Authors: Elizabeth McCullough

Eighty Not Out (37 page)

Immediately I felt a sense of release, and Fergus said: âWhat's come over you? I heard you singing this morning, and I haven't heard that in years.' Not long after, when I laughed at some trivial incident, I realised how long it was since I had laughed spontaneously. Ideally, the miracle should have coincided with Fergus's birthday on 25 July, but it happened exactly one week earlier on 18 July 1987. Later he told me he had sensed something radical had happened: was it possible I had gone through a spiritual awakening, as described in the
AA
literature? I returned to regular meetings, where the transformation was also noticed, though some members, who had followed my antics over the years, found it scarcely credible. Those who delighted in clichÃ©s were comforted by âanother miracle in
AA
'.

Katharine returned from Japan for Christmas, and on 12 January 1988 we celebrated Michael's twenty-first birthday with a large party attended by friends of all generations, some ânormal', but a number we had made through
AA
and Al-Anon.

Epilogue

Soaring on an Updraft

I
returned to Ireland in the summers of 1988 and 1989 to visit my mother. She had been told by Dodi and Rosemary that I had stopped drinking, so there was no question of not being allowed to see her. The tiny figure sat in a wheelchair, wrapped in a rug, staring out to sea from a bay window. The view over Belfast Lough was very similar to the one from her own house: from here the panorama stretched as far as Larne, Ballylumford Power Station and Black Head at the beginning of the Antrim Coast Road. Her sight was hazy, and she could only guess at what I was wearing, liking the colours and stretching a hand towards my long string of pearls. No reference was made to the past, and I shall never know if she derived any solace from my sobriety. On my last visit, accompanied by Dodi, Rosemary joined us, looking sprightly in a floral dress she had made herself. Together we tried to entertain her by speaking of people and places she had enjoyed, but it was impossible to know how much she understood. Her attention would wander to the chocolates we had brought, and sometimes she would nod off in mid-sentence, but from time to time she would interject a pithy comment, interspersed by flashes of frustration at being unable to express herself â âIt's all inside, it just won't come out.'

The nurses came to say supper would shortly be served, then they took Rosemary and me aside to tell us the patient now had little appetite and had to be spoon-fed if any significant amount were to go down. They added that sometimes she had to be sedated at night to prevent her from trying to climb out of the bed, which had side bars like a cot. The thought was unspoken â we shared the hope she would soon die in her sleep, which is precisely what she did ten days after I returned to France. She would have been ninety-three in two months' time. Rosemary, thirteen years her junior, died little more than a year later from the asthma that had plagued her throughout life.

Over the next six years I became an active member of
AA
, as was Fergus in Al-Anon. He had also become a serious golfer with a handicap of ten. I took lessons until I became proficient enough not to shame him on the course. Katharine married in 1992 and had a daughter, Caitlin, the first and only girl of our seven grandchildren, and the only one that Fergus got to know. Katharine had been six months pregnant with Rory when Fergus died on 1 May 1995. So he never knew we have six grandsons. He was at Michael's marriage to Gelise in 1994, but the first of their three sons was not born until 1997. Mary married the year after his death, and has two sons born in 1997 and 1999.

Ted died sane and sober in 2000. Despite his efforts to fight it, the disease got Terry â with whom we shared that uncomfortable New Year's Eve â in the end: he was one of the âunfortunates', but many members of
AA
believe the patient hours he spent listening to them were a major factor in their own recovery.

I moved to Scotland, and Michael, who works at the
WHO
headquarters, now lives with his family in the old house in Divonne. I bought a cottage on the Isle of Raasay in 1997 but had a stroke two years later, after which it was downhill all the way healthwise throughout my seventies â gall bladder, shingles and osteoarthritis â but now in my eighties, taking Winston Churchill as a model, I keep âbuggering on'.

Maps

Northern Ireland and Donegal