Meantime

There are deep-seated expectations around death. The dying person never alone. Family and close friends attending. Physical contact, a hand held, a body embraced a last time. Death formally marked with a gathering. Some sort of return to mother earth, burial or ashes.

Majella Cullinane’s poignant, image-rich third collection, Meantime, explores maternal loss, grief, and dislocation amid a world in disruption due to Covid, when expectations and rites of passage we take for granted were forsaken.

A mother in Ireland has dementia, grows frail and incoherent. Her daughter is on the other side of the world, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Communicating by phone becomes hopeless; yet her daughter can’t travel there amid Covid restrictions.

There is a double dislocation, with the daughter in a far-off country and the mother’s dementia rendering her increasingly absent and unreachable, which Cullinane describes as:

the long goodbye – this disease that each day

snatches parts of you and scatters them about,

until you can’t find them,

until you don’t remember losing them.

(“The long goodbye”)

The title, Meantime, captures this in-between time, in which Cullinane grieves for a person who is alive, but disappearing.

This creates a state of suspension, made more difficult by the alienation of trying to communicate without being there in person.

I press the receiver to my ear and listen

to my heart’s hollow pulse. Nothing to distil

the distance between you and me.

(“The number you have dialled”)

Another poet who writes of the geographical and emotional distancing of a loved one with dementia is Liz Breslin.

… home, is the wallpaper

    to the halting, screened

conversation that peters, pixelstutters, you call out

my name but you’re gone and the white screen asks

how do you rate the quality of your call?

(“Skype”)

They are quite different poets – Cullinane, with her lilting cadence; Breslin, anger spiced with alliterative playfulness – but both bear important witness to the peculiar frustration of death viewed at a distance.

A funeral conducted over zoom in another country goes against the natural order of being there in person. Cullinane is a disembodied watcher as if she, too, is no longer earth-bound. This disembodiment robs the ceremony of its rite of passage. Grievers cannot move forward.

I have no image of you being lowered into the ground.

(“Virtual funeral”)

In this curious zoom Meantime of being/not being, it is difficult to believe anyone is really dead – or even, really alive. Those who remain enter a new half-life, that of grief, and disbelief in that grief, once they log off.

We, who would place our fingers into the wound,

feel the space      of all that is lost to us

and still not believe.

(“All that is lost to us”)

And how can you accept the loss, if you have not seen it for yourself? It’s as if the bereaved are the undead, dragged through the zoom screen into the contemporary equivalent of the Styx.

Roles reversed: I am Persephone

searching for Demeter.

(“Lost”)

Yet, amid the profound subject matter, Cullinane lightens the sadness by interweaving images and voices that are inventive and beautiful. Sometimes the ‘I’ persona is the mother speaking, and she comes alive in a frenetic Not I monologue:

Migrants are camping in the garden. The police are here again.

The other night a baby was born. I held him in my arms.

(“This is not my room”)

Continuing the conversation from Cullinane’s stunning second book, Whisper of a Crow’s Wing, there are plenty of birds, things with feathers and other creatures acting as messengers between the earthly and spiritual worlds. ‘I’ll bring you the thrill / of blackbird song’ (“When I get back”).

And this colour-burnished image of a fox:

Last night I dreamed of a fox,

its coppery face,

its honey topaz eyes.

(“Ghosts”)

This fluidity is set up by the collection’s title, Meantime, which has an ambiguity to it. Not just a period between two events – here, life and death – it can also be an adverbial substitute for ‘while’; or convey a sense of an average or mean – such as Greenwich Mean Time, which alludes to the different time zones of mother and child. There’s also another sense, from Germanic roots, as a mean time, a time of harshness, and Cullinane captures the pain of her loss. ‘My tongue burns. / If I were to walk through autumn’s cool air / I would find no relief.’ (“Meantime”).

Underpinning this is longing for another ritual denied by Covid, that of a farewell holding of the mother who once cradled you. It is universal. Kiri Piahana-Wong writes:

My sons and the husbands of

my daughters came and gathered

up my body and carried me down,

one last time across the long black

stretch of bay.

I was laid to rest in the ground, in

te urupā.

(“Hinerangi”)

This need for the consolation of contact is also powerfully expressed by Selina Tusitala Marsh: 

The girl rises and takes her mother’s shuddering

body to hers

she cradles her

they rise and fall

like the ocean off the coast of Savai‘i

emerald green

deep and fishless.

(“Blackbird”)

Cullinane’s narrator desperately lacks the physicality of this closure. Finally visiting Ireland, she goes into her mother’s room – ‘it still smells of you’ – and puts on ‘your pastel pink pyjamas. DREAMING OF THE WEEKEND / is splayed across the front’ (“In your room”).

She notes that they are ill-fitting, ‘not my sort’. Yet clothes are a thread of connection, and an acceptance of loss, or an accommodation to it, emerges. The narrator looks to the future, to life back ‘home’ in New Zealand:

I take one of your favourite coats, purple with four

large buttons

and a wide collar …

I’ll take you to places you’ve never been.

No-one need know I’m carrying my mother on my back.

(“Carried away”)

The narrator reinvents the ritual of carrying her mother’s body for a new time, after Meantime. Each carries the other through the texture of a garment interwoven with love and memory, an act in which the grieving person moves from stasis to re-enter the world. Cullinane adds another dimension to this through her poetry collection – as well as an artistic homage, the book is a physical entity in its own right. At one point the narrator asks her mother, ‘Still, you’d have me write a few words about you – /something to say you were here?’ (“Something to say”)

Together, poet and reader hold her mother in their hands. She was here, and is here.