A Prayer

I pray for an easy passage for him – stepping stones across a lily-clad lake into a peaceful autumnal world. I pray for a calm day for him – a serene September day full of gentility and grace. I pray he’ll be called to go in the morning just as the sun is rising and the bleary-eyed birds are beginning to sing- the best part of the day, like he always said.

I pray he’ll glide across the water like the light-footed lad he once was ignoring its depth as he ponders on scenes from a full and happy life. I pray he’ll have the strength to focus his feet all the way forward fully accepting now of his fate. I pray he’ll manage to step it out in style taking death in his stride the same way he took life.

I pray for all of these things for him, but mostly I pray that all the prayers he ever prayed will be answered now and that he’ll face a welcoming God with wit and will enough to accept and understand him, and with the good grace too to finally set him free, to let him play among the trees and fields and streams he always loved, young again and able again with a whole new world stretching out in front of him….

Holiday Pals

They’re talking in whispers. Two weeks every summer, Patsy and Josie and Johnny and Jimmy, nowhere like the Derrynane Hotel the last fortnight in June, the best time of the year, the evenings at their longest, the young sun in full flight.

They’d sit here on the bench overlooking the bay talking in whispers when time allowed in between breakfast and lunch and dinner, in between golf games and hill walks and gardening demos. They talked about life, the universe and everything down through the years, the lot of them, topics like the weather and the government and the state of the country, topics like their children and their children’s children, their parents sometimes too if the mood took them, topics like rheumatic pain and blood pressure tablets and hospital waiting lists and how nice the black doctors were turning out to be, topics like this year’s All Ireland and last years and how odd it was that farmers did no manual labour anymore.

They kept themselves going with the talking, the likes of Patsy and Josie and Johnny and Jimmy, the chit chat making the holiday for them, so that months later a dark November evening maybe, Josie would remind Jimmy that poor old Patsy was going in for stomach scans before Christmas, and months later again, a breezy March morning maybe, Johnny would follow Patsy’s coffin up the ailse, heartened by all the friends and neighbours who had turned up to bury her, including the couple from the hotel in Derrynane he spotted waiting down the candle lit queue to sympathise with him.

‘See you in June please God Johnny, though Derrynane won’t be the same without herself there’, on and on they went, talking in whispers even yet….