Maggie, a great old lady from my little Donegal village, passed away recently. She was of such an age she resembled an ancestral presence. She will be sorely missed, although lately her verbal ministrations to neighbours were not much in person, as for quite a few years she had appeared bed-ridden. I say, “appeared”, for Maggie told all and sundry she was dying. Her hypochondria was overwhelming.
As officially she claimed to be immobilized, she communicated indirectly with her fellow villagers, and was rarely seen on the street. Instead, she hollered to anyone who would listen- shouting out of her bedroom window. She had a voice as loud and penetrating as a fog horn.
Alternatively, for those she could not shout at from her window, in extremis she communicated by telephone. It was said that she modulated the volume of her telephone voice in direct relation to the perceived distance of the number she had dialled. The local chemist said a colleague in Dublin had once been phoned by her with such a thunderous tirade, his entire shop erupted into laughter.
Other recipients of her phone calls at first suspected it was telecommunications abuse, a crazy ransom demand or someone being kidnapped. As technology increased so too did the reach of Maggie’s dying breath, far from the little townland of Ballybay. Some neighbours too said they had lately got emails from her, and certainly she was enough tech-savvy to get her prescriptions from the net.
In her mind she had been dying for more than half a century. Locals affectionately called her “Maggie down the lane” to differentiate her from the several other Maggies in that hamlet of Donegal. She was so old that she had entered into village folk history and actually there was no-one left in the entire county recalling a time without her adult presence in the life of Donegal.
Allegedly, a phone call from Maggie made to a relative in New York was once humorously reported back in the village. They said it was conducted in such high decibels it woke up half of Manhattan. Word got back to Ballybay that her relatives out there in the United States almost lost their little rented apartment from neighbours complaining about Maggie’s midnight tirade on the telephone. Well, despite all that, Maggie was a much-loved feature of this little one-horse town where if the one horse was not already deceased, it was contemplating it. Understandably, she was never invited to Manhattan. I think the noisy Bronx might have been a better spot for Maggie.
Thus, when Maggie finally left the moral world, her funeral was very well attended although she had no family left to speak of. An army of grocery boys, chemists, postmen, priests and doctors dating back over fifty years made up for her lack of genetic kin. If truth was to be told she reminded me of the hypochondriac wife mentioned by the celebrated playwright John B. Keane who took to her bed for decades and outlived two husbands. Keane suggests that this poor lady had virtually tortured these two fine men to death with her demands for medicines and bedside care night and day.
Now, our Maggie was no mass murderer but indeed her husband Joe had passed away long ago, and likely deserved sainthood for all the care he had taken with Maggie’s long and mysterious illnesses. For more than fifty years doctors had been summoned from all parts of the country to attend to her and offer diagnosis. To all intents and purposes she was bed-ridden and close to her last breath, but no medic was ever able to find any evidence of paraplegia or even of respiratory distress.
One young probationary medic was immediately dismissed when he told her she would likely live another forty years or more. There was not a single chemist’s shop in Donegal that she did not frequent habitually, and had even been known to dispatch neighbours to Dublin in search for cures for her mysterious and persistent ills. Of late it was said she had started to order medicines over the internet.
When the local GP came to pronounce Maggie’s death, he said the entire house was so well equipped with drugs it would have put a hospital pharmacy to shame. Maggie had literally stockpiled a pill for every illness. The policeman in the nearby town asked the undertaker to safely dispose of all Maggie’s medicines, for fear, the portly Garda said, her legacy would be a spate of drug running in Donegal. It was only with the persuasion of a fine bottle of whiskey from her long-suffering publican that the local newspaper was persuaded not to run a story entitled “Mad Maggie’s medicines”.
Maggie had spent a life sincerely believing she was in imminent danger of death. More than a dozen times in recent years the local priest had been called to the house to confer the sacred last rites of Catholic absolution on the dying. Like Lazarus in the bible, she had quickly bounced back from apparent rigor mortis and asked for more whiskey and cough mixture.
But like all good things, even dear Maggie had eventually come to an end. She was called to meet her maker, on a dark January morning in the year 2024, but not before she had taken a last medicinal drought of Jack Daniels and was heard to snore loudly for at least an hour, before dying blissfully in her sleep.
She was by then 96 and had outlived her husband and their one child, a daughter. Despite all her apparent infirmity she had endured so long on this earth she left behind no living relatives or school-friends. Her grave-stone, at her request, said only “Long suffering Maggie” which would likely puzzle the future parish historians when they saw she had lived almost a century and had died of nothing more contagious or haemorrhagic than old age.
– Martin Duffy
Martin Duffy is a student on the MFA in Creative Writing. This piece is inspired by his earliest childhood memories which are a frequent source of stimulus in all of his creative writing, which spans non-fiction and autofiction prose. He has worked extensively with the Irish Folklore Commission and the Sound Archives of National Museums, Northern Ireland. He particularly specializes in succinct vignettes of conflict memoir and the Irish short-story form. Some of his recordings are digitalized as part of the British Library’s “Save our Sounds” Collections.