The Tricks of Memory

Last month my second cousin, Eliza, died unexpectedly. I hadn’t known her well, but I cried at her funeral. My tears were not for her entirely, although she was too young to leave this earth and had lived a full and loving life.

Photographs of Eliza, her husband, her children and grandchildren filled the middle pages of the funeral booklet we each held. Crammed amongst the coloured photos was one in black-and-white of her birth family. To the foreground sat her father, Paul, alongside his wife, Pat. Uncle Paul was my father’s cousin, my godfather, an air force veteran who’d lost a leg in World War II, and my terrible childhood dentist.

‘Pat and Paul’ – as they were known – shared many early married days with my parents. But just Paul and Dad went to the races together, bet on the horses, cheated the bookies, probably drank too much and vied in my mind for the title of most fearsome Irish temper. Paul was my father’s closest friend. As eldest of their combined twelve children, I was first in line to suffer the tortures of his dental surgery. He’d limp into the room on his wooden leg, roundly curse the problem tooth, muttering, ‘You don’t need a painkiller, do you?’ This was well after the drill had hammered away at the exposed nerve..

After the war, Paul sometimes stayed over on my parents’ farm. One night I heard him and Dad outside my bedroom window loudly whispering about how to get a shilling piece into the glass of water beside my bed that held a missing tooth. They’d both fought in the armed services during war, but playing the role of tooth fairy may have been their biggest challenge yet.

Despite the demands of his own growing family, Paul managed to cheer on his goddaughter – me – a reluctant debutante at the end-of-her-school-years’ ball. Something about his kindly manner had made the homemade dress that I questioned and my flopping bouffant hairstyle all alright. He was a stalwart, lovely man.

These many years later, on the day of his daughter’s funeral, while the congregation wept for Eliza, I sobbed – with the perfect camouflage – for the man who’d gone before her.

As a child on the farm I once asked Mum why Uncle Paul cried out in anguish at night. ‘He doesn’t have a leg anymore, so how can it hurt?’’ I asked. She explained that the body’s nerves still feel pain, even though a limb has been amputated. 

And so this body’s cells remember the soul of a man who remained a mainstay for her from childhood to young womanhood. Peering into his beaming face in the family photograph, I divined all this in an instant.

And thus, in such unexpected moments, the scene for a memoir is born.