I first noticed her in the back pew of a small chapel near Glasnevin Cemetery, wearing a navy coat with a missing button and holding a folded tissue like it was a prayer card. There were only six of us there for Mr. Keane, who had lived two floors below me in a block off Dorset Street. I knew him as the man who fed pigeons at dawn and carried his shopping home one tin at a time. When the council notice went up saying his funeral would be on Thursday, I went because the thought of him being lowered into the ground with no one to remember his face bothered me more than I expected.
The woman in the navy coat was not from the flats. I knew everyone who came in and out of that building, at least by sight. She sat straight-backed, hands folded, eyes fixed on the coffin as if she had known him all her life. When the priest asked if anyone wanted to say a few words, silence filled the chapel in that heavy way silence does when it is ashamed of itself. I stood, though my knees shook, and said Mr. Keane once helped me carry a broken microwave to the bins and told me the best cure for loneliness was “a task with another person at the end of it.” It was not much of a eulogy, but the woman cried anyway.
After the burial, I found her by the cemetery gates, feeding coins into the machine for the bus. I asked if she had known him. She smiled, not embarrassed, just tired. “No,” she said. “But someone should sit with them.”
Her name was Maura, and she lived in Phibsborough above a shop that sold phone cases and birthday balloons. She was seventy-three, a retired receptionist from the Mater Hospital, and every Tuesday morning she read the death notices with her tea. Not the famous ones, not the crowded ones with long lists of sons, daughters, grandchildren and deeply regretted friends. She looked for the short notices. The ones that said removal private. The ones arranged by neighbours. The ones with no family mentioned at all.
“There’s a way they write loneliness,” she told me as we walked towards the bus stop. “You learn to spot it.”
I thought about her all week. At first I found it strange, maybe even intrusive. Funerals felt like private rooms, even when they were empty. But then I kept remembering Mr. Keane’s coffin, the six chairs occupied in a chapel built for a hundred, and Maura sitting there like a small candle refusing to go out.
A month later, I saw her again outside a funeral home near Fairview. Rain was coming down hard, the kind that turns the city silver and makes everyone look away from each other. She had no umbrella. I offered to share mine, and she accepted as if we had arranged it. The funeral was for a woman named Breda Byrne. I had never heard of her. Neither had Maura. There were four mourners including us, and one of them was the undertaker.
During the service, I watched Maura. She did not perform grief. She did not sob loudly or make herself important. She listened. When Breda’s life was reduced to dates, former addresses, and a mention of her years working in a laundry, Maura bowed her head as if receiving a confidence. At the graveside, she stepped forward and placed a small bunch of daffodils on the coffin. “Safe home, Breda,” she whispered.
On the bus back towards town, she told me her husband had died suddenly in a hardware shop on Capel Street fifteen years earlier. He had been laughing with the man behind the counter, then he was gone. “The church was packed,” she said. “People stood at the back. I remember thinking I should be comforted by it. But all I could see was the empty seat beside me.”
For nearly a year after that, she barely left her flat. Then, one winter morning, she read about a man being buried with no relatives present. She went because she knew what an empty seat could do to a person, even a dead one. After that, she kept going.</
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
