.jpg "Glasnevin Cemetery")
Someone
ought to fire off a pistol.
Seems to
me all of you think I’m just going to accept my mud-pile under all those
flowers and a work-a-day headstone, far off any trouble in the old family dump
of remembrance looking out over the bay. Well that isn’t to be.
I demand
a tomb all to myself.
I won’t
be hidden away someplace tranquil. I want to be right at the action, yes even
after death. I will take my rightful place inside the city limits. Bang
at the centre. Claim me the best possible spot. Obstructing traffic, disturbing
locals and interfering with the property market. A place everyone sees me
daily. One safe from the drunks, the cats, the weather, tourism and new
architecture. Someplace Northside. Big ugly and gold and it needs to be
an eyesore. I’ll have pillars in the Corinthian style, thank you kindly.
Carvings of inconsolably bereaved angels, frantic in their grief, to attend the
sacrilege of a world getting on without me. We’ll have a sculpture of me right
at the top. Herculean, a cosmic beauty and wild with passion. I picture me
glaring down in gold with fire and majesty at the people below buying their
carrots and fish cakes. Yes, two three weeks the same people cried out dry at
the wake will skip past the thing mindlessly on the way to Aldi. We know that.
Worse if it grew into some God awful annual family ritual. Torturing
generations on a wet Sunday.
All
my possessions you can wrap for the poor. That or burn them. Now I think about
it a pyre sounds apt. Include all my clothes, my favourite music and
unflattering photos. Put in my clarinet and my correspondence case and my
recipes. Then throw in my paintings, cushions and any gifts anyone ever gave
me. In go my love letters, given and received. Include the Jack B Yeats for it
is a damned fake anyhow. Burn it all up on the front lawn some hour most poor
folks are already at work and ensure the smoke blows toward wealthy districts.
Leave it respectfully burn out long as it naturally takes. Days if need be. And
if the thing rages out of control then guide it towards the homes of the
neighbours I liked the least. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Just their
flowerbeds.
The
funeral isn’t going off in St. Patrick’s, but St. Michaels, central Dun Laoghaire .
Set out from there on an extended procession, kilometres long. I will be
brought to my final rest inDublin at
hellish inconvenience to everyone. Procession to be numbingly slow and
accompanied by one of those New Orleans
At mass:
The very best wine. No less than four eulogies but there is no upper limit.
Cash is ready for hiring a young and beautiful whore to throw herself in
hysterics onto the coffin right at the climax. You don’t have to go through
with that one. Test how it feels on the day. I just liked the idea is all. Put
pennies on my eyes just in case there happens to be something to that old
ferryman story. No time to take chances. Go right ahead and laugh at this
sentiment till it’s your own turn. Then after they sink me into the mud someone
ought to fire off a pistol. At this sound everyone has to scatter. Fill in the
earth double time and be done with the whole affair. Any lingerers: jail them
for loitering. Keep one cop on hand for that.
Distribute
anything surviving the pyre in order of seniority based on who loved me the
most. Measure this by whoever it is works hardest seeing out all of these last
requests. It can’t cost too much to have someone keep score of that.
On to the
Obituary. Don’t imagine this is going on your regular style page along with all
of the regular guys who couldn’t think of anything better than the regular. I
demand a half a page minimum. One in each major broadsheet and two in any pair
of tabloids you want. Make that full page in the tabloids and right at the
front. Full colour photograph, doctored devilishly, of myself partying with
Peter O’Toole, Behan, Francis Bacon, the Archbishop of Dublin, throw in a
couple more like that, then maybe a group of exotic looking women and
indistinct further characters on behind us. Alongside this in fat, Arial black,
emboldened type: NATION MOURNS HER
FAVOURITE SON. Or maybe: IRELAND
Then
start out on the written part:
Michael
‘Bolivar’ Coughlin. A simple man. A beautiful man, (this
is to run verbatim, otherwise I will haunt the very last of you right into
madness ) passed from
this world still raging against the forces that conspire to suck us all down.
And he did it all with the grace and dignity fitting the more handsome
examples of our wildlife, like the swan in low flight or wild hare on the
bounce. His art, tragically burned by his grief torn family, is lost to us
forever. All we do know was the sight of it caused Beckett to cease writing and
Tarkovsky to begin making films. A known hellraiser in the capital’s bars, he
loved nothing more than retiring to a distant spot on Inis Mór to contemplate
the great matters among the buttercups.
He spent
his final days exiled to his garden flower-beds, something people seem to think
the elderly ought to have foisted on them. Why people think nurturing delicate
things to life is a task for those drawing to an end mystified the great man.
Maybe there was a poetry to it but if so he was too exhausted digging to ponder
it. The beauty of flowers never mattered a damn to him. Far as he could tell
the same colours were now available on food-packaging and tracksuits. You never
heard of plants or flowers in those same colours called garish.
And
here you have the front page article in the Times the following day. Somebody
knows a copy editor in there who can swing it, I forget the name.
“They
finally dropped the rain-wet flag over the Dail on a drizzling Tuesday which
turned out to be his last. Three bright green stripes over the silhouette of a
dove. The flag Coughlin had designed himself after liberating the nation. It
flapped with splendour and poetry above the vast cascading banners flanking the
imposing yet simple hearted likeness of Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin commemorated
on the front of the building. So named because he had rid the island finally
and completely of the hated oppressor: its own political class, using only
charm, guile, art, rhetoric, romance and bravado.
Beneath
the banners gathered many exotic looking women, visibly bereft. Behind them,
fully military guard of honour flanking the President. Between these and the
main gates; gardai, international dignitaries, the press, great thinkers, one
or two foreign kings and a retinue of archbishops, prime ministers, artists and
bards. Stood to attention with the rest of the country as the national anthem
came through over the courtyard tannoy the same as the nation’s airwaves. Two
city centre parades, book-ending a week of national mourning.
How they
contained a wild spirit like that to the garden is a wonder to itself. Some
kind of family coup. Gentlest one you ever could think up. Small matters like
the answering of his fan letters or when some visiting Nobel laureate arrived,
from the few that still even remembered him, that he had to have someone there
to help on his robes. The blood red Jaguar remained his, for a time. Then they
let him know he was unroadworthy. Not even the car. Nobody paid him any
heed any longer. He went unrecognised out among people. He took a walk down a
main street. Not even a hello. He could simply go to the town and visit shops.
He went and bought the food it damn well pleased him to. Like maybe Swiss Roll
instead of the carrots he set out for, or soap, or motor oil. Then he would
place it on the kitchen table where everyone expected carrots and it wasn’t
ever the case he just forgot the things he had been sent for. They took
away his whiskey. They replaced his cigarettes with medicines.
Finally
they holed him up. They jailed him, called it a hospice. He expected that.
Claim was it would keep him comfortable. His jailers were gracious Asian women
in white and blue. They kept him drugged and helped him into and out of the
regulation clothing. He got shown a whole lot of television intended to keep
him in a vegetative state. Quiz shows and the horses. But on he raged. He was
wildfire. The nurses loved him. They fought to bring him is tea, serve him his
pills. They snuck him toffees and cigarillos from the outside world. He came to
miss those visiting Nobel laureates. The jaguar too. He even missed the
gardens. Turned out flowers weren’t worse than garish clothes people had on.
Leave it
there. Pull any of that off and I'll try and get you those lottery numbers from
the beyond. Don't bother checking any accounts, there isn't a cent. Just try
and have history record me how I like. Only add that he is survived by his
wife, Brida, whom he loved each day sweeter than any sensation he ever knew,
his daughter Annette and his son Colm, who visited his bed each night until the
end in the high dependency unit, St. Vincent’s hospital, and looked right into
his father’s fading eyes though it agonised the both of them.
Alan
Walsh
This piece was originally published in The Moth magazine in 2013
Glasnevin Cemetery image courtesy William Murphy
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