Sanctuary was… a chuisle mo chroi.
Babies are born to that beat, they are that beat.
This morning I found myself in the infamous Tallaght Village while my car was in with a new mechanic for a service. I wandered in search of a safe haven for the day, and (quite literally) stumbled upon a café called Aon Scéal?
In English, “aon scéal?” means any news/gossip? what’s the story? or any craic? depending on who you ask.
Sounds friendly, looks cosy, I’ll take it.
What’s the story?
Well, seeing as you asked, tomorrow marks two months since my baby boy passed away in my arms. Every morning the mourning lottery gifts me an aphorism to be relentlessly repeated for the day. A mourning mantra one might call it.
“His soul never left my body” steadily drips, drops, and ripples within me today.
This is true, he was stillborn. He was kept mechanically alive in the NICU for six days, but he wasn’t really alive. He was only alive in my womb.
This is what I would have liked to say to the lovely waitress.
Having arrived earlier than the usual café rabble and hubbub, I chose to set up permanent residence for the day down the back on the slouchy sofa, beside the children’s books.
“Oh induced, a weekend baby so…” A brief glimpse of the life of the waitress that prepared my cappuccino. It was the only thing I understood, because it was in English.
They genuinely speak Irish to one another in this café, in Tallaght. From the brief snippets that I can recall from my school days, the manager is discussing their Christmas marketing content with the staff.
One might expect this out Wesht, in the Gaeltacht regions, but these City Dubs have created a small safe haven, between the old Cash for Gold and a congested crossroad.
This is a Sanctuary for a dying language and my grieving heart.
It’s nice to feel like a stranger again, even if it’s only fifteen minutes up the road. It’s nice to know a casual acquaintance won’t walk in to see my contorted face as I hold back the tears.
It’s nice to not be met with sympathetic moon eyes, and for a few moments, I can laugh and banter with the boisterous waitress, as if it was all just a bad dream.
In all of my favourite places, I have always been anonymous.
The last time I spent a whole day in a café was in India, grieving the loss of my Grandparents who raised me. I had returned to work all too soon after their passing, and later during my travels I realised just how deeply that quiet grief had been buried.
The expanse of India was my Sanctuary, they celebrated grief loudly. I recall running to the edge of a rooftop café to see the musical street celebration (it was in fact a funeral), and ne’er will I forget the great burning pyres of Kashi (Varanasi).
I miss sitting cross-legged on the floor, sketchbook in hand, overlooking a spread of notebooks, and the river Ganges, with all the space and time in the world, and nothing to do but just exist, wandering within and without.
I miss missing coffee too, as a good Americano was akin to striking gold in India. Sweet caffeinated gold, I would grieve aimlessly for hours and it was good.
Then the plague struck. I was forced by fate onto the last repatriation flight and back into a forced existence, working for pharma by day and plotting my escape by night. I didn’t realise then that my grief was a loaded steam engine, a time train headed straight to the source.
After months of sacred loneliness amidst the crowds of India, I moved to a countryside cabin, where I lived in solitude with crowded thoughts.
I thoroughly grieved my own innocence. I couldn’t look at the childhood photo of me hugging that cordyline tree without bursting into tears.
What a beautiful child, but not me, not the woman I grew to be, surely?
I call this trio of images my Triple Goddess Story:
Munchkin (pure innocence) - Maiden (the drunk escapist; the loss of innocence) - Mother (rebuilding myself; finding innocence again)
How did that child of light succumb to the darkest thoughts?
Why did she poison her beautiful little body? Those smokey nights and lost dead-days, waking to stale pints of masked anxieties.
Why couldn’t she see what she really was, who she really was?
These were the inklings of Motherhood calling; that recognition of the preciousness of innocence, mine and everybody else’s; then the burning desire to grow and guard it.
Those tippled inklings in my cabin, a nostalgic glass of wine in hand as I romanced my former freedoms, and yet, I realised, those were really times of great trappings; a “respectable” job, the ensuing escapism and many a misplaced affection.
I realised that Motherhood was a respectable job of the highest order. I yearned to create a Sanctuary for a new Innocence, and I nearly had it, but I guarded it too ferociously.
I was, or maybe I still am ... almost a Mother.
Now I don’t fit into the picture, there’s no somewhere-between Maiden and Mother. I’m somewhere beyond - above or below I’m not sure. I’m no longer hugging the tree, I was the tree, that tree of life, and you don’t grow down from that.
I pray I bough to Motherhood again, someday.
Now every kind of grief I had experienced before, in comparison to losing Lucas, feels as though it had been misplaced, but this can never be misplaced because it comes, not from my memories, but from somewhere between my heart, my spine and my bowels.
It’s an invisible cord, a portal perhaps.
When I try to locate it, it disperses, and when I try to disperse it, it concentrates into something of the density and mass of a black hole.
“Their first try… A girl, baby Fiona… Lovely name…”
Oh shit, I’m back in the café.
Not in an Indian café, sipping misplaced grief for those whose time had truly come.
Not in my cabin, sipping the misplaced grief of an innocence lost to lilac wine.
I’m here, misplaced, in a quaint old-world café in Tallaght, of all places, in a persistent, extant, deserving grief, and yet I’m managing to smile at the two ladies sitting across from me. It’s quite the paradox, to find one’s self misplaced in a Sanctuary, but here I am.
I read an article yesterday - researchers found that babies are born with the ability to recognise the pattern of a musical beat. Big news, it was the first time researchers had been able to definitively say for certain whether this was a learned behaviour or not.
No, it makes sense that we do not learn the beats; we were all once a pulse that beats from five weeks in the womb, Mother’s heartbeat was the only music we knew for another fifteen, and then another twenty more the sound of her voice, hopefully singing sometimes.
Is it really a surprise then that we are born with an innate ability to recognise that beat, the consistent steady beat of a Mother’s heart in all of her joys, the thrills of her thudding pains, the accordance of her calm contentment, with everything in between; and then thereafter, every song is but a derivative work of the magnum opus that is Mother.
I hope that my body was a Sanctuary for him; maybe he was a wayward and unruly soul, visiting me for the good bit only because being a soul is difficult enough, being human much more so, but maybe there is a sweet somewhere-between…
Maybe, just maybe, there was a brief and fleeting Sanctuary… a chuisle mo chroi. The pulse of my heart.
Hello, Hello There
I’m Sarah Griffin, this is Griff-in-Theory. Vilomah, ex-pharmaceutical scientist, creative and inquisitive spirit, lover of both the macabre and the mystical. This is a space for pondering, so I would love to hear your ponderings in the comments.
Gosh am in tears reading this. Heart sore. Hearty. Heart broken. All the hearts.