Chapter 15: The Passing

Now, sit comfortably elders and children alike, because I am describing for you what I am seeing through my eyes and you’ll be able to hear your parents, grandparents and me through my ears. Remember, I don’t want any interruptions in my head, please ... especially you Katie, my dear, I know you have a big role to play and you’re nervous but Pappa Richard loves you and so do we all and know you’ll do grand.

For some of you I, Caoimhe Connolly nee Kloss, am your Grammie or Great-Grammie but I was elected by chance and circumstance to record your Great-great-Pappa Richard. There simply isn’t room for you all to be there. I know he has been around to see you all in recent months up to a few weeks ago and to say, to each and every one of his loved ones, his own goodbyes.

This is not a sad time, though, just because we may never be able to see him in our homes again, he sincerely believes that he will be alive and well and that we can still visit him in the Otherworld, or on those glorious moonlit nights when he visits us in the Faerie Ring.

Now I am standing in my parents’ ground floor parlour in front of the freshly lit fire in the fireplace, while my dear husband Pat Connolly dozes in the comfy armchair next to me. Once upon a time it would’ve been a smokey peat fire, that was outlawed a long time ago as you know, but this ancient cottage holds a licence to burn kiln-dried wood.

I’m staring at the collection of small photographs in an assortment of tiny wood or metal frames, so tightly packed on the mantelpiece that they all overlap, crowding underneath the mirror hanging over the fireplace.

I notice a familiar photo of my middle child, Fiadh, when she was 10, and I pick it up. She was beautiful then and she’s beautiful now, though she’s a grandmother herself three times over. And she’s out there with you all, looking through my eyes.

I catch a glimpse of movement in the mirror above the mantlepiece, which arrests my attention, so I carefully replace the precious photo, fearful of starting a disastrous domino effect along the mantlepiece.

No, it’s not Pat that’s moving, he’s still gently snoring away in the armchair, competing so he is with the crackling of the fire, both sounds somehow comforting for the occasion.

No, my thoughts are interrupted by two soft hands caressing my shoulders. I glance back up at the mirror to see a vision of loveliness, a woman barely a grown adult woman in appearance, so you would think she was younger than 20, her hair a vibrant red in contrast to my iron grey locks highlighted by silver strands. She smiles and speaks softly into my ear, the one she knows has the discreet hearing aid.

“It’s time, Caoimhe, my dear, come,” her voice as sweet as pouring honey, her smile warm, not with sorrow, but with a joyful expression of expectation.

I smile back in return. “Just give me a moment to gather my thoughts, Mum, to wake Pat first and tell him where I’ve gone and then I’ll be down presently.”

She squeezes my shoulders once more, plants a soft kiss with her plump lips on my wrinkled cheek and breathes, “There’s time, child, your Da says he’s surrendering, not being taken, so he will wait for you until you’re ready.”

“I will be down in just a minute.”

With a nod she turns and glides away across the parlour and through into the hallway. She moves athletically, like a cat, but then she has been a runner all her long life and still runs at least an hour every day along the footpaths and roads around this ancient cottage in Slievenamon Road, Thurles, County Tipperary in all the years that I’ve known her, count them if you will, for 69 years. But that time of togetherness is drawing to a close for both of us.

Mum?! Some of you hearing this in the distant future who do not know our story so well may well ask yourself how can that possibly be right? ‘Surely this vision of lovely teenager only now blossoming into womanhood, cannot possibly be your mother? You must be delusional,’ you might well say to my face if not in my head.

And you’d be right to question how that is possible, after all, she’s actually not my birth mother, but my step-mother. However, as I never personally met my birth mother (she died just moments after I was born) so Etain has always been my “Mum” ever since I was about 10 years old.

Yes, my Mum’s a witch like all the females in our family but she’s also immortal and will never age. She says she’s about 1700 or 1800 years old, but a true gent like my father knows that you should never ask a lady her true age, only mark well her birthday so you never forget the day, ever, and quietly, conveniently, forget the toting up of the years.

Etain says she genuinely doesn’t know the year she was born because Ireland was still pagan in those days and they counted the years not from the birth of Christ but in the number of full sets of the four seasons that the current king of all Ireland was on the throne and, as that king was the person whose curse made her life a long one of disappointment until she met her soulmate in the shape of my Dad, Richard Kloss, that long dead old king is rarely given any credence at all.

I know, I know, my Dad’s name doesn’t sound Irish enough to have lived most of his life in the country I proudly call my own. He was actually born in America and he still has nephews, nieces and second cousins living over there that he keeps in contact with, even at a distance. When my US grandparents were still alive I used to visit them at least once every summer. They made interesting vacations especially as every other year (almost) we had to take new siblings of mine along to introduce to their Grammie and Pappy.

Etain popped out nine half-siblings, for me to remember all the birthdays and Christmases for, in all and says she could’ve kept going for eternity but Dad called a halt after nine saying that even extending the washing line across both cottages (now rejoined into one), they’d already run out of diaper space. And I do adore all my siblings and, like me, they were born mortal and are not immortal ... well, not yet. My half-siblings cannot hear me as all you can, but then they will all be present at the bedside awaiting my arrival. Dad will not start his passing until I’m there, he assures me.

After Etain departs I wake Pat up with a gentle shake of his shoulder.

“Wake up, Honey, it’s time, I have to go.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he white-lies with his sweet slow smile of his that I love so dearly, “only resting my eyes so I was.”

“Huh, and there I was thinking I was trapped in a busy sawmill with runaway machinery and no means of escape, I had to turn my hearing aid off cos you were wearing out my battery so you were.”

“Get away with ya, and tell your Dad it’s a fond fair play from us, will ya?”

“Aye, I will, you just sit on your hole, Hon, I’ve got this covered.”

The cottage has a basement under about half the area covered by the upstairs building; it’s basically underneath most of the original 18th century cottage, the part of the whole building that’s closest to the road, the cottage extensions into what Dad still refers to as the ‘backyard’ is all 21st century with nothing under the new foundations but good solid Irish soil.

The basement was built as a cellar for storage, with low ceilings, so I have to stoop to avoid banging my head on the beams holding up the cottage floor. The space is divided into storage rooms with racks and shelves for jars of sweet or pickled preserves and storing fruit and winter veg until required. At the southern end of the cellar is a door that looks more like a cupboard door, but it is no ordinary door at all.

Any stranger snooping down here would find it locked but no keyhole can be seen. If a stranger smashed down the door all they would find behind it would be a brick wall with solid undisturbed Irish soil behind it.

The doorway is actually a portal to a room in the mythical Otherworld, the Tir na nÓg where the old rulers of the Emerald Isle departed in exile to under an ancient Treaty which long ago banished an entire people and brought peace to these precious shores, at least for a while.

I open the door with a touch, which swings open inwards freely under my hand; I have permission from the Tuatha Dé Danann to enter but I am not permitted to stay in the Otherworld long enough to sleep, eat or drink, otherwise I would not be permitted to return to my home other than for short visits to our Faerie Ring. The Treaty is quite precise and The Council ensures that it is enforced.

The room I enter through the door is a cosy traditional Irish parlour, with heavy curtains by the windows, all dark timber furniture, flooring and exposed beams above and where I can now easily stand up straight. Beyond this parlour room is a bedroom that Crédne, Etain’s father and my grandfather by marriage, opened up a few months ago for my father to sleep in, once he was ready to commit himself fully to the Otherworld instead of an occasional visitor.

Yes, my father is now a permanent resident of the Otherworld, in these two rooms, a sort-of halfway house between two very similar yet vastly different worlds.

I step through into my father’s bedroom and look around. My father, of course, is there, cheerfully sitting up in his double bed, returning my smile in greeting.

I glance around the bedroom, seeing first the three witches that approach me first with their warm embraces.

They are, in turn, my Aunt Bebhinn who is a beautiful brunette who you’d guess might be in her mid- to late-thirties; behind her my Aunt Kaetlynn, a red-haired, green-eyed woman of around 40 who is so beautiful that she could hold any man in thrall; and finally my step-mother Etain, who tucks my arm into hers.

Etain is in charge of today’s proceedings, the wife of the man, my father who is about to pass away, and she is the mother to the man’s other daughters who stand around the bedside, all wreathed in smiles.

And, on the other side of the bed are my three daughters and their daughters, here to say farewell to the head of the family who we will never see in our world again but hope we will still be able to visit here for many years to come.

It is the least likely example of the passing of the head of a family that it is even possible to imagine.

As Etain pulls me round with her arm, I see all my half-siblings, all of them in their late fifties or sixties now, then my other beautiful aunts, all bar one of whom are older sisters of Etain and, towering above them all, both in stature and in the power that he holds over us all, is Etain’s father Crédne, who is therefore my grandfather by marriage while also my uncle if you can grasp that my father is also Crédne’s brother.

Yes, my children and my forebears listening in to my otherwise silent commentary, we are a complicated family! And tonight it will be complicated even further.

Of course, my aunts all give me a squeeze in welcome, we’ve known each other ever since I was a little girl of 10 and they discovered that I was a witch a lot like them, descended from a long line of witches that I was only aware of gradually from about that age, but more about that later.

I am also squeezed in a hug by Crédne my father-in-law. He is something else.

Just being in his arms you can feel the power eminating from him, not surprising really as being this close to him is like being a skin’s thickness from the power of a billion suns. No wonder people in the distant past in our island thought of him as a god.

My opinion is a little tarnished though by what I know of him. As for you, my children and grandchildren here and now, you know what is going on and a glance at you is all I need to know that we are all here as one.

Crédne is the reason why we are here. He is also the reason why Irish witches differ from my aunts. He is not of this world, or even of the Otherworld. He is actually a ball of pure fire that lives inside a huge sun, a star if you like, in a galaxy far from here. He is able to project his personality into the perfect shell of a man that he built for himself in a copy of the men he found here when he arrived. And over the passage of the hundreds of thousands of years he has been here, he replenishes the cells of his body from the very air around us, so he never ages. His power and energy comes from the star in which he lives. Thus he cannot die by ageing, to all intents and purposes he is immortal.

In Ireland’s turbulent distant past, Crédne and his brothers (who also were from stars scattered across the universe) were involved in battles and their bodies could be cut and damaged, but they could be repaired given time. However, too much damage and the portal link between the body and mind might break and they would physically be gone forever, locked into their distant stars. Heavily outnumbered and losing too many brothers, the High Council of the Tuatha Dé Danann signed a Treaty with the invaders to leave these shores forever and they departed to the Otherworld, a similar world to ours, but for them it was just a portal doorway away.

However, one of the Tuath Dé missed this world and would revisit, defying the Treaty, cause a little mischief and the Elders of the High Council of Tuatha Dé Danann clamped down on the serious offenders, the worst of them being my father, know known as Richard Kloss, but in the distant past went by the name of Aengus.

You’ve all heard the story of the god-like Aengus and the witch Trixopheron, we’ve discussed it long and hard for half a century and now we have come to face the day that has been foretold but its outcome unknown.

“Caoimhe,” my father says softly, patting the side of his bed where he is propped up on pillows. “Come sit by me. We must have a talk.”

He looks up around the room. “Could you leave me with my eldest daughter for five minutes or so?”

And, our family starts to shuffle away, including Crédne, who squeezes my shoulder in passing, to move back into the parlour. Both the bedroom and parlour are in Tir na nÓg, the old cellar beyond is in Ireland, my home.

As they file past I notice the windows to the outside show a sunny day in the Otherworld, where it is always sunny, while in my world it was a dark early winter evening. I have been in this bedroom once before, and like tonight, it was so crowded that I couldn’t see through the windows until now. When the door closes behind Etain, the very last to leave, I train my eyes onto my father, who smiles at me.

“Tonight is the night, Caoimhe,” he smiles, “I have lived in this mortal body overlong. I’m tired and Etain tells me that at the grand old age of 108, I’m the fifth oldest person in Ireland and the second oldest Irish male, if I hang on here any longer then my continued existence and even my eventual demise might be newsworthy on your side of the portal and I want to avoid all that publicity.”

“Aye, Dad, I can understand that. Do you feel ready to go?”

“Yes. I know what I have to look forward to now, all my long memories have returned to me while here in the Otherworld, where the witch’s curse can’t reach me but I was hoping to have a final plea for my eldest daughter to join me here. So, please move here, Caoimhe?”

“Sorry Dad, no can do.”

“I can include Pat. I’m not yet completely conversant with the High Council Elders here, I won’t be until I shrug off this mortal body, but Crédne has pleaded for my family on my behalf and tells me he was successful. You are family, Caoimhe and you and your children are the only ones of my nearest family who are holding out.”

“Are all my siblings abandoning me and moving to the Otherworld, then?” I ask, already assuming they probably would. “Although I am not genetically linked with them—”

“—other than through me, of course!”

“Of course, but are all my siblings and their offspring joining you in committing to the Otherworld tonight?”

“No, only Etain, who is already immortal, is joining me and her sisters here in the Otherworld. We have discussed it individually and in family groups with our children and they all agree that they want to live most of their lives in your world and come move here when they feel the time appropriate to them. I guess people can’t just disappear without concerning the authorities.”

“And you say this has already been sanctioned with the High Council, through your brother Crédne?”