Dancing through memories of yesteryear

Once again, Fr Jason Murphy strikes a chord with his latest column Let The Busy World Be Hushed touching on the subject of dementia...

At various times in our lives we are all confronted with the challenge of having to let go of that which we hold dear, that which we thought would remain for many years to come and took for granted in the ordinary and every day.

This letting go brings with it a sense of unease, perhaps fear, a sense of loss, be it of youth and beauty, strength and vigour, a sense of mourning for what was, for a time that is now past and a wondering of what will be.

But to let go of our memory is the most difficult of all leave takings, that which makes sense of our everyday, of the faces that make up the patchwork of our lives, as our mind slowly departs and leaves us behind.

It is a journey that we do not expect to travel, a journey along which we must bid farewell to all that was familiar, all that we once held dear, a journey that we are forced to go alone and yet a journey along which we seem to stand still as all else changes and gains an unfamiliarity. We dwell in the midst of a shadow land, where that which is real and present becomes lost in the mist of the now and all that lies buried in the past becomes our new reality. The faces that were part of our everyday lose their resonance and yet, when we glimpse their faces, they remind us of so many things that we just can’t seem to put our finger on.

They try to reach across the chasm that separates you from them but, despite their best efforts, your minds cannot meet for that which you held in common in the ordinariness of the present moment, the humdrum of the everyday, slowly drifts apart. As each day passes, your mind retreats to moments far from here, to places and times where you seek refuge, where nothing seems to change, forever and a day.

The McGreevys came to our town from Co Roscommon in the mid 1980s and bought a sweet shop and B&B on Bridge Street, a place we often ran to buy ice cream on warm summer days. Liz McGreevy, some 30 years later not long after retiring, developed dementia and, in the latter years of her illness, though not yet old, could be seen in Oakview Nursing Home, still smiling, with her husband Joe always by her side. The spark of recognition in her eyes was clear to be seen when she smiled with love at the man by her side and, in those moments, it seemed that the confusion dissipated as the familiarity of his touch brought back to her mind those days of youthfulness when all was safe and letting go seemed so far away.

I’m sure in those moments as he held her hand, she recalled the night when she first met him in 1959, the night of the ‘Switch On’ dance in Drumboylan old school in County Roscommon.

Poles had been erected along the whitethorn covered laneways, the length and breadth of the parish, carrying miles of black cable that brought light to the house of her father, Willie Deane, in the townland of Breenletter and to all the neighbouring homesteads around. The Rural Electrification scheme had come to completion in that corner of the world and, to celebrate the dawn of the electric bulb that revealed cobwebs in every dark corner of the houses around, the priest at mass urged everyone to come along to the ‘Switch On’ dance in the old school to celebrate the light illumining the darkness across his parish.

The parishioners sitting below in the pews whispered to each other that well he might celebrate knowing too that it wasn’t him that had to stand aloft on a chair with a cloth in his hand cleaning down the tops of dressers and mantlepieces of all the soot that gathered for the decades past. In the nights that followed both young and old paid heed to the call of the priest and squeezed into the classrooms of the old school under the glare of the lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling.

Brylcream streamed down the foreheads of the young men with quiffs in their hair as they leaned against one wall of the Master’s classroom looking across at the girls who stood against the wall on the far side. Auld lassies, the moral guardians of the parish, sat huddled in the corners of the room keeping a close eye on who was dancing with who. They near gave themselves a creek in their necks as the young Joe McGreevy from Ballyarden was seen straightening himself beyond at the wall in readiness for the band to start up and, with the first beat of the drum, he crossed the floor to ask the young Elizabeth Dean from Breenletter out to dance. The women watched with baited breath to see if she would or wouldn’t accept his hand only to breathe a sigh of relief when she extended hers to his and in that ordinary moment, in that exchange of hands, little did she know that their lives would forever entwine as they danced every dance, that night, together.

Despite all that she had been through over the preceding years, the present having long departed her, it was clear to be seen as she looked into his eyes, she recognised the boy she first met those 60 years ago and the love he then enkindled in her heart, a love that grew deeper o’er the years and which now transcended the ravages of dementia. In those moments in that nursing home room, all fear was gone as, in her mind, he held her in his arms as they danced around the floor, that night of the ‘Switch On’ dance.

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