I thought she was dead

It was my father’s birthday this week. I had left his card and present in Clonakilty before I left, and I phoned him on the day to wish him a happy birthday. We talked about the city, about the neighbourhood I’m staying in, and he told me things about his time here that I’d never heard about before. He had come to New York in the eighties to play for a GAA club in the city, but he had worked on a building site in Harlem too, he said, and an Irish bar called Fitzpatricks somewhere on 85^th. He rattled off the street name where he had lived with ease, as if it had been weeks rather than decades since his last trip, and the parties he’d gone to in Woodlawn, a typically Irish American neighbourhood in the Bronx. I love these insights into my parents, the people they were before they had children, the parts of them that have become faded over time. Identities that are close to disappearing, rubbed out by the labels of Mother/Father, Husband/Wife, but still there, underneath it all.

At the end of the conversation, I mentioned the accident. “I know,” my father said, his voice suddenly serious. “This could have been a very different twelve months.”

On his birthday last year, the whole family – my mother and father and sister and my brother-in-law and I – decided to climb Carrauntoohil, the highest mountain in Ireland. I was tired that morning, and wasn’t sure if I wanted to go. I was often tired last year; the insomnia that had plagued me since my adolescence had come back, roaring, and everything felt like such an effort. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I couldn’t even manage that. I’m tired, I said and my mother looked at me and she said I know you are but it’s your father’s birthday and we’re doing this as a family. I sighed heavily, throwing myself into the back of their car, pulling my hat down low over my eyes, and pretended to sleep as we drove to Kerry. I don’t want to be here, I thought to myself as we pulled into the car park of the SuperValu. I don’t want to be here, I thought as we bought sandwiches and snacks and bottled water for the hike. I just want to be alone, with my exhaustion and my misery and my anger. Will they not leave me in peace?

The climb up the mountain was challenging – not physically, necessarily, but mentally; it required focus, attention, a scrabble of uneven ground and small stones beneath our feet. At the summit, we waited for the clouds to clear so we could take photos at the iconic steel cross, and then we began the descent, smiling hello at those walking past us. My sister and I went ahead, chatting, my brother-in-law with us, my parents behind, a little slower. We were close to the end, maybe an hour away, so close, so close, when I heard a scream. I turned on my heel to see my mother falling, falling, and then she was rolling, her body picking up speed until she was just a blur of limbs, and she crashed into a huge stone boulder with a sickening crack.

She’s dead, that was what I thought. There was no doubt in my mind. I couldn’t see how anyone could have survived a fall like that. I screamed too, “Mom. Mom.” I was scrambling up to reach her, and I could hear my sister behind me, and I could see my father coming down as fast as he could, his face blanched of colour, and I knew he thought the same as me, that she was dead. And then this thought came to me, and