MARGARET 'ENA' GRIFFIN - (August 6th, 1935 - October 30th, 2023)

Our beautiful mother died peacefully at home on October 30th. She died on the eve of Halloween, itself the eve of All Saints Day. 22 of her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren were around her bedside when she took her final breath. It seems surreal and unreal the weight of this sadness and grief, and my family knows we will never comes to terms with our loss, all we can do from now on is cope, live as best we can, and pay forward the extraordinary compassion, generosity, kindness, and love our mother showed to everyone. She belonged to Ireland's greatest generation, the ones who built our nation directly after independence and centuries of oppression. Herself and my father protected their 12 children from all external, hostile forces that so savagely undid many families on our small island home. Her dedication to family was legendary, and her table was the symbol of her infinite generosity and love -- My poem 'Our Table' references mother's generosity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&si=nynrPe5Aj3GG28hD&v=nr1GbV4BGqo&feq-ture=youtu.be

It is impossible to pay proper tribute to a lady of such depth and importance as my mother, but I have been trying in the only way I know how, by dedicating elegies to her. This one 'Finis' is self-explanatory:

Finis

 

Let us make this last crossing together,

down the dark boreens of the dead,

and up past the light’s pale blue line

to where the migratory ghost bird sings,

let us listen together above the wastes

for the beloved voices that are now gone,

all those fading echoes we still cling to 

as the terminal darkness closes round,

let us hold hands this last time, you

and I, before the everlasting sky dims

and wraps its mummy cloths about us, 

before the tomb’s womb enshrouds us,

and we go dumb here once and for all.

Let us be done with it. look, our terminus

is just up ahead, a shade is waving us in.