“Driving out of Tullamore with Mam’s stuff for the last time was strange. My parents were gone, and the family chain was broken. I had always associated the word ‘home’ with Tullamore, but when your parents go, everything changes.

We moved to Tullamore in the ’70s when I was five months old. Dad got a new job as a salesman with Coens, so we rented for a while in Spollenstown and then built in Charleville View, where the family lived for over 30 years. The Murrays were next door, and we had already moved in when they were building their house. I couldn’t pronounce my ‘r’s, and Mam told me years later that now and then, I’d say, “I’m just going in to see Jewy Mawee (Gerry Murray)”. And I’d toddle over next door when he’d be there doing jobs around the house. I used to visit Denis Bergin across the road too, and he’d give me plants every year to plant in the garden. It was a lovely place to grow up.

I still laugh when I think of my husband Paul coming to Tullamore and walking into the ‘Brewery Tap’ for the first time. Everyone behind the bar called him by his name even though he had never met them. Being a Dub through and through, he couldn’t get his head around it. It was the small-town thing compared to Dublin; they knew me, so they made him welcome and made it their business to call him by his name.

Mam was the youngest of eight – seven girls and a boy from Kildare. It’s hard to believe that they’re all gone now. I have some great black-and-white photographs of the seven Brennan girls and their brother, and I still have boxes of things I have yet to go through. A few months after Mam’s funeral, I found her autograph book from when she was a young girl. Her father died when she was 11, and he had written in it, “may your life be long and sunny, and your husband fat and funny”. The weird thing was that Dad was precisely that! He was a real messer and a bit on the chubby side! Mam kept all of her old diaries, and about two months after she died, I immersed myself in those and read stories from her younger days, like when she dated a famous Irish singer (who is still gigging!) and about the time she got engaged to Dad. Eventually, though, it got to the point that I couldn’t even look at any of her things because it was too raw, but I know I’ll go back to them when I’m ready.

I had never heard the story of how my parents met until the day the ambulance came to take Mam to the Mater Hospital. The driver was fantastic. He started talking, joking and slagging Mam, and she told him where she met my Dad for the first time in 1966, at a bus stop in Newbridge. From then on, they were together until my Dad passed away in 2010.

2020 was the most challenging year. Mam went into hospital in November after she fell and broke her hip. Before that, she was the happiest she had been in a long time, living in ‘Tihilly’, an elderly housing initiative in Tullamore. She had care needs but lovely carers and a personal assistant called Brenda, who was so good to her. After her fall, everything changed. She would never be able to return home, so she came to stay in Clontarf Hospital Dublin, where I was working. She got pneumonia within three days of arriving and was admitted to the Mater Hospital during Christmas week. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions, I didn’t see her again until the day before she died, February 18th 2021.

What helped me at the time was my work as a dietician and looking after patients in a similar situation to Mam. I found myself going to the shop to buy things for people whose families couldn’t come to see them. Being in that sort of environment and in a position to help others made me feel better. I was incredibly grateful to see Mam before she died because many people didn’t get that opportunity and had to say goodbye through Facetime or over the phone. We were fortunate because one of only two end-of-life suites became available in her final days. I saw Mam through a locked glass door from the next room. Every so often, I would put on the full PPE and go into her room to be with her, but because she had Covid, I couldn’t stay any more than 15 minutes, or I’d be classified as a ‘close contact’, so I’d leave, and after a while gown up and go back in again.

Mam passed away on February 19th 2021, and only ten people were allowed at the funeral. My brother Shane couldn’t come home from America, which was very hard for him. Around the funeral, I discovered the website RIP.ie and all the condolence messages for the first time. I hadn’t realised that people could leave messages on the website. The neighbours on the road who had lived beside Mam and Dad for years wrote some lovely notes.

The funeral was hard. Leaving the crematorium was strange because we couldn’t even go for coffee afterwards. There were some positives, though. One was that Mam would have hated having a wake where everyone would see her not looking her best! She loved looking well and her style. On a more serious note, I had some nice conversations on the phone with people who meant a lot to us. If we had everyone in the church, I probably wouldn’t have had a chance to have those chats. People from Kildare stood on the flyover on our way up to the crematorium. A friend of my brother Ronan let off white balloons as the hearse passed, which was lovely. I was on Facetime with my brother Shane in America, so he got to feel like he was with us somehow. 

 I went back to Galway this summer to visit Dad’s relatives. I could feel his and Mam’s presence because it’s where we used to go on holidays.

Paul and I moved to Killester in Dublin in 2005, and there is a strong community spirit here. We were there two weeks when someone knocked on the door to say that the women on the road were going for a night out if I wanted to come. Killester is home for me now, but I’ll never forget where I grew up”.

Kara Cullen (nee Mannion) is originally from Tullamore but now lives in Dublin.