Eulogy for Mum - Daphne Bernadette Egan (nee Hickey) - 30 March 1934 to 18 December 2019

It’s tricky for me to write something about my Mum as a person, as someone who lived their own life with their own dreams and plans, their own youthful scrapes and grown-up mistakes, long before I was a remote possibility. In some ways, Cath, John and I knew Mum in a way that nobody else in the world could, but it’s also true that we knew very little about her life pre-us. Everything that happens before our parents are born is a bit of legend, a mythical time when the world was in black and white and you could buy a house with change from a thrupenny bit. So, trying to sum things up is a challenge. Mum went by many names: Mum to a trio of forty-somethings, and Nana to a select group of six grandchildren; Mrs Egan to some, Sister Daphne Hickey to many, but Daphne to most.

Right up until the end of her life – 85 years and nine months packed with quiet-ish determination, care for everyone around her, and a robust cheerfulness –  Mum quickly left an impression with everyone who met her as someone who was highly independent in spirit but also kind and friendly, someone who was ready with a joyful song on her lips and equally ready with a playful fist under the chin to dish out ‘a puck in the puss’ to anyone that she felt needed a corrective nudge. She was someone who was strong and stoic, almost to a fault, who firmly believed that we were all people muddling our ways through life, essentially the same, even when our differences seemed the most challenging. But as far as my brother, sister and I are concerned, we only know Mum from a time when she was a fortysomething like we are today. We’re a bit late to the party.

The whole process of learning what made Mum tick was that little bit more difficult because she was so much more interested in helping other people get what they needed during their lives; her own wishes and schemes were often absorbed into the greater good. We never met and would struggle to recognise the young woman who returned to Ireland in the early 60s from the US with over 100 pairs of shoes in her luggage. However, it is clear that she spent her entire adult life caring for others – working as a nurse in Dublin, in the States and in the County Hospital at Ennis. Her plan was to go back to Dublin after a summer staying with her parents in Kincora Park but her love of the life there kept her in her beloved County Clare for another 10 years - until Dad’s arrival and subsequent return to Cheshire finally pulled her away from Ireland in 1972. Mum was rightfully proud of her work as a nurse and considered it a privilege to be able to look after others that needed her care. Everything else came second to her duty as a carer. She gave up smoking and her car when she and Dad got married, and she gave up work when I arrived in order to focus all her attentions and considerable professional skills on me. I was, as my Dad sometimes joked, Matron Hickey’s final patient. 

Once the three of us kids were a little more manageable, Mum began a part-time job delivering gift bags to new mothers in the local hospital, enjoying being in the hospital environment once again. Later, she threw herself into helping Dad with his new textile small business, which he was forced to start in the late 80s at the beginning of a long recession, after having cared for her own mother while was dying of pancreatic cancer at home in Ennis. Moving back to Ireland for a few years in 2004, after living in our family home for a while after her old darling, our Dad, had died, Mum volunteered in the local day centre, helping to look after the ‘old dears’, many of them younger than she was. Her sense of the importance of looking after others never left her and she was still asking the nurses, doctors and staff that visited her in Ysbyty Gwynedd how they were, greeting them with a smile or a wink, until she was no longer able to speak. The smile that she would greet John, Cath and I each morning in the Glyder ward when we went to visit her was absolutely gorgeous and joyful, like the smile of a six-month old. It will stay with me for the rest of my days.

Despite our lack of knowledge of her when we were kids, though, it was possible to gather a bit of information about her earlier life. She was always happy to talk about her family holidays in County Kerry with her Dad’s family in Anaskirtane, near Rathmore. She told us how her Dad, Sergeant Denis Hickey of the Garda Siochana, the Irish republic’s brand new ‘guardians of the peace’, a role that he and she were both immensely proud of, would despair at her taste in gangster movies. She warned us how her love of butterscotch ended in dental disaster. She said how much she loved dancing at Bofey Quinn’s in Corofin and that she would be out until all hours – fully exercising her privileges as the baby of the family to get away with everything – once again, much to the concern of her poor old Dad.

Seeing as she and her brothers and big sister grew up in a house where a portrait of the hero of the Irish War of Independence Michael Collins was put up on the wall before the picture of the Sacred Heart, it was probably inevitable that she was would be an Irish patriot. But Mum took nationalist sentiment to a new level of Irish chauvinism, where if anything was Irish it was immediately the most interesting thing in the world. One Christmas visit in Manchester, a few years after the Alzheimer’s had crept in – although it wasn’t diagnosed at the time – she came up to John and asked him, ‘What’s wrong with your atlas? Ireland is much too small in it’. Mum loved speaking and writing in Irish when she was at school and excelled in both, learning trigonometry and writing poetry in the same tongue. It was a personal tragedy that the part of her she felt she could only communicate in the Gaelic language was gradually lost to her as she lost the knowledge of it. 

It was some recompense that she eventually settled with her young family in North Wales, as the scenery and rocks of Anglesey reminded her so much of the Atlantic coast of Ireland, and I think that she found living in the North of England, in Macclesfield, so soon after the death of her own Dad, with one new-born baby and then a second three years later, desperately hard, even though I’m sure she would never have complained. Her only previous trip to the North of England had been on a trip to Sheffield to visit her aunt Molly and the vision from her train window of the blackened, smoggy industrial towns and cities in the 1950s left such a mark on her mind she promised herself she’d never come back. That plan didn’t quite work out. However, at my christening, when her Dad jokingly complained that his first Irish grandchild was the son of an Englishman, Mum said that Dad was ‘the only Englishman allowed to do it’, which put just about everyone in their place. Mum has also left us a rich legacy of words – banjaxed, skew-ways, nyuck, fizzing fluteplayer - some of which might be Irish, some of which I suspect are pure Daphne.

Even when the Alzheimer’s clouded Mum’s brain with darkness and confused irritability, the strength and kindness in her heart was there for everyone to see. Mum was a devout Catholic all her life, as I expect everyone here will know very well. As a family, this meant that we got to go to church here in Menai Bridge on both Saturday and Sunday mornings, for every service of the Easter and Christmas festivals, on every other Holy Day of Obligation and during the week in the school holidays too. (‘Hooray!’) Mum was still powering her way up the stairs here as recently as November when John (or sometimes Cath or I) would take her to Saturday evening Mass, which remained one of the most important things in her life. Mum was a great advert for Christianity (kind and caring to others and drawing great strength from her beliefs) and loved being part of this Catholic community. John said recently that he felt it was a great privilege to be able to spend that couple of hours with her in the car every week, bringing her the gift of her precious Mass. What we didn’t know was that Mum had also been receiving Holy Communion on the sly from Father Adrian at the Catholic church in Bangor, so the Alzheimer’s meant that she was getting double helpings.

Those car journeys between Caernarfon and Anglesey would often involve the same few topics in rotations of five minutes or so: ‘Where is it you live now?’; ‘I’m damned lucky!’; ‘We’re all just people’; ‘It does my heart good to look at these gorgeous green fields’ and a quick rendition of ‘Que sera sera’. The Alzheimer’s, in some ways, left Mum with a mantra of the same few key sentences that cut through the fog in her head. This started as tragic, became a little comic – as John said, you could predict what Mum would say on each bend of the road – before the core wisdom underneath them shined through. Mum felt privileged that she’d been able to have a career before starting a family, but the fact that she had been what she called, with professional precision, a ‘mature primer partum’ (an older first-time mum) meant perhaps that by the time we three kids became parents ourselves, much of Mum’s parenting experience, especially the emotions of parenting which often come as a shock the first time round, had been locked away in a dementia-ravaged corner of her memory banks. Just as we lost Dad at a relatively early age, Mum had already partly faded into legend, while she was still alive, by the time we’d all become full-scale adults. Joseph, her eldest grandson and only a couple months away now from being a grown-up himself, has said he felt as though he is the only one of Mum’s grandkids that saw the real her, the Nana that walked him to church and bought him sweets on the way home – though she probably avoided butterscotch.

Another thing most people that knew Mum would agree on is she was strong – not just physically strong, but mentally strong too. In her hospital bed, as she was fighting for breath, her heart was beating as soundly as ever, her forearm muscles still felt powerful and ready for action. Her iron-finger tickling approach was like something out of a kung-fu movie, but she had an iron will to match and a determination to continue on her course. She did such a good job of looking after herself and disguising her Alzheimer’s – keeping herself organised with notes on scraps of paper and in the TV section of the paper, calling everyone ‘dear’ whether she remembered them or not – that by the time she was admitted into the Bryn Seiont residential care home, after Cath and John had moved her back to stay with him on the Llyn Peninsula, Mum’s was the most advanced case of dementia the specialist had ever seen in a newly-diagnosed patient. Her independent streak and her strategic skills were very strong, often expressed as a desire not to make any fuss. However, Cath was also ‘as cute as a country fox’ to use Mum’s vernacular, and she wasn’t fooled, telling us that she thought Mum might be suffering from a form of dementia. Cath followed Mum’s footsteps into nursing, but I think she always been especially tuned into Mum, as maybe they worry about the same kind of things.

If there is one thing, though, that might best sum Mum up, it would be her singing voice. It was strong, it was clear but warm, and it was joyful. She was singing right up to the end of her life, within 24 hours of her last breath, and her singing at Bryn Seiont was often featured in the local press – with or without the Welsh Elvis. Mum was often like her old self during the musical therapy: it would always lift her spirits, bring the light back into her eyes, and her voice will certainly be missed by everyone there. Singing brought Mum her lovely old darling, our Dad Denis. They were introduced by a mutual friend who was involved in the local musical society, Nigel Bridge, during a production of Show Boat. Not only was this a fitting way for them to meet (as Dad was also a keen singer) but it also gifted them with a party piece, as they would perform their duet ‘Ah Still Suits Me’ from the show. The song is a bit problematic now, maybe, but the love for each other that they conveyed while they sang was gorgeous and always brought a smile to whoever heard them. It was equally problematic that they performed together in Aida (I think) with Dad playing a luxuriously bearded Agamemnon and Mum playing a Vestal Virgin despite carrying me ‘in utero’ – to use her medical Latin again.

It brings a smile again to my face to think that Mum believed that Dad was waiting for her and that, once her bodily remains were in the ground beside his at Menai Cemetery, they’d have the rest of eternity together. Mum often said she felt as though a part of her died along with him died 23 years ago, and she could hardly wait to see him again. It is a testament to Mum’s strength, her desire to

look after others and the joy she still got from life that she waited for 23 years. It was Dad’s 89^th birthday five days after Mum died and Christmas Day a couple of days later again – as a child, he always got one shilling for both his birthday and Xmas together, instead of one for each like his big sister, Mary, did; he would make a joke about this great injustice every year. This festive season, perhaps he would agree that being reunited with Mum was certainly a worthwhile combined birthday and Christmas present.

Just one more thing to say. Each night when our family went to bed – when we were kids and when we were visiting grown-ups – we would go through a little linguistic ritual of wishing each other a good night. Mum and Dad would get a kiss on the cheek and then the litany would begin, running through English, Welsh, German and Irish. Good night. Nos da. Oíche mháith. Sleep well. Schlafen Sie gut. Codladh samh.

Codladh sámh, Mum. Codladh sámh.