bathed and held

on applying suncream and washing those I love when they are dead

Hello friends,
Before I begin this week’s post, I wanted to share with you news of an online event coming up on July 22. Myself and

Clare Mulvany

will be hosting what we have called
A Vigil for These Times
You are invited to join us for an evening of reflection, art making, music and readings. The event will be an opportunity for you to quietly reflect and to privately explore what your voice might sound like and how you would like to use your gifts in these turbulent times.

We will be joined by writer, mother and grower Kerri ní Dochartaigh who will share a reading and by musician and composer Brian Crosby who will play some nourishing live music. All money raised from tickets will go to MSF’s Gaza relief fund.

For more information, click here and please share.

Ok, let’s begin this week’s post.

Along the hard bone of the clavicle, around and around the shoulder mound, up and down, up and down the perfection of an arm, turning now a little brown.

Left side, right, and then across the flat lands of chest, still the same for both girl and boy, the youngest’s pot belly soon to be gone, the eldest’s chest and shoulders widening, morphing at speed from boy to man.

I hold their faces between my palms, sweeping across freckled noses, soft cheeks, the arc of the cartilage of an ear.

Photo by Francesco on Unsplash

To apply suncream on holiday, to the pale Irish skin of three children, four times a day can be a chore. I have not always been gracious about the fact it is my job in our family to apply it. The children have squirmed and yelped and ran away. I have chased and sweated and warned of no ice cream in the afternoon.

I have also taken for granted access to their chubby folds and damp morning skin. I have explored these landscapes for years now, tended to the crevices and dips, crinkles and smooth places. But children grow and they no longer need me in the same way, do not wish me to be so close. Their skin these days belongs more and more to each of them alone. Doors locked for private showers, bums independently attended to, faces wiped clean by their own hands. I am less and less the caretaker of their flesh.

A number of years ago my eldest son grew unwell while we were travelling in Thailand. A torpor overcame him and his fever raged at 40 degrees. In the local health centre I took him to late at night on the third day of his sickness, a nurse asked that he be undressed down to his underwear. Two more nurses soon arrived with a blue plastic basin filled with cool water and two white flannel clothes neatly folded over the rim. Underneath the bright fluorescent lights of the emergency room two of the nurses began to wash his burning body. Beginning at his forehead and moving gently and methodically down his torso - neck, chest, arms, fingers, belly, legs, feet, toes - they washed him from head to toe. Three times they washed him this way, a silent, gentle ritual in the bright sterile emergency room. It was so intimate and tender, this washing of my son.

Watching this ritual, I had a macabre thought. A thought I in many ways did not wish to have, but one I also considered beautiful and full of love. My thought was this :

If any of my children, or anyone that I love, should die, I would like to wash their corpse before it grows stiff. This would be my final act of love and a way to say goodbye to every part of them. A way to hold space for them while they leave and go wherever we go in death. I would like to pass a warm, or possibly a cool cloth over their skin and to do this either in silence, or as I sang. I would like to do this alone, or possibly, like the nurses with my son, in tandem with someone else who loved the person.

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash

I find the holding and washing and tending to a body a beautiful thing. Recently I went to an appointment for my back, which has been uncomfortable, tight. The practitioner held my feet for some time, she held my head - how beautiful to have your head held! She placed a hand on my spine both bottom and top.

As I sun creamed the bodies of my growing children during the week of our holidays, I thought of all of this; the washing of my son’s hot body, the holding of my own head, the washing of the bodies of those I love once they have passed. Six arms, six legs, six ears, six shoulders. Three sun flecked noses. All these acts are to me ones of devotion, tenderness, love. We are so rarely held in adulthood. We are meant to hold ourselves, or claim that we no longer need holding, that we can do all alone. Perhaps this is why I love these practices so. Maybe I am returning to deeply patterned body memories I have of being a baby. Being rocked, held, my limbs sponged with warm water, my body unconditionally held by my mother and by the water in which I bathed.

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