“I remember swims the way I remember books I have read and loved,” writes Miriam Mulcahy in this memoir of grief and loss. Mulcahy has swum in the sea since she was a child, a passion fuelled by her parents, who spent summers alongside beaches in Wexford and Kerry. It is therefore to the sea she has turned over the past decade, as she found herself navigating the successive deaths of her parents and sister, as well as the breakdown of a relationship that meant her becoming a single parent to four young children. She began swimming outdoors all year round, taking overnight trips to Kerry from her home in Kildare in the middle of winter, throwing herself into the sea under darkening skies to feel the respite of being able to put down her burdens and “stop the running circles of thought and sadness that consumed me”. When she could not find a way through, the sea gave her a way out. “I medicated with the sea,” she writes.
The sea also provides a kind of anchor to this book. Mulcahy intersperses her accounts of a happy, secure childhood with parents who adored each other, and the consequential devastation of their too-early deaths, with descriptions of sea swims, most often off a tiny beach near Caherdaniel, where her parents spent as much time as they could as they got older. Her writing about the ocean is lush and vivid: she is enthralled by its “pure and ethereal green ... a green glass plate”, and awestruck by the magnitude of a space that reduces us to the essence of our “tiny physical self”, which, once it is in the water, “untenses and unspools, becoming as languid as the jellyfish you must remain attentive to”.
This is Mulcahy’s first book – she is a freelance journalist by trade – and the work is shot through with many other finely-wrought observations, which movingly offer a sense of place. She evocatively renders Dzogchen Beara, a Buddhist retreat in West Cork, where she heads after her father’s death. Later, visiting the Skellig Islands, it is not only the fierce, savage isolation that offers her solace, but also the eerie sense of “connections being made, the present colliding with the ancient past, the boundaries of time blurring, of doors to the past slipping silently open”.
Mulcahy also brings her powers of expression to her depictions of illness and death, and here she doesn’t shirk from life’s ordinary horrors. Her father died on an ICU table, “an expression of absolute terror on his face”. On her deathbed her mother was “strangled with tumours”. She describes her sister’s tumours – she was just 40 when she died from cancer – “growing, twisting through her neck and bubbling up under the skin”. This is courageous and deliberate. Mulcahy has no truck with society’s euphemisms for death, angrily noting how we cloak death’s power in a “tepid language of excuses” when instead we need “clarity and clean, hard words”. No one talks about death, she writes. Mulcahy means to.
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It’s a laudable intent, although it is also here, I think, where she may have benefited from even more clarity, even cleaner words. The essayist Vivian Gornick has written of the necessity of finding an achieved persona on the page, a narrator who is able to pull far back enough from a story that it can draw a deep breath and take its own measure. Mulcahy tells us her worst year was in 2013 but 10 years on her continued, justifiable, fury and pain sometimes threaten to spill over on to the page, and I found myself overwhelmed by her emotions, instead of being offered a clearing that might present a larger sense of things. If it feels churlish to suggest this – after all, Mulcahy’s story is deeply affecting – it doesn’t detract from her task as a memoirist, which as Gornick notes, is to “to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom”.
There is certainly wisdom in these pages: Mulcahy employs the sea as a metaphor as she searches for ways to swim, to float, even to sink, inside her new life with half of her family gone. But there are also times I wondered if she could, as a writer, have more closely heeded her own words, which remind her, when she is struggling, that she only has “to be quiet and listen to the sea”.
