stick with me. You’re gonna be just fine.’
She hugged me so tightly like an old friend would and she didn’t let go until I felt some of my worries disintegrate in her embrace.
I gave her nothing in return at first, but she never gave up on me from that day on. She brought us hot dinners when I was having a bad day and couldn’t face cooking a proper meal, she took Ben to school and sent me back to bed to rest, and she gently gave me space to do my own thing when she knew I needed it.
‘Why do you care?’ I asked her one day as she was fussing over a hem on Ben’s school trousers. Her warmth and motherly nature were alien to me, and I just couldn’t understand why she gave so much despite getting so little in return.
‘Don’t ever run away or be afraid of kindness, Roisin,’ she told me as she repaired the hem on the little pair of grey trousers. ‘You deserve love and to be loved. We all do.’
The best thing was, Mabel’s words were never insincere, because Mabel Murphy reminded me every single day since then that I’d made the right decision to move to Ballybray, and that I was going in the right direction in life.
She celebrated with me when Ben got through his first day at his new school without tears, she danced with me when I got my part-time job in the clothes shop, Truly Vintage, and she took no excuses when I mentioned how I’d always dreamed about playing the violin as a child but had never learned. Before I knew it, she’d signed me up to a weekly class at the community centre, and when I mentioned how I’d need a babysitter, she pledged that she and Ben would have a weekly movie night while I headed off with my second-hand violin case in hand, feeling full of vigour and overflowing with the magic that only playing music can bring.
Mabel steered me on the right track in every walk of life from the first day I arrived in Ballybray, and the more she told me I was winning, the more I eventually believed it.
She brought us groceries when I didn’t have the energy or inclination to go food shopping, she listened to me cry when the overwhelming waves of trauma from years gone by visited me late into the night, she made me laugh until my sides ached with her witty one-liners and stories of her days in New York city as a cabaret singer. She made me believe in unconditional love when I thought my cynical old heart had been broken for ever, and most of all, she gave me a sense of family that I’d never had before. She gave me a rock to lean on, a shoulder to cry on, and friend who was always there to cheer me on.
‘You’re like the mother I never had,’ I told her one night when she’d stood at the front row of my first concert in the community centre and clapped with a beaming smile until her hands were sore and tears dripped down her face. My grupa ceoil had played a classic but simple Irish tune called ‘The Mountains of Pomeroy’ together with tin whistles, fiddles and guitars, but to Mabel you’d have thought I’d just performed with the London Symphony Orchestra.
In return for all the love I felt from her, she told me that I made her glow inside with my warrior strength and determination to make things better. I listened to her with awe and excitement as she recounted tales of her home city of New York, of the love she shared with her late husband Peter, and by being there to share her last few years with her, she said that Ben and I showed her how to live life to the full again. We gave her a reason to get up in the morning that didn’t involve her talking to herself or to the plants in her garden. She enjoyed picking Ben up from school and she looked forward to Christmas, to birthdays and to holidays like she hadn’t done since Peter’s passing just a year before we moved to Ballybray.
‘I wish I’d come here soon enough to meet Peter,’ I used to tell her often.
She would look up at his photo on the mantelpiece, which stood alongside a framed picture of Peter’s very handsome nephew Aidan, who lived in