Julia Kelly’s mother, Delphine, died of an aneurysm while swimming in a rough sea on a trip to the Galápagos Islands in 2012. She was best known as the wife of John Kelly, the Fine Gael politician, who predeceased her by two decades – but her own life was inspiring.
This luminous memoir reminds us of the significance of her early traditional female role behind the scenes, but emphasises the richness of her experience as a widow. After John Kelly’s untimely death when she was 50, their five children mostly grown up, desolate as she was initially, she came “out of your shadowy existence in the kitchen” and blossomed – studying for various degrees, volunteering, sea swimming regularly. She became a great traveller.
For more than 20 years she lived life to the full – an energetic, bright, independent widow. Among its many virtues, this loving memoir illustrates how rewarding the life of an older woman living alone can be.
Still is written in the second person singular, addressed to “you”, Delphine, or Mum. The chapters are headed by extracts from the autopsy report from Ecuador:
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“Abdomen: rounded due to obesity, no alterations.”
“Digestive system: no lesions in the pharynx, folded oesophageal mucosa with normal appearance.”
“Stomach: internal folded mucosa with no lesions, gastric cavity with large amount of air and no food content.”
[ Julia Kelly: ‘My mum died swimming in the Galápagos at 71. it was a strangely beautiful end for her’ ]
These terse anatomical descriptions of the body postmortem provide the narrative with an original and essential scaffolding. The quoted report on the abdomen, for instance, heads a chapter which recounts in colourful detail Delphine’s weight issues, food she liked to eat, or cook.
“Or foods that on seeing them or eating them bring you immediately to mind, the words alone more evocative even than their smells: cottage cheese, Ryvita, hot milk, Blue Band margarine, pink ham, picnic rolls, gooseberry fool and my favourite – ratatouille with mashed potatoes. And shepherd’s pie, goulash, Ballymaloe bread, what we called Sylvanerhof – a dish of steak strips, fried onions and potatoes that we had first tasted at the Sylvanerhof Hotel in northern Italy.
Apart from giving us a forensic insight into the accident that led to Delphine’s death, the device provides a pattern for the book’s motley smorgasbord of images, memories, emotions and snatches of biography, both Delpine’s and the author’s. Moreover, the scientific terminology reflects Julia Kelly’s love of language – possibly inherited from her mother, a Scrabble fanatic. Still is stylishly written in wonderfully elegant English, and dotted with comments on the meaning or etymology of individual words.
“Violaceous means of a violet colour.
“Distal points are those parts situated away from the centre of the body or from the point of attachment. If you were the point of attachment, was I a distal point? Were each of your five children distal points of attachment?”
There are keen observations on how an individual’s register, their idiolect, encapsulates their personality. She quotes Annie Ernaux, that “losing a loved one’s voice is the worst thing about death, but that using their words somehow brings it back in the exact pitch, cadence and tone”.
Delphine’s personality lives on in her characteristic words:
“Your mother’s words – ghastly, stout, beastly – were ones that you inherited and ones that I use now; words that have endured through whole generations.”
On these meticulously written pages, the author’s life story mingles seamlessly with that of her mother, and ends with reflections on the nature of grief and the consolation of writing. Like many grief memoirs, a primary function of the work for the composer is not only to temper grief by giving it words but, perhaps more urgently, to continue the conversation with the beloved dead – and finally to let them go.
Of course there is also the historian’s compulsion to document a life both unique and representative.
“One day, you will be little more than a clickable image on an online family tree – just a name, some dates, perhaps an adjective or two.”
That is the fate of all of us. But, one might hope that since this thoughtful and intelligent book now exists, Delphine will be more than just a name and a date.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer and critic. She is the Laureate for Irish Fiction
