It’s Wednesday January 3rd, 2024, and coming up to 8.30 p.m. I’m telly-bound down-stairs, having prayed enough for now in my bedroom.
Across the top of my bannister hangs the slinky top a pal has given me earlier, as part of her post-Christmas gift-recycling. Its final resting place is as yet undecided by me. After alI, I may want to exchange it myself on LETS. I probably already have enough tops as I am.
I step onto the first step of fourteen. And, as often happens, I stumble. Unfazed I grab the bannister, which has often before righted me just fine in such circumstances. But grabbing it this time, I grab too the draped sleeve of the slinky top, and, forthwith, lose all purchase on normality. A half-second is enough to assure me that This Time, I am actually taking flight. Sure enough it’s bump upon bump upon wallop upon bang. And then, where the final two steps of the stairs do their ninety-degree turn, all eleven-odd stone of me crashes into the wall, and I know immediately that my back has registered this encounter for the long-term. Momentum bounces me inelegantly onto the mat at the foot of the stairs, and I land, bottom up, and cheek-to-cheek with the floor.
My conscious mind takes a side-step now to the left. I see myself standing at the open door of an imposing, tall-ceilinged room – Edwardian in style – with a long mahogany dining table in the middle, surrounded by solid straight-backed chairs. Three or four deep-seated armchairs are in various corners, a grand piano in the far left, and a solemn china-cabinet backs onto the wall to the right. The room exudes an air of stillness, of being unlived in. It is waiting for someone to add life and colour, but on its own terms.
This awareness lasts less than ten seconds, and then evaporates. I know straight away that I want it back. I try to keep focussed – seeking beginner’s mind. But in vain! My every-day, this-moment mind now addresses me, “Máire, the following reality also deserves your attention. You have just fallen down the stairs, from top to bottom. You are now dumped on the floor, tóin le gaoth (i.e. behind to the wind.) You have walloped your back sufficiently to angle your spine. You are gasping and panting. You are now a new you, and you need to rise.“
I am in no hurry actually – but I know that the voice speaks true. I have been turned head over heels. I need to get back onto my feet, via bum and shoulder and elbow, via turning and pushing and pulling, via breathing and gasping and panting. And that is what I do! I end up in a sitting position on a sturdy chair. And, having panted some more, I reach into my bra to retrieve my phone. I know that, with it, I cannot be alone.
But, more important still, I know also what the spacious, ancient, unlived-in room has taught me: I am now an old woman. I will have to learn to live in an old-woman’s space. I will have to find new ways of being Máire, ways that will find a home among strong, sedate unfamiliar furnishings, in a place bereft of lightness, and colour, and possibilities. I am being invited to imagine myself a player of different music, where there is neither audience nor applause, and me needing to learn to be dweller in a new, unfamiliar home.
Here, gasping more gently, in the quiet of a January night, I say, “Yes.” It is the only positive choice to be made.
And, now, as I type up the memory, it is late February. I have learned, by x-ray and by pain, that I fractured bone T12 of my spine that day of the Fall. As I edge ever-closer to my seventy-fifth birthday, I am trying to open myself each day to what my “Yes” might involve. It’s a daily, unsought, unpredictable adventure in its own right, and a slow-motion lesson in growing old gracefully. It involves naming and claiming my now moment, and being at peace there. It involves living single-storeyed, slow-rooted and steady, as I pray into new and challenging spaces down-stairs, where the telly no longer lures me as before, and my main company is my still-becoming self.
Máire O’Donohoe OSU
