Cupboard Jesuses

I spent last weekend in my granda’s house, with my whole extended family, getting it ready to go up for sale.

He’s downsizing from a house to a flat because he lives alone and, as he keeps reminding us, he’ll ‘not be going anywhere anytime soon.’ I believe him—the man is so deep in his wellness era he might be the wellest person to have ever welled. His YouTube history is full of videos titled How To Live To 100. His fridge looks like it could belong to a 16 year old boy who’s just discovered the concept of protein. He starts his mornings by ‘freezing the fear’, i.e. sticking his head under the cold tap. Wim Hof has much to answer for.

I don’t think I've been in the house since the morning of my granny’s funeral a few years ago. That’s because he prefers to visit other people’s houses, not because I am a big bad grandparent neglector. But it meant I got to look at the house with fairly fresh eyes.

The first task on the snag list was to de-catholicise the house: hide any religious paraphernalia out of sight before the estate agent comes to take pictures. Standard stuff like Palm Sunday crosses (approx 15 years’ worth, sticking out from behind picture frames); rosary beads (4 sets, identical, in a row on the mantlepiece); holy water (6 bottles, varying levels of fullness, most rooms including the bathroom (didn’t ask/don’t want to know)).

We began to think this may be a bigger job than anticipated when we looked in the kitchen cupboard housing my granny’s crystal collection and found, amongst the glasses and vases and Cinderella’s glass slipper, Plastic Jesus On A Spring.

To be fair, some of the religious stuff is lovely. Some nice pictures, a prayer, a beautiful ceramic Our Lady. But, giving the aforementioned wobbly Jesus a run for his money in the tacky stakes, we also found a Pope Francis bobble head and what my granda thought was a Jesus fridge magnet, but was, upon proper inspection, an ‘Emirati man.’ (He’s on the waiting list for cataract removal.) (My granda that is, not the Emirati man.)

The son of god famously never left the house without his RayBans.

There was also a framed picture of Jesus on his bedroom wall and, wedged in the corner of the frame, my granny’s passport picture. When people said ‘she’s with Jesus now’ I didn’t know they meant it so literally.

I just typed ‘Despite how this all makes him seem, he’s actually very normal.’ Then I remembered that for their first date he took my granny to confession and suddenly I’m less committed to that statement.

Once the house was looking nice and secular, it was time to scrub it from top to bottom. Someone suggested we perhaps didn’t need to give every inch of the place a special clean as it was already pretty spotless to begin with. To which my aunt retorted, ‘If my mother hears you talking like that, you’ll be getting haunted tonight.’ There were no further protestations.

Whilst on ‘all inside glass’ duty, I came across this drawing. That’s me with both grandparents. You wouldn’t know, but that’s exactly what we all looked like. What a gifted little artiste.

Don’t worry, I caught that palm as I was taking the picture and removed it straight after.

I’m the oldest grandchild on that side so I got my grandparents to myself for three whole years before The Chaos arrived. Then I lived with my them (and my parents) for a while when I was in primary school, which was probably a bit too-many-adults-in-small-house for them, but was great for me. The house continued to be everyone’s favourite place for Christmas dinners, Sunday dinners, after school dinners… any dinner that was going, really.

An undisputed highlight of every year was the day that all the grandchildren would go round to put up the Christmas decorations and stay overnight. They had the best accumulation of decorations—baubles and advent calendars they’d had since my mum was wee along with modern sparkly ones from garden centres and Disney stores, all mixed in with the paper chains my granny and I made back when I was the only wean on the scene.

Just when the house was looking lovely and twinkly and festive and we were all feeling full of the joys of the season, my granny would turn off all the lights, make us all lie on the floor in the dark and listen to The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot. Which was, and I can’t stress this enough, a real fucking downer. To this day, I can’t hear the line ‘I'm so sorry for that laddie/He hasn't got a daddy’ without tearing up.

I was shining the inside glass of the conservatory windows and thinking about how my granny spent the entire last months of her life in this room, first because of lockdown, then because of late stage illness.

I socially distanced visited at the first opportunity. It was a lovely spring day and I brought a deck chair to sit in the garden while my grandparents sat by the conservatory door, inexplicably dressed in furry bucket hats, surrounded by plants, and playing relaxing atmospheric spa sounds through a speaker. My granda’s wellness era is not a recent development.

Over the months that followed, we would all gather at the same door while my granny lay in a hospital bed in the conservatory.

My granny was an absolute legend, btw (so’s my granda but I’m not going to tempt fate by eulogising him while he’s still kicking about). She was incredibly smart and quick witted and freakishly good at mental maths and just the loveliest, kindest, most caring person in the world to her immediate family.

She had jet black hair and thick black eyeliner and thin black eyebrows, and a penchant for high heels and Irish rebel songs. And she loved a good funeral. So the pressure was on to make hers a good one even though none of us were allowed to do the readings or the bidding prayers or the offertory (lockdown). The only way we could contribute was by making sure she had a banger of a eulogy. All her daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren contributed to the content, my mum and her sisters made it into a good draft, and I dramaturged the shit out of it. By the end, we were satisfied. It was indeed a banger. Then, when the time came, the priest stood in front of us all, took out the piece of paper we had given him, and performed what I can only describe as Granny’s Eulogy: The Remix.

either ironically or completely not ironically, that was extremely poor behaviour from a man with a real god complex. but that’s defo outwith the scope of this story.

She died at a time when you were only allowed 20 people at a funeral. We all gathered in their house in the morning, passing around black face masks and disposable gloves for carrying the coffin, before leaving household by household as the funeral cars arrived.

We opened the front door to discover that, whilst we had been inside, people had lined the street outside the house, and, as the car drove to the chapel (1.6 miles btw, I just looked it up on google maps), the line never stopped. There were people—relatives, friends, neighbours, family friends, carers, people I’d never even heard of—the whole way from the house to the church, clapping as the funeral cars passed.

And even though only 20 people were allowed inside, the car park was full of people sitting in their cars, live-streaming the funeral on their phones.

Every time I let myself remember that car journey, I’m overwhelmed with emotion and gratitude and amazement all over again. Imagine, without even planning it, 1.6 miles of people felt compelled to come out into the streets when they couldn’t even come to the funeral (or get a steak pie afterwards). It’s not often you can take an imperial measurement of exactly how much love someone leaves behind them. On a day that was not ideal in so many ways, that felt like the most perfect send off. If my granny had been there to see it— honestly, she would’ve been absolutely mortified. And we would have laughed about it for years.

Anyway, how lucky am I to have had the best of the best ❤️

Never done this before, but, if you’re feeling especially generous, you could…

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A wee postscript— I’m writing this at 5pm on Friday of the same week and the house has just been sold lmao real seller’s market up here.