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Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien

Edna O’Brien, the Irish novelist and short-story writer whose groundbreaking works included The Country Girls trilogy – famously banned in Ireland in the 1960s – died on 27 July 2024. Edna’s career spanned more than seven decades, and her unflinching portrayals of women’s lives inspired generations of writers, as RLF Fellow and Irish Times contributor Martina Evans reflects in her personal essay, ‘Mama Says.’

Edna, who was born on 15th December 1930, was 93 when she died. She leaves two sons, Carlo and Marcus Gébler. A former RLF beneficiary, she was, as The Irish Times obituary states, a “flamboyant, fearless, and outspoken Irish writer.”

In the following extracts, also originally published in The Irish Times and reproduced here by kind permission, Carlo Gébler writes about his mother’s life and her death.

Coming to the end

I am my mother’s child; I write therefore I am. Dutifully, every day, the journal is written. The commitment to productivity as a habit is a learnt behaviour that comes straight from her. My subject, almost exclusively at this moment, is her dying.

Some extracts.

I am coming to realise, her approaching death is a full-time occupation for me. Death is so huge there is little room for much else. The junction at which I find myself: it’s certain what will happen but when precisely is unknown. Certainty yoked to uncertainty – this is the way I live. The senses are stretched by this indeterminate way of living.

I think about the future, about full orphanhood. My father died in GHHI and my mother is about to follow soon. What will it be like without her? The idea of the parent as a resource, as a safety net, a last resort, even if never used, has always been there at the back of my psyche. I have always known I could always rely on my mother if something went horribly wrong. Soon that will no longer be possible. The net will be gone, folded up, packed away, no longer available. How will I manage? What will it mean not to have a mother, not to have a fail-safe? I struggle to imagine.

She is about to die, and I need to reach for scenes from the past. These memories (and my mind teems with them) are a prophylactic against death. Hello, such memories say, life has been lived, and savoured and consumed and enjoyed. Hello, hello death, you have dominion but it isn’t absolute. I have memory.

I’m preparing to travel to London to see her and I decide it’s important to be groomed because she always set great store by appearance. I pop down to my neighbour for a haircut. There are several women ahead of me in the salon attached to my neighbour’s house. I am immediately struck by the hot hair and shampoo smell. And the unique female atmosphere – serious, convivial, alert.

Memories float in of being with my mother at her hairdresser’s, waiting on a sticky seat (often slurping a Coca Cola) while around me the life of the salon unfolded: the play of hot water on my mother’s head, tilted back into a basin, the assistant lathering her hair, the stylist snipping and the wet locks falling and gathering on the floor, and finally, rollers in her hair, sitting under the humming dryer, which had the same elongated look as the Mekon, Dan Dare’s nemesis. She always brought her spiral notebook (often two) and a couple of pens and would use every spare moment, especially when she was under the dryer, to fill the pages with her big looping writing. She could write in the salon, she said, even better than at home.

I am with my mother and a close friend of hers appears and together we sit beside her.

My mother is frail and sleeps, only waking now and then for a few moments. As she looks around I feel she does not see me. How strong my need to be seen, to be recognised. The friend believes that we are seen but I am not convinced much as I would wish it, and desire it. On my previous visit, yes, after she opened her eyes, a smile confirmed she recognised me, but not this time, no. Yet despite this, I have the sense she is seeing, but her eyes are looking beyond, looking around and about the liminal space she’s traversing, and my understanding gives way to a powerful, uncanny feeling that we are in separate, coexisting parallel realities.

The next day I walk up Parliament Hill after breakfast. From the top, I see the Post Office (now BT) Tower where, on my thirteenth birthday my mother took me to dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top. She always knew how to make an occasion extraordinarily special. The Tower is no longer as huge and impressive as I experienced it in GHWX but the sites and scenes of childhood never lose their brightness or luminosity. They remain numinous.

I hold her hands, thin, papery, light, and I remember how in childhood I loved her hands, these hands that held my hand on the way to school, and shook table clothes and polished silver and set glasses out for dinner parties and weeded and pruned and planted in the garden, and wrote fluently and quickly, filling page after page with her big looping writing while she muttered under her breath the lines she was writing. There was no end to the brilliant things she could do with her very beautiful brilliant hands.

Some days later, back in Fermanagh, the carer calls me. Palliative care has been brought in. I book a flight and go to bed. I can’t sleep. I decide I need something, an image that I can hold on to after my mother’s death and instantly it comes. It’ll be her hands, the left holding the spiral notebook, the right holding the pen, driving the nib across the page, writing word after word after word, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions … words, words, words.

It is as I am writing these words that my wife comes in to my study and tells me … it has happened.

—

Originally published in The Irish Times. Reproduced with the kind permission of Edna O’Brien’s family, Peters Fraser + Dunlop and The Irish Times. Carlo Gébler’s A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island, 1989–2024 will be published in September by New Island.

For over two centuries, the RLF has been able to support many writers with hardship grants, including Edna O’Brien. You can find out more about our grants here.

Photo credit: Edna O’Brien: the writer with her children Carlo and Marcus in 1959. Photograph: Edna O’Brien/Little, Brown

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