The photos and text from the “Her Story, Herself, Her World” photography story by Liz Gallagher, Donegal, Ireland – one of the participants of femLENS workshops in 2022, organised by Women’s Collective Ireland – Donegal.
“(I) Her Story
My mum comes from an age-group of women whose likes will never be seen again. Born into a humble country background, she walked bare-footed to school and worked from the age of 10.
Educational opportunities were non-existent for these women. My mother talks about winning story-writing competitions in school and, she can recite all the words in Irish which she still remembers, 78 years after having her last Irish class and leaving school.
Women’s rights, divorce, freedom of movement, were a near impossibility, never even considered in my mother’s time. There were no private earnings, it felt as if she lived entirely as “a mother” serving family and farm, self-less to the last detail.
She now lives alone in that same farmhouse. I want to show her courage, resilience, continued interest in household activities, and connection with her carers, and the immeasurable love she continues to show us, her children. We were children of the 80s recession whose natural next move, after receiving further education, was to emigrate. Ireland did not hold any opportunities for that wave of new graduates students that had access to grants to study. My father said, “Third level education took you all away from us…”
My mother’s adaptability to living alone, after a whole 56 years of living with my father, who died in 2016, has never ceased to amaze me. I tell her each day that she is a role model in courage and adaptability.
My mother being able to live alone is due to the fact that 12 years ago when she and my father had health issues, they applied for, and got, a home-help package. That same home-help package would not be offered now to people in the same, or worse, situations.
Socialjustice.ie (ii) states: ‘…The Government policy to support people to remain in their own homes is not evidenced by the significant decrease in the provision of Home Help hours following 2008 at a time of population ageing… Numbers of people receiving home help and the hours allocated reduced from 2008 and especially from 2010, and there were still fewer people in receipt of Home Help support in 2017 than there had been in 2008. Numbers of people in receipt of Home Care Packages (HCPs) grew after 2008 but the funding for that scheme was largely static for many years and the average value of each package fell…the HSE itself suggests that home care has not kept pace with population growth or population ageing and that demand for home support continues to exceed the level of service that is funded…. planning and investment are required to meet the challenges presented by population ageing … to address the infrastructural deficits created by underinvestment…’
I want to highlight how allowing the elderly to live in their own homes adds to their life choices, their independence, their continued interest in their surroundings, and the people they come into contact with, leading to a more holistic way of treating the elderly instead of institutionalising them and taking their independence and homes away. A statistic from alone.ie (i) states that 1 in 3 older people live on their own in Ireland.
The story and photos focus on my mother’s presence in her house, her hallway, her walls and window sills, her photos, her religious symbols: Saint Brigid’s Cross given to her by her neighbour, Patrick, who made it on the eve of Saint Brigid’s Day, 1 February 2022, holy water bottles taken back to her from far off pilgrim places like Fatima and Rome, her wedding photos, her many angels given to her as symbols of other-worldly protection, her miraculous medal, her Saint Patrick’s medal. Her envelope full of prayers that she says each morning.
(II) Herself
When I ask my mother if I can do a photo story project on her, she laughs incredulously and asks who’d want to know about her at this stage in her life and smiles. Nevertheless, she enjoys seeing the photos and comments humorously, “I’m not bad-looking for an old lady of 88!”
When I ask her about living alone she says that naturally enough she sometimes feels lonely but she also senses dad is with her. She says she has the TV and her books. And the girls. ”All the girls are good to me. Frances is good ”crack”. Frances is the home-help who does a sitting service with her where they sit together for two hours, twice a week and exchange stories. There is also Siobhan and Sarah, Jackie and Joyce and Michelle, a whole team of great people who show love, care and humour to my mother, sensing what she needs, reassuring her and treating her with respect and love. She knows some of their stories. They know some of her stories. Their relationship with her is invaluable in allowing her to live alone.
When I ask my mother how she feels, she laughs and says, “I feel old, how do you expect me to feel at this age!”, and laughs. There is one particular story and a joke that she loves telling and she is good at telling them. Both are about married life.
One tells of a new bride exiting the chapel with her new husband and going with him towards his bicycle. When he asks her nonchalantly, “Where do you think you’re going?” She answers, “I’m going home with you, Sam”. To which Sam replies, “Indeed you are not, you’re not going home with me, we have nay room for ourselves, never mind you!” My mother laughs so much at this story. One night she tells it to Joyce, as they are walking together towards her bedroom and she stops with her walker to bend over and laugh heartily at the idea of this story.
The other story my mother tells is a joke about a husband and wife. The wife has never been happy with the husband because he is lazy and doesn’t do a tip of work. When he dies, she gets him cremated and his ashes put in an egg-timer. She keeps boiling eggs and says, ”You didn’t do a tip when you were living so I’ll keep you going now!”
When I ask my mother about her working life, she says, ”There was nothing for it but to do it”. This attitude that her generation had of “getting on with it” and not wishing your life away on other things is a mentality that, in the modern world, seems out of place since the whole ethos now seems to be “wishing for other things”, the need to be “bettering”.
An important part of her life is praying. First thing in the morning my mother takes out her ”prayer envelope” which is full of prayers. She takes them all out, says some of them and re-arranges them back into the envelope again. She also says a decade of the rosary for every one of her family. She listens to ‘Radio Maria’ for an hour before mass starts. There is sometimes wonderful music that stops me in my tracks as I am going about the house, preparing mum’s lunch or making my breakfast. The mass comes on at 10am and mum listens intently and answers the mass at all the right interludes. At 10.30 we change to the national station, RTE. She enjoys seeing where the mass is coming from and we both hold out for the days when the mass is broadcast from Donegal. One day it comes from Glenswilly, which is up the road. She especially enjoys it because of that.
I admire her faith, seeing how it sustains her. There is something admirable and amazing, and magical even, about her rock-solid and steadfast belief in a spiritual world that can guide and help her. There is the way she knows so many prayers by heart and says them aloud with a lilt and a sing-song tone, both with the carers, and with us when we are visiting, as she is preparing for bed, and when in bed ”There are four corners on my bed, there are four angels above my head, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless this bed that I lie on. And if I die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take”.
Mum has always loved reading. It still amazes me how she gets engrossed in a book and stays glued to it for hours. Yesterday she read aloud to me pieces from a set of short stories titled ” True Murders in Ireland”.
Alongside reading, she loves all Murder Mystery series, her favourites being “Murder She Wrote” (“…Jessica gets to the bottom of the stories very quickly…”), “Columbo” (‘‘…he’s a funny detective who, on leaving a room after questioning someone, always appears back seconds later saying, “I’ve just remembered one more thing…’’).
Another series that she loves is “Little House on the Prairie” and the fact that it is set on a farm with good people who love each other yet the inclusion of nasty, self-serving, bad article ‘Nellie Olson’ adds to the drama, especially as my mum believes that good will always triumph over nastiness, even if the journey to get there is always ridden with twists, turns and traps.
I ask mum what her favourite part of the day is and she laughs and says, “Dinnertime”. She does enjoy her dinner especially now when it is totally “pounded” up and she doesn’t have to worry about choking. She loves Siobhan’s stews and would have them every day if she could. Alongside the stews she loves shepherd’s pie.
Friends and family coming to visit mum usually bring something to the house, such as cake, buns or fruit. It’s great the way this tradition has remained. When I’m visiting we use the leftover cake and buns to make trifle. We have been wondering whether to admit we make trifle from visitors’ gifts, if we have been unable to eat them all within a few days, due to home-baked buns and cake being more prone to going stale quicker than shop-bought products.
Mum loves singing. She listens on the laptop or mobile to Bridie Gallagher, a local Donegal singer, from my mum’s generation. Mum enjoys telling how she ran away with a circus and became famous. Another singer she loves is Daniel O’Donnell. A song we have been singing a lot recently is “Maggie”. It was her father’s favourite song as her mother’s name was Maggie. Mum’s mother died when mum was just two. Mum has got into the lingo of “googling”. She asks if we can google the lyrics again of “Maggie” and I make the font really big and she reads the words from the screen and sings along.
Mum remembers a lot of words of countless songs and poems. I ask her how she knows so many songs and poems by heart and if she learned them at school. She says, ‘”We didn’t sing at school, we only learned hymns. We learned songs from the “Ireland’s Own” (a long-standing magazine) and the gramophone”. I ask her if she remembers the songs from barn dances and she says at her home they didn’t have barn dances but dad had barn dances at his home.
There is an oil painting of mum and dad on their 50th Wedding Anniversary. My brother John, who lives in Taiwan, got a friend to paint it for them. It hangs in the living room. When I show mum the photo of the painting she laughs and says, “Look at the way he is looking down at me. I must have been saying something to make him laugh or maybe he was making me laugh”. We remember a phrase about not being an “oil painting”. She laughs and says, “’You’re no oil painting’ is an old saying meaning you’re not so handsome!’’ And we laugh some more.
Mum’s walking frame plays a major role in her life. It still has the tag with her name on it from the rehabilitation centre she was in for three months, 11 years ago. She likes her walker placed either around her chair or around her bed. The only time the walker is on its own, away from her, is when it is standing in the hallway outside the bathroom looking like it has a life of its own, looking as if it were some extraterrestrial mutant, a Dalek, from the science fiction series Doctor Who, waiting patiently for mum.
Windowsills have always been used for placing important things on: photos, holy water, angels, memorial cards, cards for all occasions have a temporary stay there. Windowsills also open up the outside for mum. They are her only contact with the outside world. The garden with its high hedge, the peat shed and the path to our old cottage that lies abandoned and full of castaway items, some symbolic, some native to the cottage, some chucked in — out of sight, out of mind.
The whole place outside is amazing on a sunny morning when the early morning light casts full-blown shadows, duplicating everything in its path, from the grandeur of the roof and chimney pot to the modest, yet essential, salt, cutlery and daily tablets laid out on the kitchen table.
(III) Her World
I ask mum if I can take a photo of her standing at the front door of the house. It is a grey, overcast day. I never usually take photos on such days. That day I take the photo because I am leaving for a few weeks and it might be the last opportunity to do so. I do not expect to be shocked by what I think is just a wide-angled photo of my mother standing at her front door.
When I stand in the lawn and try to get the photo done as quickly as possible, I realise mum has probably not stood, for years, waiting there at her front door, looking as if she wants to be any place else but standing there.
The overcast sky is drawing in around her and so too is the lawn, moving closer to her, the branches curving and trapping the house and my mum in a frame framing her, trapping her there as if against her will. The grass on the cracks of the front street are inbound too, snaking towards her, as if all paths on that overcast day, lead to mum. When I show the photo to my mum, she says good-humouredly, “I look as if I’ve shrunk!” And we laugh. Then she adds, That’s what happens when you get old!”
Sources
(i) https://alone.ie/our-work/#support-befriending
(ii) https://www.socialjustice.ie/article/ireland-great-place-grow-old
