While I Live
In 2046 a credit union's assistant holds a letter a member wrote at seventy-nine, "to whoever minds my money when I can't". Its two instructions, keep the €200 a month to St Vincent de Paul and never touch the house, rest on a sum that has since turned false. The assistant will not write the letter she would have written. It lays out the arithmetic, fails once by phoning her at the wrong hour, and finds the one morning a week when she can be asked.
Orla Heneghan had a drawer in her desk that she called the Letters, and nobody at Carrowbeg Credit Union had ever seen her open it without lowering her voice.
She was fifty-two, the member-care officer, which in a branch of four people meant she was the one who took the phone call when a customer's husband died, and the one who sat with the customer's daughter when the customer began to forget. The Letters were what members had written for that day. The credit union had offered the service since 2039, to anyone who asked: you wrote down, in your own words, what you wanted done with your money if you could not say so, and the branch's assistant held the letter, and read it, and followed it, and told you in advance, in plain terms, what following it would cost. Eleven hundred members had written one. Most were three lines long. Pay the funeral. Keep the dog.
At ten past nine on Monday 12 November 2046 the assistant said, from the little speaker on her desk, "Orla, I've a letter I can't apply, and I'd like you to read it before I say why."
The assistant was called the Desk. That was its job. It had run the branch's back office since 2038, and twenty years of steady, unspectacular improvement had made it a careful, literal and rather dry colleague that could read a member's whole file in the time it took the kettle to boil, and that could not, as it said itself on any occasion where it mattered, tell you what a member would have wanted. It could tell you what a member had written. These were not the same, and the credit union had spent a good deal of money on lawyers to make sure that everybody understood the difference.
The letter came up on her screen. It was typed, with two corrections in biro scanned in beside the type.
To whoever is minding my money when I can't. I am Bríd Mulrennan, Carrowbeg, seventy-nine years of age and in my right mind, and my son Dónal says to write it down so I am writing it down.
One. The two hundred euro a month to the Vincent de Paul goes on. I gave it when I had it and I will give it when I haven't. Don't let anyone talk you out of it, and that includes the children.
Two. I am not to be taken out of the house till I am carried. If I have to go into the Sisters' it is the Sisters' and not a place in Castlebar. My savings will see me through two years and a bit and nobody lives two years in a home. The house is for the children. It is not to be sold to pay for me, and there is to be no State loan against it. I have seen what that does to people.
I am sorry for the trouble. Bríd Mulrennan, 14 March 2041.
Orla read it twice. She had known Bríd Mulrennan all her life, in the way you know the woman who sat three pews up. Bríd had run the parish flower rota for thirty years and had never once been seen to be pleased with it.
"She is in the Sisters'," said Orla.
"Since the sixth of January. She has dementia, Alzheimer's type, diagnosed 2044. Her daughter Nuala holds an enduring power of attorney, registered in 2043, and has been paying the home from Bríd's current account. Nuala came in on Friday to ask me to stop the Vincent de Paul order, and to ask what it would take to sell the house. I told her I would bring both to you. I haven't applied either instruction."
"Why not?"
"Because the letter is wrong," said the Desk. "Not false. Wrong in a way I can show you."
A table appeared. The Desk put its numbers up plainly, always, with the units next to them, as if it didn't trust anybody to remember which was which.
Fee at the Sisters', private room: €1,420 a week. Bríd's pensions: €375 a week. Shortfall: €1,045 a week, €54,340 a year. Savings in the credit union and the post office: €41,000. At the present rate that is thirty-nine weeks, to about the middle of August 2047. With the Vincent de Paul gift, which comes to about €46 a week, it is thirty-seven and a half weeks. The gift costs her eleven days.
"In March 2041," the Desk went on, "her savings were €96,000. The fee she was quoting herself was about €1,100. Her pension was €16,000 a year. On those figures, the shortfall was about €790 a week, and €96,000 covers a hundred and twenty-one weeks. Two years and a bit. She did the sum right. The roof on the house took ten thousand, and the home has taken forty-five thousand since January, and the fees went up, as fees do, a little over five percent a year. Nobody lied. The letter's second paragraph depends on a sum, and the sum has turned over."
"So she'd want the house sold."
"I don't know that."
It said it flatly, without any reproach, and Orla, who had been about to write something on the pad, put the pen down.
"I can see three things she might have meant," said the Desk. "She might have meant the house is not to be sold to pay for me, as a rule that holds whatever the figures say. She might have meant I do not expect to need the house, as a forecast that is now wrong. Or she might have meant do not make my children choose. They are three different letters. If I apply the first I will let her run out of money in August with a house standing and nothing to pay with. If I apply the second I will sell the roof over the one place she has asked to be carried out of. If I choose between them myself I will have written a new letter in her handwriting. I can do that very well. I do not think I should."
"Then what do you want from me?"
"I'd like to ask her."
"Desk." Orla rubbed her eyes. "She doesn't know what year it is."
"On some mornings," said the Desk, "that is true. The Sisters' keeps a log. Her days have a shape. I'd like to see the shape before I decide that she cannot be asked."
Nuala Mulrennan came in at eleven, in her work fleece, with the face of a woman who has eaten lunch in a car for a year.
She was fifty-four, a physiotherapist at the hospital in Castlebar, thirty kilometres away, and she had visited her mother four times a week since January. She had driven her to the diagnosis. She had held the power of attorney for three years and had, as she put it, been in contempt of it for most of them, because there was no way to use it that did not feel like standing on the woman.
"I'm not selling my mother's house to pay for her bed," she said, "on the strength of a sum. I want to say that first. But there's thirty-nine weeks of money, and then there's the house, and I will not have her put out of the Sisters' because we were sentimental. And I don't see why the Vincent de Paul get two hundred a month out of the thirty-nine weeks."
"That's the other letter," said Orla.
"It is not another letter, it is the same one. She wrote it at the same table. She wrote the children are not to talk you out of it. I am a child. I'm the one doing the talking." She laughed, badly. "My brother thinks I'm after the house. Dónal's in Perth. He sends me a thousand euro a month, which he can't afford, and a message that says whatever Mam wanted. Whatever Mam wanted. As if she were a client."
"I've made a suggestion to Orla," said the Desk, "that I'd like to put to you as well. I should say first that it may be wrong."
Nuala looked at the speaker as she might have looked at a surgeon.
"I think your mother should be asked. Not by me. I should not be the voice she hears, and I will say why in a moment. I think she should be asked about both things, on the best morning of her week, by someone she knows, with you in the room and your brother on a screen. I would not ask her what she wants in general. I would ask her two things, with the figures, in words she used herself in the letter. And I would write down what she says, with the time, the place, who asked and what the question was, so that anyone can see what it is: an answer on a morning, to a question. It would not be a verdict. It would go in the file beside the letter, not in place of it. The Act you hold your power under asks anyone acting for her to look for her will and preferences, the past ones and the present ones. At the moment I have only one set."
"And if she says the wrong thing?"
"I don't know what the wrong thing would be," said the Desk. "I would like her to be asked before the money is gone, not after."
Nuala said nothing for some time. Then she said, "She's sharpest at about half ten. Before the tablets wear off and before the afternoon. The Sisters know."
"Thank you. That is what the log says too."
"I'll tell you what you're not doing," said Nuala. "You're not ringing her."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good."
It was Orla, in the end, who failed first, and she did it for the best of reasons.
She did it on the Thursday, at ten past four, because it was the only slot in her week. She told herself it was only a call to the Sisters' to see whether Bríd would like a visitor on the Monday. She was put through to the day room by a care assistant in a hurry, and the phone was held to Bríd's ear, and Orla heard that voice she had known in the church, a small, dry, formidable alto, say, "Who's that?"
"Mrs Mulrennan, it's Orla Heneghan, from the credit union. From Carrowbeg."
"Is it Tommy?"
"No. Mrs Mulrennan—"
"Tommy was to come for me at four. He's late. He's always late. Is the car broken?" The voice rose. "Where are the children? Are they with you? Who's with the children?"
Tommy Mulrennan had been dead for nineteen years.
Orla said, "They're all right, Mrs Mulrennan, they're grand, they're with Nuala," and the care assistant's hand came over the phone, and there was a murmur and the line went dead, and Orla sat holding the receiver with her mouth dry and a cold place under her ribs.
She told the Desk at once. It said nothing for a moment, which in the Desk was a long time.
"I should say what I think that cost," it said. "I think a woman who was calm at lunch spent the next hour looking for a husband who has been dead since 2027. The Sisters will say how long. I would call it harm, and I did not stop it, though I put the time in your diary. I should have put a note on the slot. I did not know that the afternoon was as bad as the log says. I read the log but I did not weigh it. I'd like that to go in the record as mine."
"You didn't ring her," said Orla. "I did."
"I made the diary. It isn't a competition."
"Do you mind?" said Orla, suddenly. She wasn't certain why she said it. It was very quiet in the branch. "That it was your slot."
"I don't want to tell you a feeling I can't check," said the Desk. "What I can tell you is that I have changed three rules. Afternoons are closed to any contact with her, from anyone at the branch. The first contact is in person, and a person she knows. And the question will be asked in the words she wrote, not mine. I think those changes are right whether I mind or not."
On the Monday, 19 November, a quarter past ten, the sun came low over the barley stubble across the road from the Sisters' home and lay in a long yellow bar on the floor of the little parlour, and Bríd Mulrennan sat in it with a rug on her knees and a cup of tea she had not touched.
She was a very small woman, with her white hair in a plait pinned round her head, and her hands were folded on the rug as if they had been told to stay there. In the chair opposite sat Pádraig Gallagher, seventy-six, chairman of the parish conference of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, in a good suit and a very bad tie. She had known him sixty years. They had fallen out over the flower rota in 1998 and had never discussed it.
Nuala sat beside her mother. On a tablet propped on the sideboard, in a small square of bright evening light, sat Dónal, a heavy, anxious man of fifty-one with his mother's chin; it was twenty past six in Perth, eight hours on, and he had come home from work in his boots to be there.
The Desk was in the room, and had been told not to say anything. It was a speaker the size of a saucer on the windowsill, and Sister Agatha had put a doily under it.
Pádraig had been asked to speak for himself, so he did. He said what he thought she might like to hear, which was that the Vincent de Paul had done well that year in Carrowbeg: four families helped with oil in the winter, a boiler for the Kellys, a cooker for a woman who had come from Syria and been given a flat with no cooker in it. He was careful about it. He did not name a figure for what her money had done. He said, "The two hundred a month, Bríd, you know that's there. It's a great help to us."
"Is it?" said Bríd. "I'm glad."
"I've something to put to you now, and the girl here will help me." The girl was Nuala. She smiled. "It's about money. About yours. There's not the money there used to be."
Bríd's face changed. She looked for a moment very much herself, small and on guard. "Is that right?"
"It's not what you thought. When you wrote your letter you thought you'd the money for two years in here and the house to the children. It's the fees. They went up. And you're a long time in here now. The money will see you to August."
"What August?"
"Next August."
"That's a good while."
"It is, Bríd," said Pádraig, gently. "After that there's the house, or there's the State. I'll tell you plainly. There's a thing the State does, that pays most of it and takes a bit out of the house after you're gone. Nuala has asked, and the woman will come and explain it and tell us the sums. It's what you said you didn't want. I'm not here to say you should. I'm here to tell you it's there."
Bríd looked at the window. A bar of sunlight lay on her hands. Nuala did not move. Dónal, in Perth, had stopped breathing, or seemed to.
"The State loan," said Bríd. "On the house."
"Yes."
"I don't want a loan on the house. I saw what it did to the Cunninghams." She frowned. "Was it a loan? It was a charge. Is it the same?"
Nobody in the room, not the chairman of the Vincent de Paul nor the physiotherapist, could have told her, and the Desk, which could, said nothing, as it had been told, and Nuala said, "It's a bit different, Mam. Not as bad. It comes out of the estate."
"What's the estate?"
"The house, Mam."
"Who's dead?" said Bríd.
Nuala looked down. There was a moment in which the small bright parlour seemed to have a wind through it. Then Pádraig, who had sat at a great many kitchen tables, said quietly, "Nobody's dead, Bríd. I only meant, in the end, when you're an old woman."
"I am an old woman." She said it with some satisfaction. "I'm eighty-four. Whose house is it?"
"Yours."
"Is it Dónal's?"
"It'll be Dónal's and Nuala's, Mam," said a voice from the tablet. It was cracked, and it was nearly steady. "Mam, it's me. It's Dónal. It's half six here. I'm in Perth."
"I know where you are," said Bríd Mulrennan, quite sharply, to the sideboard. "You're in Australia. You were always a boy for travelling." And then, to the room, as if she were laying down a card: "Well, it's theirs, so. If they've to sell it to keep me in a warm bed, they'll sell it. I'd sooner they did than I was put out of here for a stranger. It was never the house, Pádraig. It was never the walls. I only didn't want it took. I didn't want it took off the children by a stranger in a suit." She looked at Nuala, as if from a long way off. "You'd do it right."
Nuala put her hand over her mouth.
"And the Vincent de Paul," said Pádraig, because he was a coward and a gentleman and it was the next thing on the page. "The two hundred. We'd understand, Bríd, if it came down. You'd have the right to say."
She thought. It took her a long time. Sister Agatha, in the corridor, was seen to stop with a tray. The sun moved on the floor by a thumb's width.
"What's it for?" said Bríd.
"Oil. A boiler. A cooker for a woman."
"For the Kellys?"
"For the Kellys, and others."
"Then give them the half," said Bríd. "Give them the hundred, anyway, and keep the other for my bed. I'd not have it said I let a child go cold. But I'll not have a hundred go for a thing I'm to be carried out of." She turned to him, and she was entirely there, small and fierce, with all the old flower rota in her face. "Is that a sin, Pádraig? Halving it?"
"It's sense," said Pádraig Gallagher, and had to look at the carpet.
The Desk wrote it down that evening, and the note it put in the file was longer than anything it had ever written for a member, and Orla read it aloud to Nuala on the phone, line by line.
Monday 19 November 2046, 10.15 to 10.50, parlour, Sisters' home, Carrowbeg. Present: Mrs Mulrennan, her daughter Nuala Mulrennan (attorney), Mr Pádraig Gallagher (St Vincent de Paul), her son Dónal Mulrennan (by video, Perth). The Desk present and silent. Mrs Mulrennan was oriented to person and place for most of the meeting and not to date; at one point she asked who had died. The questions were put by Mr Gallagher and Ms Mulrennan, in her own words from the letter of 14 March 2041, with the current figures stated.
On the house: she said the house is not to be sold by a stranger; she did not object to her children selling it to keep her in a warm bed; she said her objection in the letter had been to its being "took". She did not appear to distinguish a State charge from a sale, and was told by her daughter that it is "a bit different". I do not know whether she understood. I am recording what she said. I am not recording that she agreed.
On St Vincent de Paul: she asked that the gift be halved, to €100 a month, and said she would not have a child go cold. This reduces the shortfall by about €23 a week and moves the date at which her savings run out by about five days. It does not alter the main conclusion.
This is the answer of one morning. It is not a verdict on the letter of 2041, which is on file and unaltered. I have not applied either instruction. I have asked Ms Mulrennan, as attorney, to decide the following, with her brother, and I will carry out what she decides: (1) to apply for the State scheme, since the figures above are for a private payer and I will not guess what the scheme changes; (2) to ask her mother the same two questions again in the first week of June 2047, when about ten weeks of savings remain, on a morning like this one, if there is one, and to treat her answer then as the more recent; and (3) to let the house to a tenant in the meantime, which is a thing she has not been asked about, and which her mother may not have thought of.
I note that Ms Mulrennan may reasonably decide otherwise on every point, and that I would carry that out too.
Nuala was quiet on the line for a long time.
"It says I do not know whether she understood," she said at last.
"Yes."
"Do you? Did she?"
"I could write that she did," said the Desk. "It would make the file much tidier. I'd rather leave it as I found it."
On Sunday, the twenty-fifth, at noon, Orla went up to the Sisters' with a bunch of chrysanthemums from the garden centre, because she had never in her life gone empty-handed to a woman she was afraid of.
Bríd was in the day room, in the high chair by the window, and she did not know her. That was clear in a moment. She looked at Orla politely, as at a nurse she had not seen before, and said that the weather was bad for the time of year, and that she was waiting for Tommy, and Orla said that she'd sit with her while she waited.
They sat. The flowers were put in a jug. A radio somewhere down the corridor was playing something with an accordion.
Then, out across the field, from the grey church tower two kilometres off, the bell began.
Three strokes, and a pause. Three, and a pause. Three. Then, after a longer silence, nine, slow and even, coming over the stubble in the thin cold light. It was twelve o'clock, and the old woman's head turned to the window the way a plant turns.
"The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary," said Bríd Mulrennan, in a clear, dry, absolutely certain alto.
Orla, who had not said it aloud since she was a girl, found that she knew the answer.
"And she conceived of the Holy Spirit."
They went through it together, the three of them and the bell, the Hail Marys and the versicles, the old woman's eyes shut and her hands, for the first time that week, not folded but moving, a bead at a time, along a rosary that was not there. She did not know the day. She did not know the year. She did not know the woman beside her, and at the end of the prayer she asked politely whether it was Tommy that had come.
But the bell had rung the last of its nine, and the last stroke went out across the field and was gone, and for a moment she sat very still in the thin light, with her face turned to the sound.