Michael Harding: I found comfort at a funeral after the isolation of winter

That’s one of the lovely things about rural Ireland: people know each other like old trees

I was filling up with diesel at a petrol station outside Castlebar when a young woman appeared in front of me and asked me if I was going to the funeral. I said I was.

Such is the simplicity of life in the country. An old woman had died in Co Mayo two days earlier. The young woman knew I had been a friend of the old lady. She saw me at a filling station on the day of the funeral and she put two and two together.

“Can I have a lift?” she asked. “I’m just off the bus.”

“I’m going to have breakfast first.”

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“Great,” she said, smiling from beneath her fringe, a backpack hanging off her elbow with the optimism young people have that they will be included in everything.

I offered to buy her breakfast.

“Ah yeah, sure why not?” she said.

“So you knew the old lady?” I asked.

“Her grandson is in my class,” she said.

Then she went to the bathroom. When she came back, she looked horrified.

“It’s unisex in there,” she whispered.

I didn’t really need further information.

“The place is awash with piss,” she continued.

I tried to concentrate on my puddings.

But she was determined to give me the full picture. “It’s as wet as a tropical rainforest,” she said. “But I only found out when I sat down.” And then she laughed and did a little bounce on her chair to indicate that she was still uncomfortable. I grimaced.

“Cheer up,” she said. “It’s not your funeral.”

Going in to the church, she asked if she could she have a lift back to Castlebar when it was over.

“Of course.”

Hardships and car parks

The priest said the deceased woman was a hard worker, a mother who never complained about the hardships of her life as she reared her children alone after her husband died.

“He talks shite,” the girl beside me whispered in my ear. “There used to be oak trees around the church, but when he came he cut them down to build a car park. And now they don’t even need the car park because so few people go to Mass.”

After the service, people stood around the church porch as six young men hefted the coffin out the door and into the hearse. People smoked furiously, shook hands with each other and crowded around the family.

I was keeping track of the young woman, inflated as I was with the prospect of her company again on the way back to Castlebar. She had vanished into the crowd around the hearse for a while, but then I saw her walk towards me, wrestling with her backpack in a fierce wind.

“Are you going to the cemetery?” she wondered.

“Yes,” I said, “but I won’t leave without you.”

She looked surprised. I reminded her that I had promised to give her a lift back to the bus.

“Ah no,” she said, laughing. “That’s okay. I’m getting a lift to Galway with Gabriel.”

I didn’t know who Gabriel was. I didn’t know who she was, either, apart from the fact that I knew her mother in college. But that’s one of the lovely things about rural Ireland: people know each other like old trees. And meeting her was comforting because, to be honest, the isolation of winter had got the better of me the previous week, when the beloved went back to Poland and there was no one to talk to except the feral cat.

The black silky tom had appeared in October, crying at the end of the garden in the sleet. Eventually he settled into a basket by the stove, which I was delighted about, except that I realised too late that a female neighbour had been feeding him and missed his company since he moved in with me. But I suppose that’s how it is in the country. Sometimes we even have to share the cats.

The cat was my companion through the winter, and even when I planted daffodils in December he played with the spade as I dug.

Now the long shoots of green are emerging beneath the trees, and once again I am amazed at the resilience of things after a dark winter and how the world renews itself.

Even in the car park, where the young student had abandoned me for a lanky boy with a 96 Toyota Starlet, I noticed the dead stump of an old oak sticking up through the tarmac, with tiny little shoots on the trunk that soon will be green and shimmering in the wind.