deaths in Ireland. She was originally from Peterborough in
the UK. The condolence notes told me she was a keen darts player in the local
pub and her team mates clearly thought very highly of her.
Her name was Sheila
Dean.
I never knew her name, but I thought she was lovely and I’m very, very sad that she’s gone.
As we often say in Ireland around these times:
May her soul, and the souls of all the faithfully departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.
K x
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