May 20th sees my mother’s birthday, which was in the year 1926 to be exact. She passed away on 7th January 2012 in the middle of the night. I can still recall finding her half in and half out of bed and realising from her immobility and pallor that she had gone.
In truth she had wanted to die long before that as vascular dementia began to unsettle her brain and make her incapable of recognising people or remembering the most basic things. She used to repeat the phrase ‘I wish I was gone.’ and then in January 2012 she was – and I kept pondering in a mix of awe and sadness the sharp reality that a human being who had given birth to me and to my sister was no longer there. A heart that had beaten since shortly after conception in 1925 had ceased to do so.
I guess as someone who thinks historically, I have pondered the fact that the Irish boundary commission concluded its report in 1925 just weeks before my mother was conceived. In that sense, she was a twin to Northern Ireland state which only received final territorial endorsement by the British government in that year. With two of my aunts who had been born in 1920 and conceived as far as I know in each case in the post-war year of 1919, I am intrigued by the reality that each of them was born before the partition of Ireland and that in their lifetime they saw the Northern Ireland state created , experienced their youth as it went through a relatively stable first first half century and then saw it descend into a crisis that had never really gone away by the time they died – although political violence had been massively reduced by then.
It’s also intriguing to see my grand parents – all born in Victorian Ireland – as human beings who transitioned from one political regime to another. I note of course that all my family on each side were Protestant by religious affiliation, inhabitants of rural County Down, Unionist for the most part, and middle class by status and because of this combination they were much less likely to undergo the cultural privations and economic deprivation that thousands of others in both parts of this island experienced.
On 20th May, my sister and I remember my mother but on that day I invoke the inception, biography and possible futures of this place that, even when I haven’t lived there, I have still called home.